Historical Performance Practice

Catalog description

This course is designed to enable graduate students in musicology, performance and composition to become better acquainted with scholarly perspectives on the history, theory, and practice of musical performance. It is a foundational course within the Keyboard Studies DMA program. Moving from a genealogy of the term performance practice to the current state of critical performance studies, we will consider how notions of performance practice have changed over time, from formative debates over history, authenticity, and ontology to the absorption of recent developments in performance studies, embodied cognition, actor-network theory, cultural ecology, materials and computational sciences, and media archaeology. How have traditions and practices been transmitted orally, literally, technologically, conceptually, and corporeally? Whose authority is at stake? On what political, ethical, and aesthetic grounds have claims to historical fidelity been laid and challenged? What has been gained and lost in the process?By the end of this course, students will have developed a deep and broad understanding of performance practice in relation to these questions and the broader field of music studies. They will also have articulated its scope and limits in relation to specific historical periods, geographical locales, and repertoires as well as to their contemporary construal and interconnection.