Expressiveness in Music Performance: Empirical Approaches across Styles and Cultures. Ed. by Dorottya Fabian, Renee Timmers, and Emery Schubert

Abstract

This is an excellent and weighty collection of essays by a group of distinguished writers representing a wide spectrum of performance studies. The book is superbly edited, nicely produced, and comes with helpful sound clips on an associated website. While I highly commend the book as a whole, I do have reservations about some of the angles it takes, although these pertain as much to orientations in the discipline in general as to the volume at hand. Leaving aside the question as to whether or not performance studies has actually come of age as a discipline, one could argue that it has still not acquired a theory. And yet, ironically, for lack of a theory, many of its presuppositions have hardened into doctrine, if not dogma. Two presuppositions advocated by most of the contributors to this collection are flagged up in the editors’ introduction. The first is that ‘expressiveness’ inheres in the way music is performed, rather than in any of its structural features. Thus expressiveness is held to be variation of auditory parameters relative to a prototypical performance (emphatically not the score, even if there is one). The second definition is that expressiveness is engendered by deviation or irregularity, instead of residing within any performance idiom in itself. A corollary of this is that expressiveness is intransitive, so doesn’t need to express a particular emotion or mood (happy, sad, etc.). Both axioms are highly contestable, but not significantly contested by the twenty-two contributors who were invited to shape their texts around the editors’ definition of expressiveness. I’ll return to that at the end of this review, in the light of everything the authors have to say.