Musical Persona: The Physical Performance of Popular Music

Abstract

The visual aspects of musical performance, by which I mean its physical and gestural dimensions, have not received the attention due them. even scholars who are sympathetic to the idea that physical performance, not just the production of sound, is important to music tend to treat it as something apart from the music itself. Alan Durant, for example, argues on the one hand, ‘to take as music in all instances only what is heard is to abstract … an acoustic dimension of practices always and only realizable within definitions and limits of a given scenario’ while also saying, on the other, that ‘the physical dimensions of music in performance’ only contextualize or position the sound.2 Nicholas Cook argues that Jimi Hendrix’s performances can be seen as ‘instance[s] of multimedia’ because ‘while his physical motions were inevitably linked to the music … they went far beyond it. They became an independent dimension of variance. …’3 Both authors thus imply that the physical aspects of musical performance should be seen as separate from, supplementary to, or providing context for the auditory aspects, not as an integral part of the production of music.

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