Once Again: Page and Stage

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Notes

1 Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (Berlin, 1752), trans. Edward R. Reilly, On Playing the Flute (New York, 1985); Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Berlin, 1753), trans. William J. Mitchell, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (New York, 1949); Leopold Mozart, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (Augsburg, 1756), trans. Editha Knocker, A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing (London, 1951); Daniel Gottlob Türk, Klavierschule, oder Anweisung zum Klavierspielen für Lehrer und Lernende, mit kritischen Anmerkungen (Leipzig, 1789), trans. Raymond H. Haggh, School of Clavier Playing or Instructions in Playing the Clavier for Teachers and Students (Lincoln, NE, 1982).

2 For example, Türk wrote: ‘Whoever performs a composition so that its inherent affect in every single passage is most faithfully expressed and that the tones become at the same time a language of the feelings, of this person it is said that he is a good executant.’ School of Clavier Playing, trans. Haggh, 322.

3 Mathis Lussy, Traité de l’expression musicale: Accents, nuances et mouvements dans la musique vocale et instrumentale (Paris, 1874); Hugo Riemann, Musikalische Dynamik und Agogik: Lehrbuch der musickalischen Phrasierung (Hamburg, 1884); André Mocquereau, Le nombre musical grégorien ou rythmique grégorienne (Rome, 1908); Tobias Matthay, Musical Interpretation (London, 1912); Stewart Macpherson, Studies in Phrasing and Form (London, 1912); John McEwen, The Thought in Music: An Enquiry into the Principle of Musical Rhythm, Phrasing and Expression (London, 1912).

4 For a detailed discussion of the history of the concept of phrasing and its relationship with the notion of the musical work, see Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘“Phrasing – the Very Life of Music”: Performing the Music and Nineteenth-Century Performance Theory’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 9 (2012), 7–30.

5 Schoenberg wrote: ‘Music need not be performed any more than books need to be read aloud, for its logic is perfectly represented on the printed page; and the performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print.’ Quoted in Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938–76) (New York, 1980), 164. And, for Schenker: ‘Basically, a composition does not require a performance in order to exist.’ Heinrich Schenker, The Art of Performance (New York, 2000), 3.

6 Erwin Stein, Form and Performance (London, 1962); Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York, 1968). See, for example, Ryan McClelland, ‘Performance and Analysis Studies: An Overview and Bibliography’, Indiana Theory Review, 24 (2003), 95–106; Edward D. Latham, ‘Analysis and Performance Studies: A Summary of Current Research’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, 2 (2005), <http://www.gmth.de/zeitschrift/artikel/521.aspx> (accessed 15 January 2017); and Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York, 2013), 41–2.

7  For a discussion of the tensions in nineteenth-century discourses between the ‘visual’ and the ‘audible’ score, see Doğantan-Dack, ‘“Phrasing – the Very Life of Music”’.

8  Macpherson, Studies in Phrasing and Form, 2 (emphasis original).

9  See Nicholas Cook, ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance’ (2001), Music Theory Online, 7.2, <http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook.html> (accessed 15 January 2017); and Cook, Beyond the Score, 33–55.

10 Cook, Beyond the Score, 37.

11 Stein, Form and Performance, 13–14.

12 Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance, 38.

13 Janet Schmalfeldt, ‘On the Relation of Analysis to Performance: Beethoven’s Bagatelles Op. 126, Nos. 2 and 5’, Journal of Music Theory, 29 (1985), 1–31.

14 Eugene Narmour, ‘On the Relationship of Analytical Theory to Performance and Interpretation’, Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth Solie (Stuyvesant, NY, 1988), 317–40; Wallace Berry, Musical Structure and Performance (New Haven, CT, 1989).

