Musicology and performance音乐学与表演.pdf

Musicology and performance Daniel Leech-Wilkinson King’s College London Over the past 100 years musicology and performance have had an uncomfortable relationship. Until recently musicologists tended to assume that they were uniquely qualified to tell performers how music should go: Historians knew which instruments were used, how performers were supposed to do their ornaments and so on; theorists knew which notes were the important ones, the ones performers should “do something” to point up. What exactly performers were to do was a matter for them, mere craft, not something scholars need concern themselves with. More recently musicology has begun to fancy itself as performative, and in many ways it is, but not in any that brings us closer to understanding what happens when a performer (literally) makes music, nor of how the ways in which a performer shapes it tell listeners, and commentators if they listen, how the music works. Joel Lester has argued effectively that we might learn something 1 important about musical pieces from studying performances. And one could go further and suggest we could learn still more from asking the right questions of listeners, for it is a fact never to be forgotten that music makes profound sense to people who have never read a word of musicology. How it sounds and how it feels are the keys to understanding what it is and how it works. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that we can expect over the next few years to learn a lot more, by studying performances closely, about the ways in which performers make music work. At the same time we should do well to start to think about the extent to which how music sounds in performance has always influenced what scholars have written 791 about it. I do not just mean the sounds of external performances