How Music Performs Meaning: Embodiment, Culture, and Inquiry
How music performs meaning
Music takes shape through performance. Stages for musical performance are set everywhere: concert halls, amphitheaters, nightclubs, recording studios, car radios, and living rooms. Musicians produce sound there—cymbals crash, horns echo, voices reverberate. Audiences engage in listening rituals that range from the solitary placement of headphones to the shared standing, sitting, and dancing at live events of all sizes. Music is scripted and rehearsed, improvised and practiced, created and shared. It is valued and categorized. People organize around genres, specific musicians, and particular songs, just as they are organized by them. Music marks and is marked by identities, cultures, and bodies. It circulates culturally in the service of meanings, emotions, aesthetics, and consumption.
As a performance, music is an aesthetic and cultural form that scholars in both musicology and performance studies study with particular intensity. The questions and debates around music as performance yield crucial insights about cultural production, embodied practices, and aesthetic methods. Continuing to hear music in performance terms can deepen an already rich area of inquiry. Such study can illuminate values, politics, identities, histories, ideologies, materiality, and many other domains of social and cultural practice. Listening and questioning whether music operates as performance can also expand our understanding of performance as a cultural practice and a research method. Thinking through music may ultimately transform how performance itself is conceptualized and deployed in the study of culture.
Three recent books that treat specific musical performances as their object of inquiry make strong cases for both a continued study of music as performance and a broader study of performance as music. They are exemplary in concentrating on music as performance with a wide range of social and cultural outcomes. Reviewing these three texts helps chart possible directions for the field. The work accomplished in these books also suggests that studying music in performance terms opens fresh possibilities for understanding performance as an explanatory model and an embodied method. The review begins by situating these works within ongoing musicology and performance studies conversations about the music–performance relationship.
Music and performance
Musicologist Christopher Small offers a foundational conceptualization of music as performance by emphasizing human action in musical production. Small introduces the term musicking to redirect attention from music as a static object toward an active process. He writes: “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.” This call to examine the ways all musical performances—and all aspects of them—constitute acts of musicking invites the study of music-making as process and performed action.
This process-centered perspective obviously points toward performance studies. Scholar Nicholas Cook also argues for examining music in performance terms—but he maintains that both process and product benefit from a performance lens. Cook explains, “Process and product, then, are not so much alternative options as complementary strands of the twisted braid we call performance.”
Separating music as action from the qualities of music as product—discrete works, songs, and events—is not always necessary or even possible when considering music as performance. The interplay between actions and texts, fixed and fluid features, is exactly what a performance approach highlights.
Cook specifically urges attention to the performer and performing body when studying the process–product relationship.
This position echoes feminist musicologists who argue for the body’s centrality in music production. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performed, Suzanne G. Cusick argues:
If bodily performances can be both constitutive of gender and metaphors for gender, then we who study the results of bodily performances like music might profitably look to our subject as a set of scripts for bodily performances which may actually constitute gender for the performers and which may be recognizable as metaphors of gender for those who witness the performers’ displays.
For Cusick, the body–music relationship is critical to understanding the gendered scripts inscribed in musical performance. Susan McClary likewise investigates music’s cultural and social effects. She states, “That is, the more I know about these compositions as cultural entities the more I admire what they attempted and what they accomplished as agents participating in social formation.” Centering music as performed reveals that it always shapes culture and bodies even as it is shaped by them.
Cusick notes that gender is a significant angle for analyzing music performance but is not the only meaningful cultural lens. She explains, “While my goal is to use such complementary thinking as a means to better understand the intersections of music and gender, a corollary goal of such thinking would be to restore a recognition of the body’s actual contribution to the web of meanings understood by the word music.” Music is always an embodied practice, and its meaningfulness relies on bodies whose actions generate specific meanings.
This attention to cultural effects and embodied consequences in musicology resonates with the performance studies approach to cultural forms and practices.
