Introduction

Abstract

The publication of this special issue of Music Theory Online is a significant event in the development of North American music theory, both reflecting and contributing to the increasing importance of performance within the music-theoretical purview.Different parts of the anglophone world have come to the study of musical performance from different directions.In the UK, for example, where music theory was never well established as a recognizable discipline within the study of music, research into music as performance emerged primarily as a result of the convergence of interests between cognitive psychologists and music researchers that took place in the 1980s.For psychologists, musical performance was a highly complex and culturally rich practice that was amenable to experimental study and quantitative representation.For those on the musical side of the fence, the psychologists offered a toolbox of new, empirical approaches.From the first, then, the study of performance within the British musical academy had a strongly empirical flavor, as illustrated in particular by the work of Eric Clarke, and this was reinforced by links with a number of continental European researchers who came to the study of performance from a background in psychology or speech theory (e.g., Alf Gabrielsson and Johan Sundberg).[2] The study of performance from a cognitive-scientific perspective was also a feature of the North American landscape, but here the relationship with the musical academy was rather different: empirical study of performance tended to happen either in departments of psychology or in cognitive musicology labs, rather than being integrated within the music-theoretical mainstream.The reason for this difference was precisely that this mainstream existed: in North America, unlike the UK, music theory had its own disciplinary identity and intellectual momentum.As a result, rather than drawing on empirical methods, music theorists approached the study of performance by building on established approaches to scores: Wallace Berry's Musical Structure and Performance, which appeared in 1989, is the classic example.Insights derived from the analysis of scores were treated as guidelines for articulate performance, so that, to put it crudely, the theorist's role was to talk, the performer's to listen.In this way knowledge was transferred from theorists to performers rather than exchanged between them, and the resulting one-way flow of information-from theorist to performer, from page to stage-attracted a good deal of negative commentary, especially from commentators located to the east of the Atlantic.Much has changed since then: as reflected in the special issue of MTO on performance and analysis that appeared in March 2005 (vol.11.1), or in Daphne Leong and David Korevaar's article "The performer's voice," which appeared six months later (vol.11.3, 2005), the authoritarian tone that at one time characterized this discourse has more or less dissipated, and the possibility of a wide range of different approaches is recognized.Yet the basic topography of the relationship between theorists and performers that was established in the 1980s has not been entirely erased.

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