The challenges and limits for musicians dealing with texts.
This SONUS publication is the virtual companion to Performing by the Book? Musical Negotiations between Text and Act, which can be ordered as a physical book or downloaded as a free open-access eBook from the website of Leuven University Press. The present web publication contains the introduction and three chapters with multimedia and other augmentations, further enhancing exploration of the subject matter.
To perform a musical score implies the transformation of a symbolically coded text into vibrant sound. In Performing by the Book? a carefully selected cadre of artist-researchers dissects this delicate act in critical ways. Offering first-hand insights into the notational, structural, and interpretative challenges faced by musicians in dealing with texts of all kinds, the chapters traverse the spectrum between the Middle Ages and the age of Stockhausen. In a harmonious blend of scholarly allure and individual artistry, free from academic obfuscation, the contributors keep a keen eye on the limits of interpretation, in terms of both the interpretative process itself and the balance between textual faithfulness and artistic autonomy. This comprehensive volume is an indispensable guide for everyone interested in the relationship between musical performance and texts.
Editor: Bruno Forment (Orpheus Instituut)
Contributing authors: Niels Berentsen (Haute école de musique de Genève-Neuchâtel [HES-SO] / conductor of Diskantores), Björn Schmelzer (artistic director of Graindelavoix / independent researcher), Jonathan Ayerst (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste; featured in this SONUS publication), Elizabeth Dobbin (Le Jardin Secret / Haute école de musique de Genève [HES-SO]), Camilla Köhnken (freelance pianist-researcher / Bern Academy of the Arts; featured in this SONUS publication), George Kennaway (cellist, conductor, teacher, publisher, and musicologist / University of Leeds), Kate Bennett Wadsworth (cellist / Guildhall School of Music and Drama), Nir Cohen-Shalit (conductor and independent researcher), Xiangning Lin (pianist / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore; featured in this SONUS publication), Clare Lesser (independent performer, musicologist, and composer).
Against Werktreue ideals of reverence and fidelity towards the musical score, improvisation is presented as a creative and historically situated practice through which musicians reconstruct canonic repertoire as plural, dialogic, and continually open to transformation.
Improvisation, virtuosity, and textual freedom collide with emerging ideals of fidelity and canon formation in an exploration of how Czerny and Liszt helped transform nineteenth-century Beethoven performance and modern concepts of musical interpretation.
Moving between Poe’s literary theory, Ravel’s “Oiseaux tristes,” multimedia performance, and postcolonial reflection, this chapter examines how artistic meaning is continually transformed through processes of translation, correspondence, reinterpretation, and cultural recontextualisation.
Cite as
Forment, Bruno, ed. Performing by the Book? Musical Negotiations between Text and Act, virtual companion. SONUS Series. Ghent: Orpheus Instituut, 2024. https://doi.org/10.47041/SONUS.2024.1.