Towards convergence

Abstract

This chapter concerns the interrelationship between music history and analysis—so-called academic studies—and musical performance, and it considers how such studies might affect or influence the student performer. Until recently, musical performance and academic studies were regarded as separate elements in music education, a separation that is now being challenged. The chapter begins by reviewing existing scholarship on performance studies and by exploring how the concerns of historically informed performance and practice as research can bring the questions underlying that scholarship into focus, even in undergraduate curricula. The discussion then turns to the higher education (HE) music environment and recent educational thinking seeking to unite distinct strands of musical study within a single curriculum. Two modules that attempt to integrate performance and scholarship—one from a university music department and one from a conservatoire—serve as exemplars. In the final section, opinions and observations solicited from musicians working in HE throw light on the issues from divergent perspectives. The overriding themes are duality and separation on the one hand and connections and convergence on the other—of ‘thinkers’ and ‘doers’, insight and analysis, formal and tacit knowledge, conservatoires and universities, and academic lectures and one-to-one performance tuition.