Short description:

These volumes widen this research area through close investigations of a variety of complex and nuanced experiences classical music performers have qua performers, as they interact with musical scores, instruments, performance traditions, other musicking individuals, wider artistic and cultural discourses, norms and beliefs.

Long description:

The two volumes widen this research area through close investigations of a variety of rich, complex and nuanced experiences classical music performers have qua performers, as they interact with musical scores, instruments, performance traditions, other musicking individuals, wider artistic and cultural discourses, norms and beliefs. The two volumes aim to “humanise” music performers and contribute towards shaping a more performer-centred discipline of Music Performance Studies. The second volume, The Music Performers’ Lived Experiences: Personal Perspectives, brings together some of the leading performer-researchers from around the world, who foreground their personal experiences, artistic voices, and insights, not only offering intimate accounts of their creative journeys, challenges, and inspirations but also reflecting on these experiences in ways that contribute to rigorous research. Collectively, the chapters reveal the deeply human dimensions of music making, and of music scholarship. The lived experiences explored in this volume include coming to know musical form through embodied acts of music-making at the piano; music performance anxiety through the lens of an Autistic woman violinist; developing musical identity and performing personae as a female double bass player; performing Schubert on the piano as a person who experiences the world as socially disabled; engaging with an organ score as an organist and a pianist; creating expressive performances of an operatic score so that each rendition feels, to the performer, as if for the first time; performing from the whole self and sounding like one’s self; exercising agency and leadership as a soloist within ensemble contexts; learning and integrating into public performances western classical improvisation as a cellist; participating in online group improvisation as a beginner and an experienced post-genre improviser; engaging with early recorded classical music performances as a listener and applying the insights gained to one’s own artistic practice as a pianist; and listening, as a performer, to other performers without participating in the performance oneself. Readers will emerge with renewed understanding and fresh insight into the multifaceted world and nuanced experiences of classical music performers.

Table of Contents:

Volume One 

Introduction, Living With and Imagining the Composer, The Wisdom of the Classical Music Performer, Reconnecting with the Past, Feeling the Future and Enjoying the Present: Towards a Novel Pedagogy of Performing Abilities, The Joy of Sight-Reading, Performing Musical and Metaphysical Agency in Pēteris Vasks’ Grāmata čellam, Rachmaninoff Meets Stanislavski: An Allegorical Archive and the Topos of Breath, But Whose Life, Really?: Singers’ Experiences of Performing Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben op. 42, “I Was Trying to Get Down the Mountain with My Violin Strapped to My Back”: Performance Anxiety Dreams of Classical Music Performers, Cross-Genre Musicking in Individual and Collaborative Group Contexts: Lived Experience and Musical Identity, Intersubjectivity in Performance, Mixed Methods for Researching Musicians’ Lived Experience: The Philosophy and Science of Musical Absorption, Sensing Sound-Motion Objects in Music Performance.

Volume Two 

Introduction, 1 Affective Lightscapes: A Pianist's Perspective on Musical Form as Lived Experience in Performance, 2 Music Performance Anxiety: An Autistic Perspective, 3 "Dangerously Vibrant Matter": Queering Musical Persona(e) in Instrumental Music Performance, 4 What Is It Like to Be a Disabled Pianist?, 5 Of Beasts, Lovers, and Meringue Puddings: Living with Bach at the Organ, 6 "As If for the First Time, Every Time": Towards a Generative Theory of Musical Expression, 7 "Sounding like Myself": An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Freedom in Western Classical Music Performance, 8 "Point of No Return": Agency, Tempo and Leadership in the Performance of Joseph Joachim's Hungarian Fantasy, 9 Engaging with the Audience as Myself: A Cellist's Experience with Classical Improvisation, 10 Performing in The Theatre of Home: Autoethnographic Perspectives on Performer Identities, 11 Schubert on a Slackline: From Listening to Performing, 12 Experiencing Performance: The Vicarious Performer-Listener