Musical Performance

Rather than a guide to playing styles, schools of technique, or the history of performance, this volume sketches how performance might be framed as a modern research discipline. It treats performing a piece as a chain of steps: reading the work's expressive structure through analysis, emotion and gesture, then bringing that understanding into a living, bodily act that turns notated patterns into expressive human action.

The author argues that bringing these elements together is closer to following a delicate recipe, drawing on both knowledge and craft, than to executing a set of logical rules. The book is presented as an early attempt at a broad treatment of the subject that can also serve as a university textbook. It draws on musicology, philosophy and empirical studies of performance, and it introduces analytical methods and case studies. Many of these case studies rely on performances generated by the Rubato music software, which makes the work technically demanding in both its theoretical design and its experimental setups.

The project grew out of a course for performance students at the University of Minnesota School of Music. The author's position is that such students should understand the reasoning behind their interpretive choices, not only reproduce the accepted repertoire. Learning mainly by copying a teacher's model is presented as insufficient, since it lacks the precision that thinkers such as Adorno and Benjamin would demand, and without alternatives to intuitive imitation, performance may lose its connection to the audience.