Challenging Performance:
Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them
List of Contents
Part 1: Performance style and what follows
1 Introduction and examples2 The fabulous status quo
3 Performance changes over time
4 Performing identity
5 The ‘(actual) music’, ‘the music itself’, ‘musical’
6 Further delusions
6.1 Introduction: naturalised beliefs
6.2 You need to know about music to appreciate it
6.3 You must play structure
6.4 Current performances offer the best solutions
6.5 Learning to perform is learning natural musicianship
6.6 Performers and performances today are very unalike
6.7 Music makes better sense performed ‘historically’
6.8 Texts document sounds
6.9 Everything is in the score
6.10 A work is greater than any performance of it
6.11 Scores have limited interpretative possibilities
6.12 The composer knows best
6.13 Composers’ intentions are (can be) known
6.14 The performer should be inaudible
6.15 Composers are alive and listening
6.16 Composers are gods
6.17 Works
6.19 Conclusion: Why do we maintain these delusions?
Part 2: The policing of performance
7 Teaching7.1 Teachers and WCM State
7.2 Childhood lessons
7.3 Exam boards and the space for creativity
7.4 Conservatoire and creativity: Juniper Hill’s Becoming Creative
7.5 Conservatoire and conformity
7.6 Izabela Wagner on the training of virtuosi
7.7 Micro schools and their discontents
7.8 Competitions
7.9 Alternatives
9 Criticism
9.1 Introduction: ‘one of us’ or ‘not one of us’
9.2 The metaphorical language of record reviews
9.3 The value of record reviewing
9.4 Performance criticism in social media
9.5 The risk performers take in the face of criticism
9.6 The lack of intellectual debate about WCM
11 Obligations to the dead
11.1 Piety and the dead composer
11.2 Philosophical obligations
11.3 Ethical obligations
12.1 Policing
12.2 Seeking Utopia
12.3 Self-policing
14 The damage to musicians’ health
14a A musician’s personal testimony
15 The legal constraints on performers
Part 3: Allowing Creativity
18 Creativity18.1 Recapitulatory introduction after Juniper Hill
18.2 Comparison with theatre
19.1 Ethical recapitulation
19.2 Ethical coda
20a Josef Hofmann going beyond the text (by Daniel Barolsky)
21 Historical examples on record
22 Making music work
22.1 What makes a performance work?
22.2 Musical dynamics and musical shape
22.3 Expression is dangerous
22.4 Music as social action
22.5 Assessing non-standard performances
23.1 Exchanging the Moonlight and Erlkönig
23.2 Schubert/Gilchrist/Katz: Ave Maria
23.3 Further transgressive performances
23.4 Using anxiety creatively by Martin Lawrence
24.1 Regieoper
24.2 How we made ‘Dido & Belinda’
24.3 What the performers thought
24.4 What the audiences thought
26 Speaking of others
27 Finally: The right to be different
Part 4: Related essays
30.1 Sounding the rightAcknowledgements
About the author
Summary
Still to come:Ch. 16 recording, Ch. 17 management, Ch. 23 more examples
and, in Part 4: Related essays,
music as infantilisation, music as religion, music as another person, music and attachment