The Creativity of Musical Performance

I’m now at the University of Cambridge, on the third stop of my conference tour around the world. I’m here to deliver a lecture at the first annual conference of the Performance Studies Network, funded by a large grant from the UK government.

For decades, music scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the composer and on written compositions. There has been a complete neglect of performance. This is due to several cultural beliefs that we tend to hold in Europe and America:

* Creativity emerges from a genius, solitary individual (in this case, the composer).

* Creativity resides in visible products (in this case, composed scores)

* Performers are not creative because they are simply executors of the composition–essentially just talented craftsmen.

This has largely been the case in the Western classical music tradition. But if you expand your perspective a bit, to all of the world’s musical traditions, you find that almost none of them are like this. Most musical traditions do not have “composers” who create; rather, they perform pieces that are handed down from previous generations. And in most musical traditions, there is substantial performance variation (what Western scholars would call “improvisation”). Finally, in most musical traditions, performance is a collective act, done by an ensemble, and interaction among the performers is at the core of performance.

In the West, the performance genre most like this is small group jazz: my own topic of study. So I’m delighted to see that this conference, bringing together a very new community of performance researchers, is successful. There are over 100 scholars from around the world, and only half of the submitted papers were accepted.

I’ll report more on the final day, Sunday, after my keynote talk.