ABSTRACT
The gradual emergence and establishment of performance studies as a 'musicological discipline in its own right' over the last two decades has coincided with ground-breaking discoveries in contemporary neuroscience that challenged the long-standing Cartesian model of the relationship between the body, mind and the brain. For more than three centuries, the philosophy of Descartes, which radically separated the mind, and with it consciousness, from the body and the world, shaped much of Western sciences and humanities, and their epistemological foundations. The implications for musicology of these recent advances in cognitive and neurosciences have been explored by several music theorists who have attempted to explain our experiences of the rhythmic and tonal structures in music by reference to so-called bodily image-schemas. The recent performative turn in musicology, therefore, signifies for many scholars a ontological re-organization of musical phenomena manifested as a move away from an 'overriding preoccupation with the score, and towards an understanding of music as performance'.
