Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice

Mine Dogantan-Dack, Mine Dogantan-Dack

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317178200
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Music

Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice brings together internationally renowned scholars and practitioners to explore the cultural, institutional, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, ethical and practical aspects and implications of the rapidly evolving area of artistic research in music. Through various theoretical positions and case studies, and by establishing robust connections between theoretical debates and concrete examples of artistic research projects, the authors discuss the conditions under which artistic practice becomes a research activity; how practice-led research is understood in conservatoire settings; issues of assessment in relation to musical performance as research; methodological possibilities open to music practitioners entering academic environments as researchers; the role of technology in processes of musical composition as research; the role and value of performerly knowledge in music-analytical enquiry; issues in relation to live performance as a research method; artistic collaboration and improvisation as research tools; interdisciplinary concerns of the artist-researcher; and the relationship between the affordances of a musical instrument and artistic research in musical performance. Readers will come away from the book with fresh insights about the theoretical, critical and practical work being done by experts in this exciting new field of enquiry.

PART I
Institutional and Critical Perspectives

Chapter 1
Performing Research: Some Institutional Perspectives

Nicholas Cook

I found myself in a minority of one. It was 1996, and I was representing music on a study group convened by the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE). Our focus, to borrow the title of the report published the following year, was Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design. The group was chaired by Christopher Frayling, at that time Rector of the Royal College of Art, and the other members came from various parts of the art and design sector. The point with which I couldn’t agree was that a practice-based doctoral submission must include a major textual component, consisting perhaps of 40,000 words, on the grounds that clarification of the research process is an essential element of any doctoral submission, and that artistic practice – of whatever kind – does not provide this. Everyone seemed shocked by my laid-back attitude over composition, where it is not unusual for the textual component of a doctoral submission to be quite minimal: to me, the others’ insistence on what amounted to an ancillary dissertation suggested a lack of confidence in the capacity of their own spheres of practice to embody doctoral-level qualities. Looking back on it, however, what strikes me is how far my focus was on composition and not performance, and I don’t think I was unusual in that respect. I was familiar with the incorporation of live or recorded performance within musicological¹ projects, of course, as also with the American model of the DMA (or Doctor of Musical Arts, of which more shortly). But it is as if the more general idea of musical practice as research, as we now conceive it, still lay some way over the horizon.

This shows how things have developed in less than two decades, since the viability of practice as research is now taken for granted in all except the most benighted circles. At the same time, the disagreement between myself and the other members of the study group illustrates the divergence between different areas of practice as research. That makes it hard to speak sensibly about the area of practice as research as a whole, and the situation is exacerbated by the obvious shortcomings of the terminology we use when doing so. For one thing, terms like ‘practice-based research’ or ‘practice-led research’ suggest that practice and research are basically different, perhaps even mutually exclusive things, whereas – as will become clear – the foundation of current institutional thinking is that practice can actually be research. That is why in this chapter I refer to ‘practice as research’. But there is a more fundamental problem. The point of the term ‘practice’ is to make a distinction from something else, but what is that something? An obvious answer would be theory. But theory and practice do not divide up neatly: as Fiona Candlin complains, attempts to draw distinctions between academic work and artistic practice ignore ‘both the practical elements of theoretical writing and the theoretical aspects of art practice’ (2000: p. 100). In academic contexts such as PhD regulations, the distinction generally seems to be between practice and text, but this is no more satisfactory. As Candlin also says, academic writing is itself a practice: it is ‘not simply apparent and clear but forms an ingrained set of assumptions that underpin stylistic rules to the point where they have become naturalised’ (2000: p. 100). That is, it has its own conventions and criteria of good practice. And the confusion is compounded when, as frequently in both academic and bureaucratic circles, the word ‘practice’ is coupled with ‘creative’: whether creativity is defined in terms of bisociation, flow, or paradigm change, it would be absurd to maintain that academic writing cannot embody it. In this way the idea of ‘practice’, creative or otherwise, is so ill-defined as to obscure what might be more meaningful distinctions – for example, between those practices, such as academic writing, that are self-documenting and those that are not (this was the UKCGE study group’s point about the research process), or between those that involve real-time action and those that do not.

But, of course, the disagreements between members of the UKCGE study group reflected not just the inherent qualities of different fields of practice, but the extent to which the concept of research had become established in them. Candlin, whose focus is on the visual arts, remarks that ‘the Royal College of Art is perhaps the only English institutions (sic) that had any long-standing history of such qualifications’ (2000: p. 97), hence, presumably, Frayling’s chairmanship of the study group. But higher education institutions on both sides of the Atlantic have a long history of awarding earned, as well as honorary, doctorates in composition. In the UK both the PhD and its cognate, the DPhil, are awarded in composition, while the first American PhD in composition was apparently awarded by Eastman School of Music in 1937, to Wayne Barlow (University of Rochester 2009). In other words there is a well-established tradition of seeing composition as a form of writing that is no less capable of embodying doctoral qualities than other forms of writing (and the fact that it is a form of writing, even if the symbols are not textual, probably played a key role in its acceptance). Nobody to the best of my knowledge theorised this, or if they did it was long ago; composers today just teach and assess composition as a matter of course.