Judith Hamera observes, “Performance is central to contemporary views of culture as enacted, rhetorical, contested, and embodied. It functions as an organizing trope for examining a wide range of social practices.” Music is among those practices—enacted, performed, social and cultural. She goes on to say:
Performance is both an event and a heuristic tool that illuminates the presentational and representational elements of culture. Its inherent “eventness” (“in motion”) makes it especially effective for engaging and describing the embodied processes that produce and consume culture. As event or as heuristic, performance makes thing and does things, in addition to describing how they are made or done.
Performance as a mode of inquiry is well equipped to consider music as performance, offering language to make sense of music as embodied, active, and created. It can also hear the ways music produces—and is produced by—various social and cultural practices.
In the introduction to a special issue of Cultural Studies ⇔ Critical Methodologies on music and performance studies, Stacy Holman Jones explains that performance provides a way of understanding music as creative, generative, and potentially utopian. She writes, “In shifting the focus of musical analysis from composition and text to performance, our approach highlights the interactional, political, emotional, and emergent in music.” Performance raises questions about music as both active and interactive—as cultural and aesthetic. For Holman Jones and the issue’s authors, hearing music through performance highlights its political, cultural, and ideological roles. She continues:
… although a strict attention to genre and form might point to the critical and transformative potential of some of these musics (for example, queercore punk or jam bands) while pointing up the reversals and failings of others (for example, vocal standards or pop), what unites these disparate musical perspectives is our emphatic interest in music’s performance on stage and on record; in the lives of the performers, audiences, and writers; and for the explicit purpose of singing, telling, asking, renaming, reclaiming, and imaging something more.
Performance is deployed to grasp music’s particularity as an embodied cultural practice—and as a means of critique, uncovering the generative possibilities within musical performances.
Music explored as performance by both musicologists and performance studies scholars is a rich site of inquiry. At least four approaches stand out:
- Music as explanatory frame. Music is a cultural form explained in performance terms. Understanding music as musicking—verb and action—depends on the language of enactment and embodied practice. Music invites performance as an explanatory frame for hearing diverse forms of performance and production.
- Music as cultural artifact. Music functions as an artifact that can be analyzed for what it says about cultural values, politics, and identities. Musical performances reveal how cultures and identities form and persist for both performers and audiences. They also carry material consequences for specific contexts, histories, and ideologies.
- Music and embodiment. Bodies produce musical performance—and are produced by it—in culturally specific ways. Music is experienced and made sense of through bodies in particular contexts. McClary states, “By far the most difficult aspect of music to explain is its uncanny ability to make us experience our bodies in accordance with its gestures and rhythms.” As embodied and cultural, music raises questions about how individual performance and felt experience relate to larger social meanings.
- Music as performance method. Music itself can be deployed and analyzed as a performance method. Tracy Stephenson Shaffer and Joshua Gunn discuss its unpredictable effects in staged work, noting “we cannot prescribe a specific use for music in performance because it will always take on a life of its own among listeners.” Beyond theatrical use, music is a method for inquiry. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Sharon Bridgforth borrow elements from jazz to compose theatre: “a respect for truth in the present moment, improvisation, process over product, ensemble synthesis, solo virtuosity, simultaneity, collaboration, and audience engagement.” Similarly, Tami Spry uses jazz and swing as a “performative ethos” to explore racial accountability and embodied theorising.
Performance approaches music as action, cultural artifact, embodied form, and method. The performance studies lens attends to its creative and generative effects; it raises questions about identity, culture, embodiment, location, emotion, politics, memory, and many other human themes. Continued attention to music as performance—from both performance studies and musicology—is a productive line of inquiry. Not only does it address music’s effects and lived experience, but arguing from these texts, hearing music in performance terms can also change how scholars conceive of and enact performance itself. That is, music can be explained through performance, but the understanding of performance (in method, concept, and practice) may also be transformed through musical frameworks.
Three recent books that prioritize music as performance make this argument concrete, extending ongoing conversations and suggesting starting places for recasting performance as music.
