ABSTRACT
Western “art music” has long been thought of in terms of texts reproduced in performance. This chapter, in contrast, advocates a musicology in which text and performance play equal roles. Music theorists have historically seen the expression of musical structure as represented in the score not as a performance option but as the definition of legitimate performance. The claim of this chapter is that, in the early twentieth century, this “structuralist” style of performance was just one option among many. The author illustrates this claim through an analysis of a piano roll performance by Eugene d’Albert, which features a mobile tempo and is organized around emotional high points. That is to say, d’Albert created meaning in the real time of performance: this is the basic principle of interdisciplinary performance studies, which came into being as a secession from literary studies. However, rather than following that example of divergence, the author argues for embracing both text and performance within a single, more broadly conceived, musicology.
