Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance

Editors’ Preface

Editors’ Preface James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” was famously adept at “taking it to the bridge.” The term bridge, of course, has various meanings in addition to “a structure carrying a pathway or roadway over a depression or obstacle .” In musical terms, a bridge is “a musical passage linking two sections of a composition” or “a short section which links together—perhaps by a key change—two important sections of a large-scale symphony or similar work.”1 James Brown took it to the bridge every time he performed “Sex Machine,” a funk groove in a single key with a few lyrics that he repeated again and again with spectacularly energetic and inventive variation: Get on up, get on up Stay on the scene Like a sex machine Brown would perform his trademark high-energy dance moves and emit steady streams of sweat until he was ready to pop the question: “Hey, can I take it to the bridge? Should I take it to the bridge?” He would ask several times, at first seemingly not satisfied or convinced by the overwhelmingly positive response from the ensemble players that he held in a legendarily authoritative iron grip. Ready at last, he would turn to signal the band, kicking them into the bridge section. After a few bars, Brown would signal a return to the lead groove, continuing his improvisatory gyrations all the while. Taking a cue from James Brown, the fields of musicology and performance studies have lately been “taking it to the bridge” in a different sense: moving into a new key with the benefit of an alternative perspective, thereby building bridges between the disciplines. Performance studies is a relatively new academic field that trains an analytical eye on staged performances as well as those that occur in everyday life, while musicology has viii • Editors’ Preface traditionally focused on musical texts rather their performance. But for some years now, scholars in both fields, which previously have had little or no contact, have been examining the performance behavior of musicians. They have also begun to take note of and pay attention to one another’s work, and to incorporate each other’s views. An example of such bridging that helped to spur the present volume is the opening paragraphs of the essay “Musical Personae” by performance studies scholar PhilipAuslander,in which he engages with the performanceoriented work of musicologist Nicholas Cook. Auslander writes: Traditional musicology, often characterized as worshipful of the musical work and disdainful of performance, has been undergoing a “performative turn”in recent years,a development well-documented by Nicholas Cook in “Between Process and Product: Music and/ as Performance” (2001). As someone committed to finding ways of discussing musicians as performers, whose primary discipline is performance studies, I am cheered by this development and grateful to Cook both for his careful mapping of disputed territory and his advocacy for the “music as performance” approach.2 Our purpose in this volume is to further such interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement by presenting current “music as performance” work by scholars in both fields. The idea for this volume came about through a meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in 2008, at which Philip Auslander convened a panel of papers devoted to the various ways musicians behave on stage, the personae they construct for the purpose of stage performance, and the song characters they take on when they enact lyrics. The panel featured speakers from both performance studies and musicology, and the suggestion arose that it might be developed into a book of essays sampling this new, cross-disciplinary field. The coeditors (one from musicology and one from theater and performance studies) have aimed at a balanced representation of both fields, in the hope that this will stimulate further productive interaction between them. The book begins at the musicological end of the spectrum, with Elisabeth Le Guin’s Foreword and Susan Fast’s essay on U2 3D, the 3D film of a 2008 concert by the Irish band, in which she explores the difference between mediatized and live performance.The opera historian Philip Gossett offers an essay on vocal ornamentation in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia , while Dana Gooley writes about the political significance of a piano recital in nineteenth-century Vienna. Ingrid Monson explores the social and visual elements of a performance by Neba Solo, a musician from Mali, Editors’ Preface • ix while Roger...