It is as performance that music is loved, understood, and consumed, yet musicologists have traditionally treated it as a kind of text. They have seen meaning as written into the music, implying that performance merely reproduces what is already there: this paradigm of reproduction has prevented musicology from adequately engaging with performance. Beyond the Score is a thoroughgoing attempt to reconceive music as performance, in other words as a real-time practice that affords the production of meaning. That means rethinking familiar assumptions and developing new approaches. Focusing primaril ... More

It is as performance that music is loved, understood, and consumed, yet musicologists have traditionally treated it as a kind of text. They have seen meaning as written into the music, implying that performance merely reproduces what is already there: this paradigm of reproduction has prevented musicology from adequately engaging with performance. Beyond the Score is a thoroughgoing attempt to reconceive music as performance, in other words as a real-time practice that affords the production of meaning. That means rethinking familiar assumptions and developing new approaches. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on the Western “art” tradition, the book explores perspectives that range from close listening to computational analysis, from ethnography to the study of recordings, and from the social relations constructed through performance to the performing (and listening) body. It also has a strong historical emphasis, extending from the early days of recording to contemporary digital culture, and a number of themes weave through it. These include the relationship between the written and the oral in musical culture, and the need to move on from thinking based on the paradigm of reproduction to a semiotic approach grounded on the production of meaning. While the principal claim of the book is that thinking based on the idea of music as text has hampered the academic understanding of music, the book argues that it has also made the practices of performance less creative than they might be, and the book explores how we might escape from the textualist straitjacket.