Conference Report: “Performance Studies Network Second International Conference”
Daniel G Barolsky · Music Theory Online · 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?"-whichexplored 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 Volume 19, Number 2,