Beyond the score : music as performance / Nicholas Cook.

Author/creator Cook, Nicholas, 1950- author.
Format Book
Publication InfoNew York, NY : Oxford University Press, ©2013.
Descriptionxiv, 458 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Subjects

Contents Introduction -- Plato's curse. Sounded writing ; Performative turns? -- Page and stage. Theorist's analysis ; Performer's analysis ; Performance analysis -- What the theorist heard. Affecting the sentiment ; Spoken melody, or sung speech ; Schenker vs. Schenker -- Beyond structure. Structure in context ; Mozart's miniature theatre ; Rhetoric old and new ; In time and of time -- Close and distant listening. Reinventing style analysis ; Forensics vs. musicology ; Performing Poland ; The savour of the Slav -- Objective expression. Nature's nuance ; Phrase arching in history ; Phrase arching in culture -- Playing somethin'. Referents and reference ; The work as performance -- Social scripts. An ethnographic turn ; Sociality in sound ; Performing complexity -- The signifying body. 31 August 1970, 3.30 AM ; The white man's black man -- Everything counts. Pleasures of the body ; Bodies in sound ; Building bridges -- The ghost in the machine. Music everywhere ; Original and copy ; Signifying sound -- Beyond reproduction. The best seat in the hall ; Acoustic choreography ; Rethinking the concert ; Making music together.
Abstract This book supplants the traditional musicological notion of music as writing, asserting instead that it is as performance that music is loved, understood, and consumed. This book reconceives music as an activity through which meaning is produced in real time, as the author rethinks familiar assumptions and develops new approaches. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on the Western 'art' tradition, the author explores perspectives that range from close listening to computational analysis, from ethnography to the study of recordings, and from the social relations constructed through performance to the performing (and listening) body. In doing so, he reveals not only that the notion of music as text has hampered academic understanding of music, but also that it has inhibited performance practices, placing them in a textualist straightjacket. This book has a strong historical emphasis, touching on broad developments in twentieth-century performance style and setting them into their larger cultural context. The author also investigates the relationship between recordings and performance, arguing that we do not experience recordings as mere reproductions of a performance but as performances in their own right. This book is a comprehensive exploration of new approaches and methods for the study of music as performance, and will be an invaluable addition to the libraries of music scholars--including musicologists, music theorists, and music cognition scholars--everywhere.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references (pages 415-458) and index.
LCCN 2013027060
ISBN9780199357406 (hardback)
ISBN0199357404 (hardback)

Availability

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Music Music Stacks ML457 .C75 2013 ✔ Available Place Hold