Music as performance in three recent studies
Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill’s edited collection brings together musicology and performance studies scholars around the question of music as performance. Their aim is an interdisciplinary bridge between the two fields, drawing on musicology research that focuses on performance and performance studies research centered on music. They pay particular attention to the Music as Performance (MAP) working group started within ATHE by performance studies scholars. The authors explain:
If musicology generally involves working from scores and sounds toward an understanding of cultural contexts, then the MAP approach can be seen as extending the musicological purview: it adds a more comprehensive understanding of the meaning-producing potential of performances that includes the effects of musicians’ stage interactions and demeanor, or of gestures and modes of (un)dress, as well as of audience behavior, critical interpretation, and historical representation. In this way, musicology and performance studies can be seen as highly complementary.
The fifteen essays in the collection are loosely grouped into three categories:
- Essays on theory and method;
- Essays that unpack specific performance meanings;
- Essays considering music performance and technology.
These groupings suggest a broader conceptual framework. A performance studies approach first brings theory and method to music; second, it offers tools for interpreting musical meanings; third, it allows for analyzing newer forms of musical performance.
Essays that focus on theory and method treat musical performances as examples of ongoing negotiations within performance studies regarding framing, choices, and the roles of participants. Susan Fast, for instance, explores liveness and technology, the performer–audience bond, and the constitution of the live event through the concert film U2 3D. Richard Pettengill examines constructed identities during a particular ensemble’s performances, extending questions central to performance studies.
Perhaps the strangest and most evocative piece titled “Strunnaya” is performed in this political and spectral context. The pianists’ arms cross over each other over the keyboard: though no color lines exist now, it places bodies into a twisted intimacy.
The essays centering on interpretations of specific musical performances point to the significance of music as a cultural form that might enact and constitute a variety of social relationships, responses, and political critiques. Dana Gooley considers the implications of the performance of pianist Sigismond Thalberg in Vienna, Austria in 1848 in the context of political conflict and revolution (102-110). Joseph Roach provides a performance studies based analysis of the cultural meanings and implications of the New Orleans jazz funerals (125-133).
Other essays in this grouping interpret the significance of performers and musicians. Aida Mbowa considers the embodied performances and experience of listening to Abbey Lincoln as politically and culturally significant (135-150). Margaret F. Savilonis analyzes the political, gendered, and racialized implications of the performances and performance (of) identities of the musical groups, Labelle and Parliament (155-175). Daphne A. Brooks discusses the performances of Lauryn Hill as culturally meaningful in terms of gender, race, and musical genre (180-198). In these chapters, performance offers a way of explaining and studying the cultural and social meaningfulness of particular musicians.
Another approach to the interpretation of music as performance is demonstrated through essays that consider the staging and experience of musical performance. For example, Jason King turns to the film Michael Jackson’s This is It as a musical performance exemplary of spectacle, presence, and affective “good feeling” (204-232). Maria M. Delgado’s essay describes composer Carles Santos’s avant-garde music theatre productions and the ways music is deployed as an aesthetic form for understanding and exploring questions of representation, identity, and culture (237-256). Ingrid Monson offers a discussion of the sensory experience of the performance of Tchekisse by bala player and composer, Neba Solo. In her analysis of this performance, Monson offers and relies on access to a digital recording of the music as a way of engaging the aural qualities of the music (262-276). In each of the chapters that focus on the interpretation of music, the language and assumptions of a performance perspective provide an opening for the interpretation and analysis of musical forms, musicians, and experiences as dynamic and always situated in social and cultural contexts.
The final two chapters of the book explicitly consider the relationship between music as performance and digital technologies. Roger Mosley uses the video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band as case studies for exploring the relationship between playing digital games and playing music (283). The context of music based video games offer a starting place for Mosley to analyze and raise questions about the significance of play in the performance of music (284-305). For David Borgo, the performance of music in the context of cyberspace raises questions about the experience and production of music. Building on Christopher Small’s notion of musicking, he proposes the concept of “transmusicking” to encompass music practices that are enabled by digital and network technologies.
