Beyond the Score: Music as Performance

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Contents
About the companion web site
List of figures
List of media examples
Introduction
1 Plato's curse
Sounded writing
Performative turns?
2 Page and stage
Theorist's analysis
Performer's analysis
Performance analysis
3 What the theorist heard
Affecting the sentiment
Spoken melody, or sung speech
Schenker vs. Schenker
4 Beyond structure
Structure in context
Mozart's miniature theatre
Rhetoric old and new
In time and of time
5 Close and distant listening
Reinventing style analysis
Forensics vs. musicology
Performing Poland
The savour of the Slav
6 Objective expression
Nature's nuance
Phrase arching in history
Phrase arching in culture
7 Playing somethin'
Referents and reference
The work as performance
8 Social scripts
An ethnographic turn
Sociality in sound
Performing complexity
9 The signifying body
31 August 1970, 3.30 am
The white man's black man
10 Everything counts
Pleasures of the body
Bodies in sound
Building bridges
11 The ghost in the machine
Music everywhere
Original and copy
Signifying sound
12 Beyond reproduction
The best seat in the hall
Acoustic choreography
Rethinking the concert
Making music together
List of references

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In Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, author Nicholas Cook 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 generated in real time, as Cook rethinks familiar assumptions and develops new approaches. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on the Western 'art' tradition, Cook 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. Beyond the Score has a strong historical emphasis, touching on broad developments in twentieth-century performance style and setting them into their larger cultural context. Cook 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. Beyond the Score 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.

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