Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance

Bridging the Unbridgeable? Empirical Musicology and Interdisciplinary Performance Studies

70 Nicholas Cook Bridging the Unbridgeable? Empirical Musicology and Interdisciplinary Performance Studies Performative Turns The term “music as performance” has had some currency among musicologists in recent years, but it is more specifically associated with theatre studies: as mentioned in the Introduction, it is the name of a study group within ATHE, the North American Association for Theatre in Higher Education. There are two ways in which this might seem rather odd. First, why might we be talking about music as performance? As opposed to music as what? Whoever thought music might be anything else? And second, why might we find a study group on music as performance in a theatre studies association, rather than its musicological equivalent? Actually the two questions have a common answer, and it’s quite a long story. As also explained in the Introduction, theatre studies is not an old discipline but came into being through the rejection, as an unproductive way to think about theatre, of the idea that meanings are inherent in texts, placed into them by the author and (all being well) recovered by the reader or spectator. By contrast, theatre studies is defined by its focus on the meaning that is generated in the act of performance—meaning that may in some sense or to some degree be prefigured in a dramatic text (you can’t make anything mean anything), but at most as a potential to be given specific realization in performance. Seen this way, musicology is like literary studies : an old, one might say unreconstructed discipline. For musicologists, as for the philologists on whom nineteenth-century musicologists modeled their emerging discipline, meaning was again inherent in the text, and the basic musicological task was seen as one of editing, of recovering and inter- Bridging the Unbridgeable? • 71 preting the texts of the past in order to understand the intentions of their creators. Musicology, in short, is built on the premise that music is a branch of literature: like poetry, music can be rendered in performance, but that isn’t essential for critical engagement with the meanings embodied in the notated text. Small wonder then that the term “reproduction,” generally used to describe the relationship between performances and recordings, has sometimes been used of the relationship between compositions and performances. The English translation of the title of T. W. Adorno’s book on musical performance, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, is a fair rendering of the German original. All this is not to say that musicologists are uninterested in performance, and musicology did not remain untouched by the performative turn that spread through many cultural disciplines in the last decades of the twentieth century. But because of its basic identification of music with writing, musicology’s performative turn took some rather strange forms. One was the authenticity or “historically informed performance” (HIP) movement that developed from around 1970, which advocated new styles of performing early music on the basis of sometimes suspect evidence of period performance practices or even more suspect evidence of composers’ intentions . Since the evidence in question was produced by musicologists and based on documentary sources, the net effect was to subjugate the practice of performance to the regime of scholarship and the written word. Much the same might be said about another of the strange forms which the performative turn took, now in the subdiscipline of music theory: what might, by analogy with the authenticity movement, be termed analytically informed performance. As illustrated by Wallace Berry’s Musical Structure and Performance (which won the 1992 Outstanding Publication Award of The Society for Music Theory), this approach took conventional, scorebased analysis as its starting point: the purpose of Berry’s book was to show “how . . . a structural relation exposed in analysis can be illuminated in the inflections of edifying performance.”1 The flow of signification is in this way from analysis to performance, from text to act, from page to stage. Practice is subordinated to theory, establishing a hierarchy that is regularly enacted on North American conference platforms where a (probably tenured ) theory professor explains how the music should go, and a singer or instrumentalist (probably on a fixed-term contract) demonstrates it. Given the textualist paradigm that is deeply embedded in musicological thinking, it is not so surprising that people working in theatre studies saw the need to take matters into their own hands. Philip Auslander, who founded ATHE’s “Music as Performance” group, had musicologists (in- [18.118.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-04...