Contemporary Musical Virtuosities

Contemporary notions of musical virtuosity redevelop historic concepts and demonstrate that our present understanding of virtuosity in western art music has shifted from what seemed, for a time, to be a relatively clear and stable definition. In the field and the academy, lively debates around the definition and/or value of virtuosity have always elicited strong and varied ideas. In the twenty-first century, frictions have emerged between traditional definitions of virtuosity and contemporary practices that emphasise collaboration and blur roles between performers, composers, and improvisers. Contemporary Musical Virtuosities embraces the evolving processes, practitioners, and presentation models within twenty-first century art music. This edited collection explores recent insights into the experience and role of virtuosity in different contexts, via contributions from an intergenerational group of artists, academics, and artist-academics. Their writing highlights current themes in contemporary western art music and intersecting musical and performing arts genres such as dance, sound art, improvisation, jazz, trans-traditional collaborations, and Australian Indigenous music. It offers models for supporting and recognising a plurality of musical virtuosities typically excluded from traditional definitions and examines implications for musical practice today. Chapters take the form of academic essays, artist reflections, interviews, personal letters, and a manifesto, reflecting the range of approaches and contexts covered. The collection includes first writings on practices that have been present in the industry for some time not yet documented or examined in detail until now, and thus offers a vision for the future that prioritises inclusive and overlapping practices and processes in music.

Drawing upon the past two decades of burgeoning literature in philosophy of music, this study offers a comprehensive, critical analysis of what is entailed in performance interpretation. It argues that integrity and other virtues offset the harm that virtuosity and rigid historical authenticity can impose on the perceptive judgment required of excellent musical interpretation. Proposed are challenging and provocative reassessments of the appropriate roles for virtuosity and historical authenticity in musical performance. Acknowledging the competitive ethos of the contemporary music scene, it details the kind of character a performer needs to develop in order to withstand those pressures and to achieve interpretive excellence. Performers are encouraged to examine and explore the ethical dimension of their art against their responsibilities to the diverse patrons they serve. Professional and student performers and instructors will appreciate this practical discussion of the ethical challenges performers confront when interpreting musical works. The ethical discourse applies to instrumental performance studies, the history and theory of music, general music pedagogy, and philosophy of music courses.

This volume explores the possibilities of cognate music theory, a concept introduced by musicologist John Walter Hill to describe culturally and historically situated music theory. Cognate music theories offer a new way of thinking about music theory, music history, and the relationship between insider and outsider perspectives when researchers mediate between their own historical and cultural position, and that of the originators of the music they are studying. With contributions from noted scholars of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, this volume develops a variety of approaches using the cognate music theory framework and shows how this concept enables more nuanced and critical analyses of music in historical context. Addressing topics in music from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, this volume will be relevant to musicologists, music theorists, and all researchers interested in reflecting critically on what it means to construct a theory of music. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Why do most musical performers and musical researchers continue to inhabit divergent epistemic spaces? To what extent is the act of musical performance coextensive with the act of doing musical research, and vice versa? At what point in the research process can a performative act transform into a scholarly one, and a scholarly act into a performative one? These, and other related questions, form the central focus of this book, with each chapter offering a fresh perspective on a particular topic in music performance studies: improvisational traditions, historical performance practices, analysis and performance, sports psychology, cross-cultural musical interactions, and institutional challenges. This book is aimed at music researchers, teachers, students, and practising musicians interested in the intersection of academic and performance research; as such, it seeks to bridge the divide between the research of university-trained musicologists, scholars from other fields who focus on music, and the growing community of musical artist-researchers. Material in this book is supported by performance outcomes offered by the contributors on a separate YouTube channel and on the Routledge online portal.

This book approaches opera fantasias – instrumental works that use themes from a single opera as the body of their virtuosic and flamboyant material – both historically and theoretically, concentrating on compositions for and by woodwind-instrument performers in Italy in the nineteenth century. Important overlapping strands include the concept of virtuosity and its gradual demonization, the strong gendered overtones of individual woodwind instruments and of virtuosity, the distinct Italian context of these fantasias, the presentation and alteration of opera narratives in opera fantasias, and the technical and social development of woodwind instruments. Like opera itself, the opera fantasia is a popular art form, stylistically predictable yet formally flexible, based heavily on past operatic tradition and prefabricated materials. Through archival research in Italy, theoretical analysis, and exploration of European cultural contexts, this book clarifies a genre that has been consciously stifled and societal resonances that still impact music reception and performance today.

Wanneer luisteraars over hun luisterervaringen praten, refereren ze vaak aan muziek alsof het een verhaal is. Maar kan muziek wel een verhaal vertellen? Kan muziek narratief zijn? Traditioneel wordt narrativiteit geassocieerd met verbale en visuele teksten en wordt er betwijfeld of een muzikale variant zelfs maar kan bestaan. In deze studie beargumenteert Vincent Meelberg dat muziek wel degelijk een verhaal kan vertellen, en dat de bestudering van muzikale narrativiteit zeer productief is. Meer specifiek stelt Meelberg voor om hedendaagse muzikale verhalen te beschouwen als metaverhalen, dus als verhalen die het verhaal van het proces van narrativizering vertellen.