Conference Report: “Performance Studies Network Second International Conference”

[1] In April 2013, performers, historians, ethnomusicologists, composers, cognitive scientists, empirical musicologists, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, educators, neuroscientists, studio engineers, and even music theorists converged in Cambridge, England for the Performance Studies Network Second International Conference organized by the AHRC Research Centre for the Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP). As Centre Director and conference organizer John Rink explained in his opening remarks, this conference was intended to spark further conversations and collaboration across and between disciplines. Unlike joint national conferences, which in spite of their unifying intentions tend to run in parallel, this was a rare and exceptional merging of diverse approaches, the mingling of which opened out into a fascinating range of topics, revealed and challenged often unquestioned assumptions that undergirded disciplinary frameworks, and shed light on conceptual obstacles that many of us still struggle to overcome. The success of this conference stemmed not only from its size and intimacy but also from the focus and theme of the conference: performers, performances, and their creativity.[2] The study of performance is not necessarily new to music theorists or musicologists, but giving voice to the creative contributions of performers, creating an open dialogue among scholars and performers, and above all else gazing or listening beyond the score or text as the foundation of music theorizing is something scholars in North America, in particular, are still reluctant to fully embrace. The primary impediment to this new line of questioning is, sad to say, the concept of the musical work as a fixed, textual entity and/or a direct representation of compositional intent. In spite of such scholarship in the last two decades by, among others, Lydia Goehr (1992), Nicholas Cook (1998), and Richard Taruskin (1995), the burgeoning field of music cognition, the increased intersections between musicology and anthropology, and more recently Music Theory Online 18, No. 1 dedicated to analyzing performance, performers and performances remain held back, or perhaps hold themselves back, by the overwhelming and uncritical adherence to some notion of Werktreue.[3] Consider, for instance, the presentation by Amy Blier-Carruthers-"What is the performer's place in the process and product of recording?"-which explored classical performers' anxiety and apprehension toward studio recordings. Blier-Carruthers's ethnography revealed how "live performance" was perceived as a kind of ideal, one that studio performances inherently failed to live up to. Yet at the same time, these performers felt the obligation to present a "perfect" performance, that is, one that remains faithful to the score since recordings provide a different lens through which critics might examine and highlight any "flaws" or "mistakes" more emphatically. These competing aesthetics, the "naturalness" of concert performances, and the desire for "textual fidelity" are ultimately two sides of the same coin in performers' pursuit of musical truth or purity. Both of these views, however, sought to conceal the means of production, the effort and creative voice of the performer, as well as the "artificial" adjustments made by producers and engineers. Consequently classical musicians were reluctant to interact collaboratively with producers and engineers in the same way that non-classical musicians were, as demonstrated by Simon Zagorski-Thomas's subsequent presentation, "Performance in the studio." Blier-Carruthers's ongoing work in the recording studio at the Royal College of Music seeks to encourage performers to accept the studio as a collaborative space, to embrace the creative and interpretive possibilities of a recording studio, and to overcome performers' almost servile sense of self.(1)[4] In her paper, "The classical performer's conception of self," Mary Hunter examined the implications of this self-awareness. …