Playing with Tradition: Weighing up Similarity and the Buoyancy of the Game

Abstract

This paper seeks t o interrogate some of the common uses and assumptions surrounding the musicological concept of tradition and its empirical study from recordings. In particular, I take issue with certain style-analytical approaches for investigating performance traditions from recordings. From a theoretical perspective, I consider how the operation of tradition resides beyond the substantive content of performance style, and how such an understanding of tradition fares against quantitative measurements of style and the historical periodization of performance practice. Through a series of empirical case studies based on two of Crieg's Lyric Pieces I investigate the relevance of tradition as an analytical category for studying the transmission of performance practices from recordings. Using beat tempo data extracted from these recordings as an empirical marker of transmission processes, the case studies illustrate how stylistic kinship between performers captures the operation of tradition in different contexts. Findings suggest that stylistic relationships function best as heuristic tools for tracing the presence of tradition in this repertoire: the data do not support the more conventional understanding of tradition as collective style or historically patterned trend, nor do stylistic similarities between performers always verify the operation of tradition. Finally, in seeking to understand tradition beyond the dimension of performance style, I turn to ethnographic data which reveal the operation of tradition as a subjective feeling of connection and ultimately as ontological potential.

Rethinking classical sound recordings

“…Recognising the need to explain more fully what performers do and why, especially in terms of subtler nuances and gestures in performance, some researchers have combined empirical style analysis of recordings with ethnographic evidence of performers' own accounts (e.g., Bayley, 2010;Volioti, 2010Volioti, , 2012Neumann, 2017), or with other documentary sources such as video footage to complement the sound recording (Cook, 2013b). The need to appraise the agency of performers and listeners when delineating histories of performance (from recordings) remains an important aspect for a number of reasons.…”

“…On a broader level of culture, tradition comprises both the macro-process of observable stylistic change and the less perceptible micro-channels of influence. Tradition is not something passive but a social-cultural construct that emerges from the active dialogue between the individual performer and the material handed down from other social actors (pedagogues, other performers, 6 composers), as well as other sources of musical influence including recordings (Volioti, 2010;Heaton, 2012;Volioti & Williamon, 2017).…”

Re-imagining Operatic "Objects": Commentary on Neumann's Phenomena, Poiesis, and Performance Profiling: Temporal-Textual Emphasis and Creative Process Analysis in Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera

“…Performances by their nature are temporally transient events that exist as the sonic traces, fragmentary memories and experiences they invoke. The need to account for some of these experiences in performers and listeners, by supplementing empirical analysis of recordings with ethnographic contextual evidence, has been voiced and documented by other scholars too (e.g., Fabian, 2015;Volioti, 2010Volioti, , 2012. Although the epistemological impulse in Neumann's investigation runs predominantly from page to stage (i.e., tracing temporal interactions using the time scapes, and then validating hypotheses with singers' discourses from interviews), the reverse approach (i.e., identifying interpretative issues of interest and relevance to what performers need to do onstage and then use empirical analysis as a means to facilitate the process) would offer a welcome rapprochement to some of the problematic issues Rink mentions; the danger of becoming too distant from the practicalities of performance and its inextricably creative nature.…”

Musicianly lives musically told: Oral history, classical music, and Desert Island Discs

“…Undertaking comparative analyses of recordings in order to demonstrate this empirically, for example, is an area fraught with analytical difficulty (Volioti 2010 We also gain occasional insights into the oral transmission of musical practice and the manner in which highly skilled musicians endeavour to verbalise musical sound patterns. (Kippen, 1988)-but less frequently encountered in the Western classical music tradition in part because it is usually deemed peripheral to understanding the music of that tradition, but also because it normally occurs in teaching-rooms or masterclasses, where individual approaches to performance aesthetics are made manifest for the purpose of musical education and enculturation.…”