Technologies enable musical community. In fact Borgo draws attention to and calls for research that attends to the ways music as a cultural, aesthetic, and social practice is transformed by the possibilities of digital technologies and cyberspace (344). In these two chapters, performance studies functions as a frame for theorizing the nuances of music performance in the social and cultural context of digital technologies and media.
In the foreword of the collection, musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin offers an important reminder of the historical relationship between performance and text. Rather than upholding the binary distinction between text and performance as a construct that must be dismantled, Le Guin points to the ways texts and performances have historically been entangled. She reminds: “Until very recently in its history, reading was performance” (xii). The separation of text (and the reading and writing of texts) from performance is a recent phenomenon. Therefore, for Le Guin, the recognition of the ways text and performance are always interconnected frames the project of the collection as also addressing a recent phenomenon (xii). Music and performance are always already entangled, and the work of bridging the study of music as text with the study of performance is the work of cultivating recognition of the entangled position of music and performance.
Overall, Cook and Pettingill’s edited collection presents an excellent range of examples of the ways performance studies theories and perspectives attend to the relationship amongst music, performance, and cultural contexts. Taking it to the Bridge demonstrates the ways performance provides a framework and language for theorizing music. The collection also highlights the value of emphasizing the implications of music as performance relationship to a wide variety of cultural and digital contexts. A performance studies approach presents an appropriate vocabulary and a dynamic context for the continued study of music as performance. Similarly, music offers a breadth of possibilities for understanding and theorizing performance broadly. As the essays in the volume demonstrate, music complicates and adds nuance to the conversations surrounding multiple performance theories, music amplifies the importance of interpreting the social and cultural significance of performance, and music indicates the possibilities and questions of performances in emerging digital contexts. Taking it to the Bridge sets out to bridge the study of music with the study of performance, and while the study of music is certainly complemented by a performance studies approach, performance studies is also enhanced by the possibilities of music. The next two books considered here offer extended examples of the ways the study of music might extend and expand the study of performance.
Music Performance, Location, and Movement
In his book, Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ‘40s, Andrew S. Berish develops an analysis of the “specificity of sound” (1).
Berish carefully and thoroughly listens for the relationship between jazz music and “spatial experience,” questions of mobility, and the experience of place. For Berish, music is always connected to cultural practices and meanings. To delineate how sound communicates, Berish explains: “Musical sounds themselves have a kind of semantic content. That content is much more indeterminate and flexible than spoken and written language, but it is nonetheless real and identifiable. To delineate this interaction between sound and discourse means correlating music analysis with a sensitive accounting of how people understood these sounds” (17). In order to account for the cultural particularities regarding the performance of music, the musical performances must be considered in addition to any consideration of extra-musical qualities.
Berish successfully demonstrates an approach to music that considers musical qualities and the various contextual, historical, and cultural factors that surround musical performances. He centers by emphasizing hearing music as a “spatial practice” (23). For Berish, this analysis relies first on an attention to the “spatial practices of the people involved in making music” (25). In other words, he attends to the ways music is performed in various locations by various actors. Second, Berish examines the ways specific “spaces and representations of space” enable and constrain musical performances (25-26). This includes questions of transportation, infrastructure, and the regulation of spaces including racial segregation (26). Third, Berish considers the various ways certain musical performances might function to create “representational spaces” and spatial experiences in sound (26). Finally, Berish argues for a utopian understanding of music performance in his contention that “music does not only engage existing spatial arrangements; it allows the creative expression of new ones” (26). His approach to music as a spatial practice functions to hear music as performance that is constituted in and by locations, and that also actively works to generate locations. In this book, Berish analyzes the specific musical performances of Jan Garber, Charlie Barnet, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Christian. Berish demonstrates the link between the performances of these musicians and the production of place, mobility, and values.
