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Since the late eighteenth century and the flowering of Romanticism, western classical or 'art' music has adopted aesthetics which aim to express 'the great and sublime in nature' (Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: P. F. Collier and Son Company). However, though improvisation was a source of inspiration and motivation for creative expression, the rise of romantic aesthetics sacralised composers' creative processes and their works, ultimately producing the more restricted concept of Werktreue, or fidelity to the score (Goehr, Lydia. 1994. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). In this article, I turn to the writing of Louis Althusser (1971. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press) to illustrate how implicit values and beliefs within the cultural institutions of classical music form an ideology which dominates the individual in a way described as 'hegemonic'. As a result, classically-trained musicians are excluded from improvisational practices, because: (i) they must act within a culture in which improvisation itself is misunderstood, misrepresented and suppressed, and (ii) the act of 'interpellation', in which ideology is interpreted by the individual, encourages musicians themselves to identify and seek fulfilment through non-creative, non-improvisatory practices. Lastly, I explore a way out from the determining tendency of ideology, explaining how the act of improvisation offers an alternative musical role which is genuinely creative and indeterminate; allowing the musician to become ideologically aware, and thus free to choose their own musical identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of so-called laptop music in the late 1990s also created a distinctively new aesthetic, which utilized the errors and disturbances taking place in digital sound processing. This focus on the glitch became an emblematic sound and signaled a new approach to the relation between the sound artist and the tools of music production by focusing on the production process itself. There has been a steady increase in the quantity of music produced under the concept of glitch, and its "aesthetics of failure" has lost much of its avant-garde status by becoming a part of an established musical vocabulary. I wish to consider the laptop producer's role, which overlaps academia and popular culture, by offering further analysis on the concept of glitch and the production process and will conclude that the laptop artist inhabits a paradoxical position, both culturally (academia/pop) and aesthetically (artistry/machinic production). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]