A Performance and Listener-Centered Approach to Musical Analysis: Some Theoretical and Methodological Factors

In traditional musicological studies, performance practice has tended to be treated separately from the main musical parameters that retain the analyst's attention. Musicologists have defined performance practice as "the way music is and has been performed (especially as regards the relationship between the written notes and the actual sounds)."¹ Thus, the main goal has most frequently been to reconstruct sound for performance purposes. By stressing the relationship between musical notation systems and the sounds assumed to correspond to them, such an approach considers performance primarily as a sound-structure phenomenon. Yet Howard Mayer Brown himself emphasizes the need to examine "indirect evidence, such as the musical institutions of a period," adding that "the sub-discipline of performance practice involves the study of social history, as well as the history of musical instruments (organology), of musical subject matters in works of art (iconography), of theoretical treatises, and the music itself."²

Distinctions between the indications implied in standard Western notation and an assumed previous knowledge of style to the proper execution of a piece cannot be made for the overwhelming majority of world musics as they do not rely on written traditions. For this reason, Howard Mayer Brown recognizes that "performance practice is an inseparable part of the central concerns of ethnomusicologists who work with orally transmitted repertories."³ Even so, the prescriptive nature of traditional performance practice analysis differs considerably from the ethnography of musical performance carried out by most ethnomusicologists.

In this brief presentation, I intend to address a few of the main theoretical and methodological factors informing the integrated study of sound and context, i. e., performance and practice, stressing the potential benefits of such a study for both musicology and ethnomusicology. In doing so, I hope to make clear that the concept of performance practice needs to be expanded and that the study of performance is inseparable from musical analysis as a whole, regardless of the specific tradition or of the historical period under consideration. Indeed, a recognition that behind notational systems (however prescriptive) rest specific performance practice traditions has only been implicit in much musical inquiry of the past; this might explain why the actual performed sounds have not constituted the essential text for analysis. My basic assumption here is that the "music itself" only exists in performance contexts and that, in effect, as performance is all we have, it should be our primary source of study. Thus, the analysis of contemporary performance contexts for older European music repertories or for world music outside its original cultural setting would appear particularly important if our concerns are predominantly the elucidation of the socio-cultural meanings of such repertories for contemporary listeners.

Ethnomusicologists have argued for quite some time now that the structure of organized sounds made by a given social group is paralleled in significant ways with the social organization and world views of the same group. In other words, the social structuring of sound appears fundamental if we are to understand the true meaning of sound for the makers of that sound. The theoretical premise that sound structure is socially structured is easily acceptable but difficult to demonstrate in unequivocal terms. Previous attempts at formulating and constructing a social theory of music have been, for the most part, provocative interpretations grounded in specific ideological stances but hardly of convincing universal validity. What appears to work for the few remaining classless and egalitarian societies in terms of sound re-presentations of social relations may not be wholly applicable in theoretical and empirical terms to highly stratified societies. In the latter, however, one does find more or less clear sonic representations of stratification that relate to broader social issues such as multi-layered constructs of identity and ethnicity, viewed from a dynamic perspective of adaptive strategies.

At a session on comparative "sociomusicology," organized by Steven Feld and Charles Kell at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1983, such questions were thoroughly addressed and two of the papers were subsequently published with responses from a number of scholars.⁴ In his study, Steven Feld...