With the 1997 founding of the International Association of Word and Music Studies (WMA), transdisciplinary research about the relations between text and music has found an academic home. The 2009 international conference of the WMA in Vienna focused on performativity, a key concept in the humanities since the “performative turn” in the 1960s. The edited volume under review comprises seventeen essays from this conference divided into two sections, “Performativity in Literature and Music” and “Surveying the Field.”The two opening essays introduce the idea of performativity in literature and music. In “Performativity and the Musical Work of Art,” Tobias Janz gives a historical and terminological overview on defining the musical artwork that includes the performative dimension as an irreducible aspect of the work itself. Leaving behind an interpretation of music that has been purely based on the published score and other written documents since the 1960s, the new understanding of musical pieces includes ephemeral elements such as sound, intensity, and modifications of musical time to come to a comprehensive understanding of the work. Since then, the goal has been an integrative approach that includes all written sources and performative issues. The second essay, “The Bearbeitungsfrage and the ‘Romantic Baroque,’” by David Francis Urrows elaborates on that question. The author introduces the Bach-Gesellschaft in Leipzig, which, through their efforts of publishing critical editions of Bach's work, gave birth to the new discipline of musicology in the nineteenth century. Through the quarrels with their opponents, who were concerned with the practicality of those editions for performances, emerged the Bearbeitungsfrage—the issue of arrangements and transcriptions—which built the basis for contemporary discussions about performativity. On the side, Urrows offers interesting arguments for and against historical performances in contemporary performance halls.In “The Act of Performance as Mahlerian Topic,” Robert Samuels, who published the monograph Mahler's Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge, 1995), provides the first case study of the volume, which investigates Mahler's use of theatrical effects. Samuels argues that the composer's conscious use of the symphony as a stage spectacle with multiple layers of narration opens his music up to various levels of meaning, which can be explained through Charles Sanders Peirce's typology of sign types. Performativity in Mahler mainly derives from his usage of offstage bands, his concern with imperceptible choir entries, the physicality of the performance, and his detailed stage directions. While the knowledge about these features of Mahler's music is not new, their inclusion in the context of performativity gives the reader a different angle from which to interpret the composer's œuvre, which will open new ways for understanding his pieces.The next six essays discuss the connection between prose, poetry, and music. Katia Chornik's “Politics, Music and Irony in Alejo Carpentier's Novel La consagración de la primavera” examines the usage of political and musical subjects in the work of the Cuban writer and music critic. Chornik illustrates convincingly how the writer uses performance as a platform to convey irony and ideology in a political context with the help of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and the anthem “L'Internationale.” This strategy links performance in art with social movements, a topic that Mario Dunkel picks up later in the volume. Delia da Sousa Correa's essay “Musical Performativity in the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield” argues that Mansfield's stories perform rather than merely invoke musical analogy through their use of tone effects, which results in a sense of performativity in words. The author touches on Mansfield's use of symbolism that may have originated from a childhood trauma, but she does not elaborate on that. A closer look at the connection between trauma and performativity would nurture studies in psychoanalysis and trauma work.The editor of the volume and founding member of the WMA, Walter Bernhart, opens the field for poetry and music in “Rhythmical Ambivalence of Poetry Performance: The Case of Elizabethan Verse.” He calls the reader's attention to the lack of coded prosody in poetry. Whereas composers usually annotate their scores with instructions for the performers (e.g., staccato, piano, or “do not hurry”), poems usually lack those notes. With two case studies from the Elizabethan period, when two distinctive types of language pronunciation were practiced—the morphological and syllabic performance style—he shows how the usage of either of the forms is a question of style, not of truth or error. Both styles coexisted while the choice for one or the other reflected the historical transition in the Elizabethan age from humanist-inspired to rationalist conceptions of poetry. In “‘Music will keep out temporary ideas’: W. B. Yeats's Radio Performances,” Adrian Paterson expands the discussion of poetry to the medium of the radio. Yeats's commitment to performance in poetry shows a strong theatrical impulse as well as a real engagement in modernity and technology use. His four poetry broadcasts represent a recorded experiment of musical performances whereby the author wanted to call the ancient theater into imagination at the same time. Even though Paterson does not mention other artists that may have worked like Yeats, the reader is reminded of the collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. All three men had similar ideas about singing with a focus on the text, the body as gesture, and music that catered the expression of meaning. If Lotte Lenya was Weill's and Brecht's “perfect medium,” then Margot Ruddock may count as that for Yeats, who wrote the song “Sweet Dancer” for her.The next essay, “‘The Invisible’/‘The Inaudible’: Aspects of Performativity in Celan and Leibowitz,” by Axel Englund segues into the connection between performativity and the Lied. The author asks how the transition from a visible to an audible materiality of a poem may alter its message and its way of generating its meaning. The examination of two poems by Celan that René Leibowitz set to music shows that while silent and spoken poems stage their own silence and disappearance of language, the sung poem especially relates to the notion of erasure of meaning through the music's dodecaphonic