Contents
This introduction examines the performer-composer as a layered, permeable identity, with historical examples showing how performance practice, instrumental technique, and patterns of musical thought can shape composition, thereby challenging the conventional separation of performing and composing as distinct activities.
How Messiaen’s recorded performances of his organ music challenge familiar oppositions between fidelity and freedom is the focus of this chapter, revealing how notation, performance, authorship, and compositional thought remained deeply intertwined in post-war musical modernism.
From Grieg recordings and early radio broadcasts to women’s music clubs and the enduring influence of his aunt and teacher Phoebe Harvey James, this chapter maps the sounds and musical communities that surrounded the young John Cage, illuminating formative influences on his later performances and compositions.
Drawing on Cage and Derrida and focusing on performances of Water Walk and Four6, this exploration of indeterminate works questions whether composers, performers, and listeners can ever occupy stable or separate roles, and how creative agency is redistributed between them.
Composition, performance, listening, and instrument-making are recast as overlapping rather than separate practices in this performative reflection on John Cage, David Tudor, indeterminacy, and the shifting identities of performer-composers.
Writing for people rather than instruments is central to this conversation with Gavin Bryars, which traces how his experience as a bassist, improviser, and composer continues to shape his relationships with musicians and musical works.
From Pauline Oliveros and Pamela Z to the AACM, the author draws on a lifetime of participation in experimental music to survey the performer-composers, artist-led initiatives, and technological innovations that helped reshape American contemporary music after 1960.
Moving from solo conductors and theatrical gestures to darkness and auditory cueing, this chapter analyses conducting as a performative practice and compositional parameter rather than a purely interpretative function in works by Cage, Schnebel, Battistelli, Haas, and the author.
Focusing on a series of major works, the chapter investigates how Trond Reinholdtsen’s experimental music theatre places the composer within the work as narrator, commentator, and unreliable guide, continually staging and undermining claims to authority, meaning, and direct communication.
How can a performer-composer’s practice be reactivated after the fact? This chapter draws on scores, recordings, photographs, and filmed performances to examine how Fernando Grillo’s early works for double bass can be approached through embodied and choreographic modes of interpretation.
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