Berish begins with a discussion of the connection between musical performance and the ideological constitution of place. He considers the example of performances of sweet jazz that took place in the Casino Ballroom in the tourist destination of the city of Avalon on Catalina Island in order to demonstrate the connection between musical genre and the formation of particular social values and structures, namely racial segregation and resistance to the modernization of the 1930s and 1940s in the United States (34-35). In regards to the kinds of musical performances allowed by the Wrigley family, the owners of the ballroom, Berish explains: “By regulating the sounds of the ballroom—the cultural centerpiece of the island experience—they could work to protect one especially potent avenue of cultural infiltration” (71).
Berish’s analysis holds musical variations alongside forming both discrimination and its defiance in early 20th century resort social rituals. He also considers specific musical examples, the textures and sounds of musical performances, and the relationship between music and the cultural discourses surrounding these performances.
In order to provide a specific example of the relationship between musical performance and particular social and cultural values, Berish turns to the song “Avalon,” which functioned as a kind of anthem for the city of Avalon (50). In his survey of the different recordings of the song “Avalon,” Berish articulates a link between musical variations, cultural discourse on race, and location. The performance and arrangement of “Avalon” recorded by Jan Garber’s band musically produces a rhythm that Berish argues “suggests body movements that the managers and owners of the ballroom wanted, precisely because it aligned so well with their larger ideology. This is the sound of middle-class activity at an American resort—relaxed with focus and direction” (65). Not only did this performance work to re-produce particular social and cultural values in terms of movement and bodies, but it also worked to maintain racial segregation. Berish explains, “The band made sense in relation to other groups, and with race and musical practice so intimately intertwined, it was deeply marked by the careful avoidance of racially freighted musical gestures” (66). This musical performance and the musical performances allowed at the Casino Ballroom functioned as an attempt to create a place marked by racial segregation.
Following his discussion of Avalon, Berish turns to the musical performances of Charlie Barnet as exemplary of geographic, musical, and social mobility (77). Berish considers the specific performance of the song “Pompton Turnpike” by Barnet’s band as directly related to and reflective of the social and cultural values of mobility and experience of space, movement, and community enabled by the automobile and the construction of roads following the Great Depression (91-98). He explains: “With ‘Pompton Turnpike’ the road and the automobile, two of the most powerful symbols of modern development, align with the popular dance band music of the era to create in sound a temporary sonic place embodying values at odds with a segregated American society riven by racial divisions” (98). Berish links specific musical choices in Barnet’s performance of this song to wider social and cultural events in order to make the case for the ways music reflects, enacts, and reimagines social values and practices.
In his discussion of the musical performances of Duke Ellington, Berish argues, “The musical performance of a place is not a thing but a dynamic process, a social interaction between people and musical sound” (121). For Berish, considering specific performances of Ellington’s band through the lens of a hermeneutic of place demonstrates work toward imagining of particular civic communal histories and experiments with sound. In Berish a view the performances of Ellington’s Orchestra in 1946 at the Chicago Civic Opera House of “Air-Conditioned Jungle” and The Deep South Suite function as a laboratory for presenting different possibilities for the configurations of “spatial and social relationships” (165).
By tilting the venue and set list he delivers that musical arrangements had potential aside from their exact performance notations one written sequence versus entirely another set of timing and volume and cross-thread from. For Berish these musical performances not only work to create and maintain places, but they also function to re-imagine place in ways that move toward multiple possible futures.