structure that performs completeness and coherence, and the predominance of sound over the word. Whereas Englund focuses on how the message of a poem changes through its media, Lawrence Kramer asks in his essay “Sexing Song: Brigitte Fassbaender's Winterreise” how the gender of performers of Schubert's Winterreise change the message of the pieces. Fassbaender, one of the rare examples of a female singer of the piece, transforms the male-centered song cycle into an immanent critique of the cycle's representation of desire—in other words, the female voice reveals aspects of the songs that the male voice cannot present. Besides offering an excellent interpretation of Winterreise, Kramer also addresses questions of mourning, desire, and identity that are encoded in the pieces.Three chapters on opera and performativity follow, starting with Simon Williams's three case studies from the romantic era in his essay “Romantic Opera and Virtuoso” that show the different levels of performativity in acting singers. He discusses the differences between opera seria, grand opera, and bel canto that not only have aesthetic consequences for the performance but also an influence on the social implications of a work of art. Michael Halliwell's “Vocal Embodiment and Performing Languages in Waiting for the Barbarians: Philip Glass's Adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's Novel” takes this question further and asks how vocal utterances become modified through a change in register. In their works of art, both Coetzee and Glass communicate their concern that language has been corrupted by the state and therefore needs to be enhanced by sensuality of the singing voice and its physical body. Halliwell, himself a busy performer of operas, suggests that opera may be emotion expressed in vocal sound without the dependence on syntactical signification. Not only is the focus put on the human body and its expression of the darker recesses of the human soul, but the incomprehensibility of opera singers ceases to be an issue. The last essay in this group, Bernhard Kuhn's “Operatic Hyperreality in the Twenty-First Century: Performance Documentation in High-Definition Quality,” sees modern HD opera screenings creating a hyperreality that exceeds the possibilities of the originally staged opera. Kuhn claims that Franco Zeffirelli's Met production of La Bohème presents a cinematically rather neutral approach that seems to be typical for HD operas. While I find Kuhn's analysis of the screening very convincing, I would have wished for a definition of the term “neutral.” The author describes how camera movements are selective, and interviews and other extra material that the audience of the original staging cannot access are shown beforehand as well as during the intermission. This hints at a rather guided performance of a work of art.The first section of the volume ends with two essays on the connection between jazz and performativity and one essay that presents a study on methods that emerge from the performative turn in theoretical writings. Emily Petermann examines the role of performance in jazz novels in her contribution “Jazz Novels and the Textualization of Musical Performance.” Jazz, as a highly performative art, provides a certain level of orality that serves as an intermediate stage between text and music. Mario Dunkel offers very thought-provoking ideas in his essay “Charles Mingus and Performative Composing” when he connects Mingus's new method of performative composing with the heritage of avant-garde composers of classical music in the twentieth century, but also with the civil rights movement and its emphasis on equal rights as well as its expression in African American literature of the 1950s. Dunkel does not simply accept that jazz music is performative; he asks to what degree this music uses performativity. Katrin Eggers's “Wittgenstein and Schoenberg on Performativity of Music as Method for Philosophy” focuses on performativity as a therapy for philosophical thinking that aims at finding solutions inside the dilemma of Wittgenstein's language crisis or the antiscientific approach to discover Schoenberg's secrets of art.The second part of the book consists of two essays that go beyond the scope of performativity in music and text. Peter Dayan's “Seeing Words and Music as a Painter Might: The Interart Aesthetic” poses questions about the interrelations between image and music studies. Dayan argues convincingly that there is no dissymmetry in the relationship between arts so that there should be “Music and Image Studies” in addition to “Word and Music Studies.” Using the works of two painters, James McNeill Whistler and Georges Braque, Dayan shows how music and poetry can be presented in painting.The last essay in the volume, David Mosley's “Milan Kundera's Polyphonic Novels and the Poetics of Divestment,” re-poses the question to which degree fiction can actually be musicalized. The Franco-Czech novelist Kundera's belief that Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil failed in their attempts to integrate music as a structuring principle into their novels brought him to “composing” texts where each line aims to be read as an independent novel and all of the lines evolve simultaneously. Even though Kundera claims that novels can never reach the polyphony of sung voices, he argues that if the lines treat the novel's overall theme equally, if they illuminate one another, and if they contribute to the work's indivisibility, it would result in a perfectly sufficient polyphony. Hence, Mosley concludes that we need a different definition of polyphony when it occurs in literature. This must lead us to asking fundamental questions about terms and concepts in Word, Music, and Image Studies again.In all, this volume offers the reader a thorough overview of the field of performativity in literature, music, and image through its diverse contributions that cover works of art from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. The authors chose their examples from symphonies, the Lied, the opera, and jazz, the novel, poetry, and stories, with essays extending the question to philosophy and politics. The inclusion of the art of painting in this volume expands the scope of performativity that can open new realms to interpret connections between the arts. New connections were offered between music and trauma, opera and HD broadcast, as well as performativity and social movements that need to be discussed further.