15 See, for example, John Rink, review of Wallace Berry, Musical Structure and Performance, in Music Analysis, 9 (1990), 319–39; Joel Lester, ‘Performance and Analysis: Interaction and Interpretation’, The Practice of Performance, ed. John Rink (Cambridge, 1995), 197–216; Nicholas Cook, ‘Analysing Performance and Performing Analysis’, Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, 1999), 239–61; Rink, ‘Analysis and (or?) Performance’, Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding, ed. Rink (Cambridge, 2002), 35–58; and Cook, Beyond the Score.

16 AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (2004–9), based at Royal Holloway, University of London, and directed by Nicholas Cook; and AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (2009–14), based at the University of Cambridge and directed by John Rink.

17 From PAIG’s ‘mission statement’, <https://societymusictheory.org/societies/interest/performanceanalysis> (accessed 15 January 2017).

18 Nicholas Cook, ‘Introduction: Refocusing Theory’, Music Theory Online, 18/1 (2012), <http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.12.18.1/mto.12.18.1.cook.html> (accessed 15 January 2017), ¶2.

19 Cook, Beyond the Score, 40.

20 Janet Schmalfeldt, In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (New York, 2011). Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘The Role of the Musical Instrument in Performance as Research: The Piano as a Research Tool’, Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice, ed. Doğantan-Dack (Farnham, 2015), 169–202 (p. 171).

21 Doğantan-Dack, ‘The Role of the Musical Instrument’, 171.

22 Daniel Barolsky, ‘Conference Report: Performance Studies Network Second International Conference’, Music Theory Online, 19/2 (2013), <http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.2/mto.13.19.2.barolsky.html> (accessed 15 January 2017), ¶2.

23 Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘In the Beginning Was Gesture: Piano Touch and the Phenomenology of the Performing Body’, New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Farnham, 2011), 243–66.

24 Ibid., 248.

25 This is not, of course, a new or forward-looking idea. Schmalfeldt already wrote in her 1985 article that ‘there is no single, one-and-only performance decision that can be dictated by an analytic observation’. ‘On the Relation of Analysis to Performance’, 28 (emphasis original). It has also been one of the basic hypotheses of expressive performance studies in music psychology since its beginnings.

26 See, for example, Alf Gabrielsson, Strong Experiences with Music: Music Is Much More than Just Music (New York, 2011).

27 See, for example, Robert H. Woody, ‘Emotion, Imagery and Metaphor in the Acquisition of Musical Performance Skills’, Music Education Research, 4 (2002), 213–24, and Kim Burwell, Studio-Based Instrumental Learning (New York, 2012).

28 As various authors have noted, some kind of informal analytical thinking that considers the relationship between the parts and the whole of a piece always goes on in performance preparation. See, for example, Rink, ‘Analysis and (or?) Performance’. Swinkin’s assertions, however, concern institutionalized music analysis as practised by music theorists, hence my term ‘academic analysis’.

29 For the current state of research on embodied cognition, see The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, ed. Lawrence Shapiro (Abingdon, 2014). For an early foundational text in this area, see Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (London, 1993).

30 A schema is a theoretical construct used to account for the way the human mind organizes knowledge. It refers to structured information about particular conceptual categories – including objects, events, people and situations – acquired through experience. ‘Image schemata’ operate at the level that is between abstract propositional structure and particular concrete images. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago, IL, 1990), 29.

31 See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, 1999).

32 Cook, Beyond the Score, 47.

33 Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York, 1972), 108–9. See also George Lakoff, The Political Mind (New York, 2008).

34 In Chapter 4, the teacher-analyst invites the fictive student performers to come up with appropriate metaphors for certain analytical constructs, but of course it is the author himself who is representing the fictive students through his own discourse.

35 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Compositions, Scores, Performances, Meanings’, Music Theory Online, 18/1 (2012), <http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.12.18.1/mto.12.18.1.leech-wilkinson.html> (accessed 15 January 2017), ¶1.7, ¶2.1.

