Sound Recording As a Factor of Evolution of the Piano Performing Style in XX Century

Роль звукозаписи как источника и катализатора изменений, произошедших в фортепианном исполнительстве в XX веке, мало исследована в отечественном музыкознании. Цель автора — восполнить данный пробел, раскрыв влияние звукозаписи на развитие фортепианного искусства. В центре внимания — репертуарные предпочтения, возможности и подходы исполнителей; анализ производится в рамках предложенной периодизации звукозаписи (ранней, классической, цифровой). В эпоху ранней звукозаписи трансформация исполнительских средств связана с временны´ м аспектом. Период классической звукозаписи характеризуется стремлением к идеальному исполнению в студии звукозаписи, что обусловлено технологическими открытиями в области обработки звука, становлением типа пианиста-интерпретатора и возникновением типа исполнителя-постмодерниста. Идеалы качества эпохи цифровой записи привели к формированию высоких стандартов концертных исполнений, а развитие компьютерных технологий — к появлению новых исполнительских техник. В статье представлены основные стилевые тенденции, возникшие под влиянием звукозаписи, обозначены основные проблемы современного исполнительства. The role of the sound recording as a source and catalyst of changes that took place in the piano performance in the XX century is researched rather little in the native musicology. The aim of the author is to fill this gap by examining the influence of the sound recording on the piano performing style. In the spotlight there are performing techniques, repertoire preferences and interpretative approaches which are analyzed within the framework of the suggested periodization of the sound recording — early, classical, digital. In the days of early sound recording, transformation of performing techniques is connected with the temporal aspect. The period of classical sound recording is characterized by the desire of an ideal performance in the studio of sound recording, owing to technological discoveries in the area of sound processing, and emergence of such types of musicians as pianist-interpreter and postmodern performer. The ideals of quality of the era of digital recording led to formation of high standards in concert performance, and development of computer technologies created new performing techniques. The article presents the main stylistic trends which appeared under the influence of sound recording, and outlines the main problems of the contemporary performance.

Maelzel, the Metronome, and the Modern Mechanics of Musical Time

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, despite being most recognized today for inventing the clockwork metronome, was one of the most famous automata showmen of the nineteenth century. This chapter begins by offering a reception history of Maelzel, the metronome, and his automata, and exploring the cultural significances underlying his clockwork creations across the Industrial Age. As numerous accounts maintain, Maelzel’s automata projected decidedly inhuman performance practices. His automata emblematized a machine culture that ran in direct opposition to the subjective ‘artistry’ championed by many skilled performers and composers over the century. This study subsequently addresses the discord between Maelzel’s age and ours regarding the values of musical time and performance practices: those metronomic qualities largely rejected by Maelzel’s musical contemporaries are often vehemently endorsed today by many professional musicians and educators who apply mechanically precise tempos and rhythms to all musical repertoires. This history ultimately confronts the veiled ‘metronome mentality’ found throughout contemporary performance culture, which neglects many musical-temporal aesthetics and rhythmic qualities from a pre-industrial, pre-metronomic past.

Performing Touch and Smell: The Liminality of the Senses

The paper discusses the liminal nature of the sensorial languages in contemporary performing arts. Its starting point will be the following chain of thoughts: during artistic events, a performative action reshaping the performers and the audience takes place, along with the interchange of the roles between the “stage” and “auditorium”, either in the sense of Augusto Boal’s spect-actor or the destruction of the fourth wall and the specific “autopoietic feedback loop” (Erika Fischer-Lichte) between both parties involved. We aim to rethink and re-examine the role of the sensorial language as one of the rarely used yet highly efficient tools of the performative revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries. These revolutions started with the Futurists, continued with the tactile and sensorial performances and politics of Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono, and culminated with Enrique Vargas and his sensorial theatre in different stages from New York’s La Mama radical 1960s productions to his 1990s new sensorial theatre language of his Teatro de los Sentidos. We will try to answer the following questions: How can and how do we touch and smell … in performative actions? Which kind of liminalities does the act of sensorial produce in a contemporary performance?

Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and Shane Vogel, eds. Race and Performance after Repetition.

Race and Performance after Repetition is a vital showcase of contemporary performance studies scholarship that reconsiders the intersection of performance, temporality, and racialization across a wide variety of contexts and arguments. The book articulates several new conceptual frameworks, such as dark reparation, parabolic performance, and dedouble.

Staging Scores: Musical composition as strategy and structure of performance

In this article, we deploy overlapping conceptual frameworks to address contemporary performance work we were involved in devising, which explored the representation and utilisation of classical music from a theatrical and structural perspective. It combines Postdramatic Theatre (Lehmann, 2006), Composed Theatre (Rebstock and Roesner, 2012) and Score Theatre (Spagnolo, 2017) in order to expose how our performance practices are invested in the language, etiquettes, and compositional principles of classical music.

Queer Feelings: Love and Loss in the Letters of Horace Walpole

This essay looks at the letters of Horace Walpole through the lens of the contemporary performance theory of José Muñoz in order to suggest the ways in which Walpole’s feelings in the past reach us with a hope for the future. By looking at touchstones in Horace Walpole’s life, I look for a model of queer relationality that is centuries ahead of its time.

Tall Poppy Syndrome & Patriarchal Femininity: An Auto-ethnographic Investigation into New Zealand’s Female-identifying Comedians

<p>This practice-based and auto-ethnographic research project explores the correlation between Tall Poppy Syndrome (TPS) and patriarchal femininity in the performances of female-identifying stand-up comedians in New Zealand. I identify ways TPS, as a patriarchal ideology, has an impact on the subconscious/and or conscious choices of New Zealand’s self-deprecating female-identifying comedians in contemporary performance. I have chosen to analyse TPS through an intersectional feminist lens, focusing on ways the historical construction of patriarchal femininity directly relates to the cultural phenomenon of Tall Poppy Syndrome. I aim to connect this relationship to the ways New Zealand female-identifying comedians ‘perform’ autobiographical comedy, as part of expected social and cultural conventions. As I want to investigate the impact of TPS in an exclusively New Zealand context, my research isolates its case studies to comedians who make comedy primarily for a New Zealand audience, discussing international comedians as a point of comparison.</p>