PSi

Chair: Philip Auslander

The working group in Music as Performance was founded by Philip Auslander in 2004. It had its first meeting at the pre-conference in Toronto sponsored by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Performance Studies Focus Group in the summer of that year. The initial meeting was organized around the following issues:

Although Performance Studies takes the traditional performing arts as part of its purview, the discipline has thus far ignored music almost completely. This working group will seek to redress that neglect by investigating what a Performance Studies perspective on musical performances might be and might yield.

The working group will take non-theatrical musical performances (that is, concerts and similar performances rather than musical theatre or opera, not restricted to live forms) in any musical genre as its main objects of inquiry. The initial meeting in Toronto will be devoted to addressing some basic questions and forming a plan of action for the future. It is hoped that participants will remain in touch after the conference and that we can find ways of working together on an on-going basis.

The questions we will discuss at this first meeting may include:

* Why has Performance Studies taken so little interest in musical performances? What are the barriers to making connections between Performance Studies and music?

* What are the connections between musical performance and performance genres to which Performance Studies has been more attentive (e.g., ritual, performance art)?

* What does Performance Studies have to offer the study of music? How is a Performance Studies perspective different from other perspectives (e.g., musicological or cultural studies perspectives)? What kinds of questions might a Performance Studies approach to music involve? With what other disciplines should Performance Studies seek to make common cause in discussing musical performances?

Fortified by some reading assignments, a group met over two days at the conference and had lively discussions around these issues.

The second manifestation of the working group as at the 2005 PSi conference at Brown University, for which Auslander organized two panels on questions around music and performance and the working group had a second organizational meeting. Some of the issues discussed included:

* The purview of the working group. Although Auslander’s original formulation excludes theatrical forms (see above) there was sentiment in the group that people working on opera, musical theatre, and music theatre might find common cause with us
.

* Outreach to disciplines beyond Theatre and Performance Studies. Suggestions included: Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Sociology of Music, Cultural Studies, Folklore, American Studies, and Popular Music Studies. Effort should be made for people associated with the working group to present at conferences in these fields and promote the “music as performance” perspective as well as the working group itself.

* Projects:
1. A website (that would be this!)
2. Listserve on Music as Performance so that people can exchange ideas and information (perhaps an online discussion forum as well)
3. A Membership Directory for the working group
4. An annotated bibliography of work of interest to the working group
5. Eventually: sponsorship of conference panels and perhaps edited volumes by the working group.

The working group will meet for the third time again under the auspices of ATHE’s Performance Studies Focus Group during its pre-conference in San Francisco at the end of July 2005. Auslander will be sitting the conference out; the pre-conference activities are being organized by Elizabeth Patterson. For information, please go to www.athe.org/FG/ps/index.html. Anyone who wishes to participate should contact Elizabeth directly at elizabeth.patterson@colorado.edu. Watch this space for Elizabeth’s report on the pre-conference.

Anyone who wishes to join the working group should contact the chair . If you’d like to help out with any of the projects delineated above, please let him know. Priorities would seem to include developing means of communication among members, the membership list, and the bibliography.