ABSTRACT
In both sociology and musicology, there has been a burst of research activity concerning “performance” in recent years. However, the two fields could not be more different in the way that they approach the topic, a contrast that has been sharpened by their independent development. Sociologists have tended to think about performance in terms of embodied social action, which has led them to investigate musical interaction rituals in a variety of social settings. Musicologists, on the other hand, have researched performance by “informing” it through an analysis of a work’s formal structure or by gathering historical evidence about how it was played in the composer’s time; they have also investigated the history of performance through recordings. In this chapter I will trace the development of performance research in these fields. To conclude, I will explore the possibility for a long overdue interdisciplinary synthesis.