In the broader terms of practice as research, however, a more informative comparison is with the American DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts), which was first offered in 1955 by Boston University (Boston University 2012). Though available in composition, like the PhD, the primary purpose of the DMA was to provide a route by which performers could gain the doctoral qualifications necessary for employment in American universities. By the 1970s DMAs had turned into something of a production line, at least at institutions such as the University of Iowa, where the formula was ‘A Comprehensive Performance Project in <insert details> Literature with an Essay <insert details>’ (as for instance in Virginia K. Stitt’s 1979 submission ‘A Comprehensive Performance Project in Oboe Literature with an Essay Consisting of an Annotated Bibliography of, and an Integrated Guide by Composer to, Published Editions of Orchestral Excerpts for Oboe, Oboe D’Amore, and English Horn’). This kind of DMA was practice and research rather than practice as research (unlike the modern DMA, in which there is generally a much closer relationship between practice and research). All the same, it meant that the idea of artistic performance practice, being a legitimate field for doctoral qualifications, became thoroughly normalised. Clearly such qualifications in art and design have a very different history. The point, then, is that the different views expressed at the UKCGE study group reflected different disciplinary histories.

In this chapter I shall not attempt to make generalisations across fields of practice whose only common feature may be that they are not embodied in texts: as Annette Arlander writes, ‘there is not one general form of research for the art-researcher to attempt to approximate, just as there is not one generally approved concept of art on which to base art-based research’ (2011: p. 332). Even within music, practice as research ranges from performance and composition to instrument design and other applications of technology, sound recording and production, software design, education, and therapy or other relational practices; each of these has its own history, and consequently raises different issues. Apart from a few comparisons with composition, I shall accordingly restrict my focus to performance, the area in which issues of musical practice as research have been most controversial during the final years of the twentieth century and the initial years of the twenty-first.

Performative Turns

Within the academic context, the best starting point for examining the developing relationship between performance and research is perhaps the so called ‘performative turn’ that impacted many arts, humanities, and social science disciplines from around 1970 on. One obvious example was the disciplinary secession that saw theatre studies break away from literary studies: Shakespeare’s plays, for example, came to be regarded less as literary texts than as the traces of theatrical productions, an idea that was subsequently transferred to opera studies. But the scope of this approach was greatly expanded when the idea of meaning being generated in the real time of performance was extended beyond the world of the theatre. It is probably a myth that what I shall refer to as interdisciplinary performance studies (in order to distinguish it from the musical version) arose out of a chance meeting between the producer and drama theorist Richard Schechner and the anthropologist Victor Turner, but the point of myths is to be truer than the truth, and this one accurately identifies the twin origins of this new field in theatre and in the anthropology of ritual. Since then the performance studies approach has permeated the study of history, politics, gender, and the everyday self: in Schechner’s words, ‘there is no cultural or historical limit to what is or is not “performance”’ (2006: p. 2).

It is paradoxical that, with a few exceptions such as opera studies, musicology was one of a relatively small number of disciplines in which the performative turn was not felt in any direct way. The reason was the strength of the idea that music is in essence a form of writing, a text reproduced in performance – an idea that goes back to the origins of musicology as an adaptation of philology within the context of the nineteenth-century European quest for national origins. If you think of performance as in essence the reproduction of a text, then you cannot think of it as a primary mode of signification. This traditional conceptualisation of music only came under sustained scrutiny in the 1990s, through such books as Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992) and Christopher Small’s Musicking (1998). Even nowadays much ‘normal’ musicology, to borrow Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) term, is predicated on an unquestioned textualist paradigm. As a consequence, while there were important interactions between musicology and performance during the closing decades of the twentieth century, the terms within which they took place were fundamentally different from those of the performative turn.

One of these interactions gave rise to historically informed performance (HIP), the aim of which was to reinstate pre-modern styles of performance. It began with ‘early’ (medieval, renaissance) music, proceeded steadily through the baroque, classical and romantic repertories, and is now engaging with the first half of the twentieth century. Based on the study of period treatises, iconography, and instruments, HIP was in its earlier stages characterised by a sometimes shrill rhetoric of authority based on the composer’s intentions or, hardly less problematically, on the circumstances of early performances (the problem is that early performances were often not what composers would have wanted, an obvious example being Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). There is an irony here: this rhetoric clearly falls into the pattern epitomised by that manifesto of modernist performance, Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music (1947), the French original of which was published in 1942. Stravinsky’s ideology of ‘execution’ not only resonated with contemporaneous ideals of artistic objectivity, but also served the interests of a composer trying to establish himself as a conductor of his own works. The difference, of course, is that while in Stravinsky’s case authority was vested in himself, in the case of early music it was vested in those historians of music who took on the role of the composers’ representatives. One might in this way see HIP as a disciplining of performance practice, subjecting it to a text-based musicology – and seen this way, it ran completely counter to the performative turn as embodied in other disciplines, the point of which was to recognise performance as a primary mode of signification in its own right.

