Between Process and Product

Abstract

The text-based orientation of traditional musicology and theory hampers thinking about music as a performance art. Music can be understood as both process and product, but it is the relationship between the two that defines “performance” in the Western “art” tradition. Drawing on interdisciplinary performance theory (particularly theatre studies, poetry reading, and ethnomusicology), I set out issues and outline approaches for the study of music as performance; by thinking of scores as “scripts” rather than “texts,” I argue, we can understand performance as a generator of social meaning.