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She writes, “Musical works can metaphorically perform fragmentation, disruption, silence, continuity, mourning, or yearning, as expressions related to trauma and recovery that participate in wider cultural and social attempts to interpret trauma” (41). Schnittke’s piece serves as a structural model and analogy for comprehending and presenting “several different discourses: a contemporaneous preoccupation with truth, realism, suffering, and history; postmodernism theories and trends during the 1970s and ‘80s; and trauma theory” (42). Through this analytical lens, composition is understood as entangled with cultural, theoretical, and temporal concerns. Music performance, in other words, contributes to the (re)production of cultural experience and understanding via the very form of its composition. Schnittke’s development and deployment of polystylism holds particular interest here. That technique, which adapts and alludes to various musical styles, raises questions about historical time and “nonlinear connections between the past and the present” (46). For Cizmic, polystylism productively enacts and points to experiences of time and history aligned with trauma theories (48). She explains, “Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings performs trauma by invoking and breaking down teleology—a musical parallel to the ways in which traumatic memory disrupts normative, linear memory” (54). Her interpretation situates the composition within its historical and cultural location, regarding its form not as a mere reflection of the moment but as something responsive to and productive of that moment. She states that Schnittke’s music “may very well bear witness to a crisis of truth by musically performing that very crisis—drawing upon shards of recollections without asserting any finale that might offer resolution. The concerto performs its own breakdown as a way to aesthetically and formally participate in a broader social concern for history and perform the manifold ways in which traumatic memory can be fragmentary, nonlinear, disrupted, interrupted, and silent” (66). This reading positions music performance as a culturally reflexive aesthetic form. In the second case study, Cizmic shifts attention to the embodied aspects of musical performance, interpreting Galina Ustvolskaya’s Piano Sonata Number 6. The score demands the pianist “play with ‘hammering force’” (67). Cizmic considers the embodied act of performing this piece as a form of bearing witness to trauma (67). She notes, “By putting a pianist in a position to feel discomfort, Ustvolskaya’s sonata addresses the epistemology and representation of suffering, a concern central to discussions of pain across disciplines” (68). She examines the sonata within the political and cultural context of 1980s Eastern Europe and communism’s collapse, arguing that “Ustvolskaya’s music engages an overlapping set of concerns: a general sense of crisis, universalized spirituality, sacralized suffering, moral authority and integrity, truth, and pain” (70). By centering her interpretation on the performer’s embodied experience of Piano Sonata Number 6, Cizmic claims that “performative acts and sensations constitute musical meaning” (76). Performances of this composition enact pain; as she puts it, “Acts and sensations of pain that one might encounter in a variety of forms in reality work their way into the performance of Ustvolskaya’s sonata—simply put, hitting a hard surface for an extended period of time will hurt” (76). Learning, practicing, and performing this work involve cultivating an embodied knowledge that negotiates the physical realities of pain (88–90). The pain involved in and enacted by performance also ties back to the cultural-historical moment of composition (90). Cizmic states, “Examining the physical acts of playing Ustvolskaya’s piano sonata demonstrates the ways in which the embodied nature of musical performance registers, reacts to, and interacts with social discourse” (96). This interpretation points to and builds on conversations about how performance constitutes a mode of knowing, presenting, and engaging with social, cultural, and historical contexts. The third example considers the use and function of Arvo Pärt’s composition Tabula Rasa, especially the movement “Silentium,” in the film Repentance. Cizmic focuses on “the ways in which these works intersect with a wider, East European and Soviet discourse regarding memory, trauma, and loss in the late twentieth century” (99). She interprets the significance of Pärt’s compositional style in relation to music history, cultural location, and religion (113–118). Of Pärt’s music she explains: The placement of this music in Repentance allows Cizmic to interpret how the specific qualities and characteristics of Pärt’s composition generate a sense of trauma, memory, loss, and empathy (118–130). She explains that “‘Silentium’ provides an affective—mournful—interpretation of the film’s events and the elements of Soviet history they invoke” (132). The juxtaposition of music and film demonstrates how music can perform interpretations and responses that extend and add to other aesthetic forms. The final musical example is Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony. This analysis considers how the music performs and responds to trauma both indirectly, through musical form, and directly, through connections to specific traumatic events. Cizmic begins by examining the connections between formal musical quotation in Górecki’s symphony, the composition’s style, and the political and cultural context of Poland, World War II, and Polish Catholicism (135–138). She writes: Here, music performance functions to illustrate and (re)present specific human experiences and emotions. Cizmic provides a detailed account of the musical elements that work to demonstrate concepts of grief, mourning, and response to trauma metaphorically (139–155). She then turns to the implications of the response to and reception of Górecki’s composition within a broader social discourse on trauma (155). This relationship is partly constituted through Tony Palmer’s film Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which juxtaposes Górecki’s symphony with scenes of Auschwitz. The conflicting reactions to the film as a Holocaust representation, and the use of the composition, raise important questions about culturally specific experiences and meanings of trauma (155–161). Cizmic observes, “Once people engage music for its affective qualities, there is no guarantee that such ascription of emotional meaning will remain stable as a work circulates in public conversations and participates in the contentious nature of remembering trauma” (166). Górecki’s symphony evokes a sense of mourning and loss, but also demonstrates how music can offer multiple possible understandings and interpretations of trauma and loss. Throughout, Cizmic effectively demonstrates music's function as performance that presents and represents the complexity of human experiences and emotions. By attending to formal qualities, embodied performance, and socio-cultural context, she articulates an understanding of music as performance in terms of grief, trauma, and loss. This extended consideration also suggests implications for the formal, embodied, and contextual factors of music and performance in relation to other human experiences and emotions. Performance as Music Music resonates with performance. The study of music as performance is a harmonious collaboration. Music is always already a form of performance, and performance studies offers a range of tools, theories, and perspectives that allow researchers to highlight the multiple layers of cultural, social, and aesthetic implications of various musical performances, styles, and contexts. The work of Cook and Pettengill, Berish, and Cizmic demonstrates the advantages of studying music in relation to performance studies. Studying music from this perspective offers endless insights, just as studying performance in musical terms might transform insights about performance. In this conclusion, I imagine the idea of hearing performance as music to suggest how music can transform the study of performance. Hearing performance as music arises from the premise that performance is music. Just as music is always already a performance, performance is always already music. Performance is a productive, embodied act characterized by resonance, reverberations, harmonies, tempos, rhythms, and melodies. Performance is music created when bodies interact with technologies, instruments, and other bodies to expressive ends. It is contextual and engages audiences in shared spaces. It amplifies bodies, histories, and politics. It is difficult to describe fully because it always exceeds language. Hearing performance as music allows for using music’s logic as a hermeneutic for interpreting performance’s social and cultural significance. What emerges when music becomes the hermeneutic for interpreting performance? Music invokes logics of hearing, sound, and the aural when attending to performance. Hearing performance as music privileges a sensory orientation grounded in auditory experience’s phenomenology (Ihde, 15) and demands attention to listening as an embodied act. As Don Ihde explains, “I do not merely hear with my ears, I hear with my whole body” (44). Music as an interpretive frame emphasizes the body’s importance in performance and in experiencing it. Hearing performance as music also expands questions about performance’s implications for context, culture, history, politics, and technology. Research on music as performance clearly demonstrates the cultural, historical, and political implications of musical performances. The kinds of questions posed by Berish, Cizmic, and Cook and Pettengill’s collection can serve as a starting point for new questions about other performance forms. Hearing performance as music, then, involves identifying and recognizing how human performances—musical and otherwise—are embedded in social, cultural, historical, and political structures. Performance is certainly a generative approach for studying music as it helps uncover music’s significance as an embodied, social, and cultural form. Music performance can also teach us about performance broadly. Hearing performance as music activates performance’s possibilities by engaging its embodied and formal elements. It asks the researcher to listen to performance and hear how performances shape and are shaped by larger structures. It calls for an engagement that is embodied and strives to listen for possibilities in the dynamic sounding of all performance.By rejecting progress both in terms of music history and as a way to organize the composition of a piece, Tabula Rasa blends early music influences, religious concerns, and stasis to create a cyclical experience of time in which all these elements coexist and interconnect—a kind of critical response to Soviet rhetoric regarding progress and religion. (118)
Many of Górecki’s compositional choices can be heard as sonic metaphors for psychological and emotional responses to trauma and loss. Such formal and aural analogies draw upon the lived experiences of grief and recovery from trauma, perform them in musical terms, and thereby constitute a form of witnessing… (138).