Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse de Lyon

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, he 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. The book has a strong historical emphasis, touching on broad developments in 20th-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.