Music as Performance

The 1990s saw a sustained critique of the idea of the reified musical work, triggered largely by Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992). This critique is the necessary starting point for developing a concept of performance that is not just performance “of,” or-as I have expressed it in my title-thinking of music as (not and ) performance. Richard Taruskin (1995) and Christopher Small (1998), to name just two, have suggested some ways in which this might proceed, but in this chapter I want to draw on aspects of interdisciplinary performance studies and ethnomusicology that I see as particularly relevant to an understanding of music as performance. The shift from a text-based to a performance-based understanding of music is closely comparable to the breaking away of theater studies from literary studies that took place during the last generation, the flavor of which is conveyed by the dance and theater theorist Nick Kaye’s characterization of performance as “a primary postmodern mode”: as he sees it, the performance-oriented practices of artists like Foreman, Cunningham, or Cage subvert the “discrete or bounded ‘work of art’” definitive of modernism, or dissolve it into “the contingencies and instabilities of the ‘event’ . . . penetrated by unstable and unpredictable exchanges and processes” (Kaye 1994, 22, 32, 117). Given the extent to which the reified musical work is built into the very language of musicology, the same kind of tension is probably inherent in any attempt to write about music as performance. But then nobody without a taste for the impossible should become a musicologist.