However, this is a case where appearances are deceptive. As in the case of Stravinsky, this rhetoric of the composer’s authority was to a considerable extent a marketing spin, and a highly successful one. Moreover it was hardly unique to HIP: as Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (2012) points out, the rhetoric of composers’ intentions is equally characteristic of mainstream performance, which has the curious consequence that nobody is in greater denial of the creativity of performance than performers. But the more important point is that period treatises, iconography, and instruments all afford a wide range of competing interpretations: in the case of treatises this is because of the slack fit between words and expressive performance, in the case of iconography because of issues of the nature and purposes of visual representation, and in the case of instruments because few survive in original condition or working order – and the most important components for performance nuance tend to be perishable. Rather than being a one-way process in which musicologists hand down directions to performers, then, HIP has in reality been at least as much a performer-led movement – and sometimes, of course, the scholars and performers have been the same people. Performance practice has been at least as important for making sense of texts, images, and instruments as the other way round, though how far the sense in question has been musical or historical has been a contentious issue: Richard Taruskin’s (1988) influential view is that the value of what he called ‘authenticist’ performance lies not in its unprovable and sometimes improbable historical accuracy, but rather in its creation of a new approach to old repertory. However the point I want to make is that HIP was, and is, based on an iterative method in which knowledge flows in both directions between musicologists and performers. Not only is this an example of performance as research: HIP may be said to have established beyond doubt the viability and the value of performance as research.

There is a parallel to HIP in AIP, though the acronym isn’t generally used: analytically informed performance can again be characterised – and this time more accurately – as the application of academic knowledge to practice. AIP is essentially a product of the postwar institutionalisation of music studies within North American universities: performance was brought under the same roof as other musical subdisciplines, including musicology (which in this context means music history), theory (a distinct subdiscipline in North America), and composition (which was often put together with theory). There were admittedly walls between the departments in which these various subdisciplines were located, and walls within institutions sometimes seem more impermeable than those between them; but all the same a number of interactions between theory and practice developed. An obvious example is the now declining phenomenon of the American composer/theorist, who would on the one hand publish articles about compositional structures or systems, and on the other embody these theoretical constructs in compositions. It is striking that while many composer/theorists, like Fred Lerdahl, became internationally known as theorists, their reputation as composers rarely extended beyond North America, or even beyond the university campus.

However, a more relevant example is the relationship between theorists and performers reflected – and promulgated – by books such as Wallace Berry’s Musical Structure and Performance, the aim of which is to explain, in the author’s words, ‘how … a structural relation exposed in analysis can be illuminated in the inflections of edifying performance’ (1989: p. 2). Put crudely, the idea is that the theorist knows how the music works, based on analysis of the score, and accordingly tells the performer how it should go. Over the years, American music theory conferences were full of sessions in which this unequal power relationship between theorists and practitioners was acted out. They were occasions less of knowledge exchange than of knowledge transfer – from the academic to the performer, from the page to the stage. This one-way approach was heavily criticised, particularly by commentators from the eastern side of the Atlantic: in this respect, the AIP movement undoubtedly ran counter to the basic values of the performative turn. Another criticism might be that the performers involved in AIP tended to belong to the academic concert circuit rather than the international stage. There is a small number of leading professionals who make use of academic theory in developing their performance interpretations, the most conspicuous example being Murray Perahia’s invocation of Schenkerian analysis, but even they tend to remain aloof from the academic establishment and employ established analytical methods in a personal manner (Rink 2001).

I have used the past tense throughout most of the previous paragraph because this account of AIP is not only perhaps crude, but also to some extent out of date. To be sure, work of the kind I described still goes on. But there have been two new developments, one of which might be described as an extension of the page-to-stage approach, and the other as an alternative to it. I can illustrate the first through the example of Janet Schmalfeldt, an accomplished pianist as well as theorist, who in 1985 wrote an influential article that took the form of a dialogue between two Schmalfeldts: analyst-Schmalfeldt and performer-Schmalfeldt. Despite the attractive format, the article turned out rather like those conference sessions. In essence, analyst-Schmalfeldt talked and performer-Schmalfeldt listened. Stung by criticism to this effect, however, Schmalfeldt started listening more to her performer self, and the result may be seen in her most recent book, In the Process of Becoming. ‘I have been led to the central topic of this book’, writes Schmalfeldt, ‘by the performer in me as much as by my analytic and theoretic concerns’ (2011, p. 114). For example, in a chapter on Schubert’s A minor Sonata Op. 42, interpretive approaches are derived from the author’s own experiences of performing the piece, and also from well known pianists who have recorded it (Richard Goode, Maurizio Pollini, András Schiff, and Andreas Staier). To the extent that the outcome of Schmalfeldt’s project is a book, this is not what one would normally call practice as research. Yet practice still plays an indispensable role as a research method.

I spoke above of a second new development: rather than applying the results of score-based analys...