Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Most of the skills required for greater creativity in classical performance are in use already (albeit to a smaller degree) in normative performance. What creativity requires is simply that one takes,...

23 Dec 20243min

We have only to imagine how dreary theatre would be if every performance of ‘Hamlet’ used the same gestures and the same intonations—all enforced by an ideologically-contrained community of actors and...

23 Dec 202412min

Ignoring or transforming indications from the composer may allow us, ethically as well as practically, to learn much about how relationships can change, or be radically other, and still be profoundly ...

23 Dec 20245min

As performers we have ethical responsibilities, not to ‘the music itself’, nor to the long-dead composer, but rather to others whom our performances may influence. We cannot allow listeners to feel en...

23 Dec 202410min

A reminder of the overwhelming reasons to be innovative in classical music performance. Then, how are we to get these scores to work differently and variously? Ten approaches are suggested to get us s...

23 Dec 202412min

Early recordings provide many revelatory examples of musicalities are quite unfamiliar to us now. They are excellent sources of models if we want to experiment with performing scores differently, for ...

23 Dec 202414min

A performance that works dynamically (the essential requirement) is one in which the performer moves from note to note—modelling feeling-shapes we know or can imagine from life—in a way that carries u...

23 Dec 20248min

The sense that music moves, is lifelike, and is like other kinds of changing feeling states and other everyday experiences, may be rooted in more basic experiences and responses to the world around us...

23 Dec 20243min