Engaging Analysis and Performance

Abstract

Performance issues have engaged the discipline of music theory and analysis for as long as this discipline has been institutionalised in Europe and North America. Such lasting engagement has culminated in several seminal publications over the past few decades, among them Nicholas Cook’s Beyond the Score (2013), Daphne Leong’s Performing Knowledge (2019), and Philip Auslander’s In Concert (2021). Taken together, these publications (and others) have encouraged analytical looks beyond the score, attention to the experience of performers themselves, and consideration of musical/performative acts beyond sound itself. Having travelled far from the era where theorists and musicologists wrote prescriptively to ‘diagnose and cure the performer’s “malady”’ (Latham 2005, 137), we now experience a landscape where bilateral exchange between performing musicians and music theorists/musicologists generates provoking avenues of discussion, which can be formulated as broad questions. How can the concerns, choices, and pursuits of music performance and music analysis inform one another? And what sites of intersection provide promise for collaborative research between music theorists, musicologists, composers, and performers? To explore these questions, the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto hosted the inaugural symposium Dialogues: Analysis and Performance in October 2021. The symposium convened artists and scholars, spurring interdisciplinary dialogue on topics such as structural analysis, criticism, interpretation, technology, performance practice, and embodied knowledge. Presenters responded to a call for proposals that situated analysis and performance as distinct but related activities, with a specific focus on contemporary music and musical practices. What quickly became apparent among the accepted presentations, however, was that for many artist/scholars specialising in contemporary music, analysis and performance are essentially inseparable, if not entirely one and the same. What began as a symposium seeking to uncover shared strategies for two distinct pursuits—analysis and performance— became a forum on how those pursuits are tightly connected through a network of elements: score, instrument, performer, and environment. The seven articles presented in this special issue reflect this inseparable network. As such, two prevailing themes emerge through the articles. The acts of analysis and performance are often indistinguishable. Many artists and scholars whose research connects performance and analysis might argue that one is not fully defined without consideration of the other. The work presented here goes even further, suggesting that one cannot fully exist without the other. Timothy Roth’s article on the reconstruction of obsolete technology to perform Stockhausen’s Mikrophone I (1964) foregrounds the analytical detail required to perform this work today, when the composer’s preferred sound filter is not readily available. Roth argues that, in navigating technological obsolescence, musicians’ reconstruction of new technological materials to perform this work constitutes a type of analysis that is indispensable for interpretation of this work and others like it. Kate Doyle and Agnesse Toniutti demonstrate how a circular dialogue between score-based analysis and performance-based experimentation is necessary to