Analysis and Performance Studies. A Summary of Current Research

Abstract

As a sub-discipline of modern music theory and analysis, analysis and performance studies, or simply "performance studies" as it has occasionally been called by some authors (Dunsby, 1997, 12), is only about forty years old.Although the pioneering contributions of Roger Sessions (Sessions, 1950) have been noted particularly by Edward T. Cone, Erwin Stein's seminal study of form and phrase structure as they relate to performance (Stein, 1962) is more frequently cited as the foundational study of the discipline in its modern form.Stein's declaration that "discrepancies between performances are often a matter of different emphases, but often they are caused by misconceptions" (Stein, 1962, 12) ushered in an era of prescriptive writing on the part of music theorists eager to diagnose and cure the performer's 'malady' -making "sound without sense" (13).Stein identified issues of tempo, dynamics and articulation as the most pressing interpretive concerns of the performer, and declared that, while "structural considerations cannot guarantee a good performance," they can "help to avoid a faulty one" (21).For Stein, these structural considerations primarily involved form and phrase structure -how music unfolds at different temporal levels in balanced, proportional segments.Though not explicitly stated as central to his book, his implicit emphasis on temporality and structural levels in music set the stage for the next two decades of research in analysis and performance.In his 1968 book Musical Form and Musical Performance (a near duplicate of the title of Stein's book), Edward T. Cone combined the study of temporality and structural levels, introducing the concept of "hypermeter," a deeper level of meter that groups measures together into "hypermeasures" with a single "structural downbeat."While many readers may be more familiar with the concept of hypermeter from the later writings of Schenkerian theorists such as Carl Schachter and William Rothstein, for Cone hypermeter was integrally linked to performance, since "valid performance depends primarily on the perception and communication of the rhythmic life of a composition" (Cone, 1968, 38).Continuing the prescriptive trend begun by Stein, he advocated "accentual adjustment" to bring out the groupings revealed by hypermetric analysis.Unlike Stein, who, as reported by Benjamin Britten in his foreword, enjoyed a career as a German opera conductor (Stein, 1962, 7) and therefore intended his book to cover "all types of music, vocal as well as instrumental" (19), Cone separated the study of instrumental and vocal music, writing a second book focused more on the latter that addressed "persona" and dramatic narrative in place of hypermeter (Cone, 1974).In

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.