36 Ibid., ¶2.1.

37 Indeed, how exactly does a thought lead organically to performance expression? What role do cultural norms and expectations play in this progression? Is the process similar to what Stanislavski had in mind when teaching the ‘organic’ as opposed to the ‘representational’ acting style? See, for example, John Gillett, Acting Stanislavski: A Practical Guide to Stanislavski’s Approach and Legacy (London, 2014). For a discussion of the pervasive rhetoric of musical performance as ‘problem solving’ in music performance studies, which – similar to Swinkin’s assertion about expressive playing emerging from thinking ‘organically’ and naturally – has little to say about the passage from the practice room to the stage, except for telling performers to let the ‘the pieces of the jigsaw slip into place’, see Anthony Gritten, ‘The Problem with Performing’, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Performance Science 2011, ed. Aaron Williamon, Darryl Edwards and Lee Bartel (Utrecht, 2011), 481–6.

38 Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Philosophical Reflections on Expressive Music Performance’, Expressiveness in Music Performance: Empirical Approaches Across Styles and Cultures, ed. Dorottya Fabian, Renee Timmers and Emery Schubert (Oxford, 2014), 3–21 (pp. 11–12).

39 John Rink, ‘The State of Play in Performance Studies’, The Music Practitioner, ed. Jane W. Davison (Aldershot, 2004), 37–51 (p. 41).

40 Dillon Parmer, ‘Musicology as Epiphenomenon: Derivative Disciplinarity, Performing, and the Deconstruction of the Musical Work’, Repercussions, 10 (2007), 1–49.

41 According to Cook, ‘it is taken for granted that Schenkerian and other structuralist methods are directly applicable to performance in general’, with the consequence that questions regarding historical context and performing style ‘become unnecessary’; ‘otherwise there would be no rationale for the approach’. Beyond the Score, 53.

42 Eckart Altenmüller and Wilfried Gruhn, ‘Brain Mechanisms’, The Science and Psychology of Music Performance: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning, ed. Richard Parncutt and Gary E. McPherson (New York, 2002), 63–82.

43 Cook, Beyond the Score, 18.

44 See, for example, Ruth Solie, ‘Whose Life? The Gendered Self in Schumann’s Frauenliebe Songs’, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 219–40.

45 The two resisting performances developed as part of this chapter are available through the author’s website.

46 To listen to these challenging performances and to read the interviews with the performers where they talk about their motivations and methods in developing these interpretations, visit the ‘Challenging Performance’ website at <https://challengingperformance.com>. For a discussion of a music-theoretical myth about music’s expressive content, and a performance interpretation that debunks this myth, see Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Artistic Research in Classical Music Performance: Truth and Politics’, Parse, 1 (2015), <http://parsejournal.com/issue/1> (accessed 15 January 2017).

47 Cook, Beyond the Score, 7.

48 For an example of how expressive meaning emerges from the interaction of tonal movement in pitch space and the movements of the performing body, see Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Dynamics of Musical Expression: Response to Jin Hyun Kim’, Empirical Musicology Review, 8 (2013), 174–7.

49 See Doğantan-Dack, ‘Philosophical Reflections on Expressive Music Performance’, 12–15.

50 Swinkin, Performative Analysis, back cover.

51 See, for example, Jane Davidson and Jorge Salgado, ‘Meaningful Musical Performance: A Bodily Experience’, Research Studies in Music Education, 17 (2001), 70–83, and Andy McGuiness, ‘Self-Consciousness in Music Performance’, Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, ed. Martin Clayton, Byron Dueck and Laura Leante (New York, 2013), 108–34.

52 Diane Reay, ‘From Academic Freedom to Academic Capitalism’, Discover Society, 5 (2014), <http://www.discoversociety.org/category/issue-5> (accessed 15 January 2017).

53 Henry Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago, IL, 2014), 80.

54 For a discussion of the difficulties facing contemporary classical performers in their pursuit of expressive freedom, and some ways of cultivating that freedom, see Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Expressive Freedom in Classical Performance: Insights from a Pianist-Researcher’, Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance, ed. John Rink, Helena Gaunt and Aaron Williamon (Oxford, 2017), 131–5.