In Western Classical Music, the relationship between score-based analysis, the creative decisions performers make, and what they ultimately do on stage has been a contentious vein of musical scholarship. Voice-leading and motivic approaches to analysis in particular, have been criticised for operating within a narrow epistemological framework, undervaluing performer-centred understanding and failing to qualify the analytical knowledge they generate as a product of particular cultural or historical circumstances. Yet existing studies of performance and analysis fail in providing necessary tools to reconcile such critiques with the utility these techniques have for performers, mainly owing to a neglect of artistic research approaches.
In contrast this project sees the performer’s perspective as key to negotiating this dilemma. Using a mixture of practice research, auto-ethnographic and phenomenological methods, the project examines the interaction between different forms of musical knowledge that come from performance, analysis and the broader context in which the artistic process takes place. Epistemological interactions are mapped within the performance space and used to drive performance experimentation. The outcomes of such experiments constitute concrete artistic products which are both research outcomes and a basis for new theoretical perspectives on analysis and performance to take shape, placing performance practice at the heart of the project’s practical and theoretical outcomes.
Promoters: Jeroen Malaise (Conservatoire), Bart Eekhout (UAntwerp)
