Music reflects subjectivity and identity: that idea is now deeply ingrained in both musicology and popular media commentary. The study of music across cultures and practices often addresses the enactment of subjectivity “in” music – how music expresses or represents “an” individual or “a” group. However, a sense of selfhood is also formed and continually reformed through musical practices, not least performance. How does this take place? How might the work of practitioners reveal aspects of this process? In what sense is subjectivity performed in and through musical practices? This book explores these questions in relation to a range of artistic research involving contemporary musical practices, drawing on perspectives from performance studies, phenomenology, embodied cognition, and theories of gendered and cultural identity.

Logic of Experimentation offers several innovative and ground-breaking perspectives on music performance, music ontology, research methodologies and ethics of performance. It proposes new modes of thinking and exposing past musical works to contemporary audiences, arguing for a new kind of performer, emancipated from authoritative texts and traditions, whose creativity is propelled by intensive research and inventive imagination. Moving beyond the work-concept, Logic of Experimentation presents a new image of musical works, based upon the notions of strata, assemblage and diagram, advancing innovative practice-based methodologies that integrate archival and musicological research into the creative process leading to a performance. Beyond representational modes of performance--be it mainstream or historically informed performance practices--Logic of Experimentation creates an ontological, methodological and ethical space for experimental performance practices, arguing for a new mode of performance. Written in an experimental style, its eight chapters appropriate music performance concepts from post-structural philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and technology studies, epistemology, and semiotics, displaying how transdisciplinarity is central to artistic research. An indispensable contribution to artistic research in music, Logic of Experimentation is compelling reading for music performers, composers, musicologists, philosophers and artist researchers alike.

Identity and subjectivity in musical performances Who is the “I” that performs? The arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have pushed us relentlessly to reconsider our notions of the self, expression, and communication: to ask ourselves, again and again, who we think we are and how we can speak meaningfully to one another. Although in other performing arts studies, especially of theatre, the performance of selfhood and identity continues to be a matter of lively debate in both practice and theory, the question of how a sense of self is manifested through musical performance has been neglected. The authors of Voices, Bodies, Practices are all musician-researchers: the book employs artistic research to explore how embodied performing “voices” can emerge from the interactions of individual performers and composers, musical materials, instruments, mediating technologies, and performance contexts.

The concept of subjectivity is one of the most popular in recent scholarly accounts of music; it is also one of the obscurest and most ill-defined. Multifaceted and hard to pin down, subjectivity nevertheless serves an important, if not indispensable purpose, underpinning various assertions made about music and its effect on us. We may not be exactly sure what subjectivity is, but much of the reception of Western music over the last two centuries is premised upon it. Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann offers a critical examination of the notion of musical subjectivity and the first extended account of its applicability to one of the composers with whom it is most closely associated. Adopting a fluid and multivalent approach to a topic situated at the intersection of musicology, philosophy, literature, and cultural history, it seeks to provide a critical refinement of this idea and to elucidate both its importance and limits.

Community Performance: A Reader is the first book to provide comprehensive teaching materials for this significant part of the theatre studies curriculum. It brings together core writings and critical approaches to community performance work, presenting practices in the UK, USA, Australia and beyond. Offering a comprehensive anthology of key writings in the vibrant field of community performance, spanning dance, theatre and visual practices, this Reader uniquely combines classic writings from major theorists and practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Paolo Freire, Dwight Conquergood and Jan Cohen Cruz, with newly commissioned essays that bring the anthology right up to date with current practice. This book can be used as a stand-alone text, or together with its companion volume, Community Performance: An Introduction, to offer an accessible and classroom-friendly introduction to the field of community performance.

“Truth happens to an idea.” So wrote William James in 1907; and twenty-four years later John Dewey argued that artistic experience entailed a process of “doing and undergoing.” But what do these ideas have to do with music, or with research conducted in and through music—that is, with “artistic research”? In this collection of essays, fourteen very different authors respond with distinct and challenging perspectives. Some report on their own experiments and experiences; some offer probing analyses of noteworthy practices; some view historical continuities through the lens of pragmatism and artistic experiment. The resulting collection yields new insights into what musicians do, how they experiment, and what they experience—insights that arise not from doctrine, but from diverse voices seeking common ground in and through experimental discourse: artistic research in and of itself.

In the sciences, the experimental approach has proved its worth in generating what subsequently requires understanding. Can the emergent field of artistic research be inspired by recent thinking about the history and workings of science?

Essential reading for anyone interested in artistic research applied to music This book is the first anthology of writings about the emerging subject of artistic experimentation in music. This subject, as part of the cross-disciplinary field of artistic research, cuts across boundaries of the conventional categories of performance practice, music analysis, aesthetics, and music pedagogy. The texts, most of them specially written for this volume, have a common genesis in the explorations of the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM) in Ghent, Belgium. The book critically examines experimentation in music of different historical eras. It is essential reading for performers, composers, teachers, and others wanting to inform themselves of the issues and the current debates in the new field of artistic research as applied to music. The publication is accompanied by a CD of music discussed in the text, and by an online resource of video illustrations of specific issues. Contributors Paulo de Assis (ORCiM), Richard Barrett (Institute of Sonology, The Hague), Tom Beghin (McGill University), William Brooks (University of York, ORCiM), Nicholas G. Brown (University of East Anglia), Marcel Cobussen (University of Leiden), Kathleen Coessens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, ORCiM); Paul Craenen (Director Musica, Impulse Centre for Music), Darla Crispin (Norwegian Academy of Music), Stephen Emmerson (Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Brisbane), Henrik Frisk (Malmö Academy of Music), Bob Gilmore (ORCiM), Valentin Gloor (ORCiM), Yolande Harris (Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media – DXARTS), University of Washington, Seattle), Mieko Kanno (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Andrew Lawrence-King (Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, University of Western Australia), Catherine Laws (University of York, ORCiM), Stefan Östersjö (ORCiM), Juan Parra (ORCiM), Larry Polansky (University of California, Santa Cruz), Stephen Preston, Godfried-Willem Raes (Logos Foundation, Ghent), Hans Roels (ORCiM), Michael Schwab (ORCiM, Royal College of Art, London, Zurich University of the Arts), Anna Scott (ORCiM), Steve Tromans (Middlesex University), Luk Vaes (ORCiM), Bart Vanhecke (KU Leuven, ORCiM)

This volume represents the second proceedings of the Royal Musical Association’s (RMA) Music and/as Process Study Group. It is not surprising that a large number of the contributors to the Music and/as Process Study Group are active practitioners in the performance and composition of contemporary music. The collaborations documented here represent the bringing together of disciplines, joint work between practitioners who contribute their own specific areas of expertise to a composite creative activity, and work that crosses disciplines in order to make a critical comment in each of them. In this collection, these three types of collaborative work describe an increasing amount of contemporary music practice. In addition to the increasing involvement of practice in research, the understanding and prevalence of practice methodologies in the form of practice research has also increased in musicology. This volume reflects these concerns through contributions from authors who are all active practitioners in their respective fields of music performance, composition, improvisation, and conducting. The diversity of these contributions shows the variety of processes and practices that are currently being undertaken by proponents of the field of contemporary music. These essays provide a snapshot of the current collaborative and distributed processes that are employed by today’s contemporary music practitioners. The chapters contained in this volume reveal the varied nature of the approaches to creativity in music making, and the ways that these are distributed across its practitioners during each stage of the development of musical works.

How does the production of performance engage with the fundamental issues of our advanced neo-capitalist age? André Lepecki surveys a decade of experimental choreography to uncover the dual meaning of ‘performance’ in the twenty-first century: not just an aesthetic category, but a mode of political power. He demonstrates the enduring ability of performance to critique and subvert this power, examining this relationship through five ‘singularities’ in contemporary dance: thingness, animality, persistence, darkness, and solidity. Exploring the works of Mette Ingvartsen, Yvonne Rainer, Ralph Lemon, Jérôme Bel and others, Lepecki uses his concept of ‘singularity’—the resistance of categorization and aesthetic identification—to examine the function of dance and performance in political and artistic debate.