CfA: Performance Research Special Issue
CfA: Performance Research Special Issue, 30/1 – ‘On Music’ (spring 2025)
Proposal deadline: 22 April 2024
https://psn2022.wordpress.com/
Issue editors: Tom Armstrong, Georgia Volioti and Christopher Wiley Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, UK
Aims, context and purpose:
This issue of the journal Performance Research seeks to reflect critically on the development of music performance studies across the early twenty-first century while simultaneously showcasing the current status of practice and research on music performance in a range of musical genres and envisaging future directions for the field. Key questions that it aims to address include:
What is music performance studies and how can it address (some of) the challenges, complexities and uncertainties we face in the twenty-first century?
How do scholars/scholar-practitioners currently engage imaginatively and critically with music performance in all its multifaceted elements and across different contexts?
What does the field of music performance studies (broadly conceived) look like in relation to performance studies across the disciplines?
Twenty years ago, the main precursors to a budding field of music performance studies included the musicological branches of music theory and analysis, historically informed performance practice and foundational strands of music psychology research. Over the years, the increasing cross-fertilization of music(ological) studies by the theoretical work of eminent scholars – particularly, Philip Auslander (on liveness), Richard Schechner (on performativity), Georgina Born (on mediation and on a relational musicology), John Rink (on performance analysis), Nicholas Cook (on a systematic retheorization of musicological concepts and approaches) and Darla Crispin and Mine Doğantan-Dack among others (on artistic practice-as-research) – has opened up music performance studies into a flourishing transdisciplinary field of enquiry.
But whereas on paper scholars often seemingly tackle the question, ‘What is music performance (studies)?’ by addressing it through a discussion of the emergence of a succession of disciplinary ‘turns’– for example, the ‘performative/practice’ turn, the ‘relational’ turn, the ‘practice/reflexive’ turn, the ‘non-human/materialist’ turn – plenty of work still remains to be undertaken on the theoretical and methodological bases with which music performance scholars and practitioners engage. In seeking critically to interrogate current and future directions in music performance studies, this issue of Performance Research aims to address how disciplinary currents and influences such as the above not only shape (in a ‘top-down’ manner) but are shaped, subverted, cross-fertilized and renewed by scholar-practitioners’ work from the bottom up.
In the process, the issue will serve to reflect on the scope and nature of border-crossings and transdisciplinarity for the field of music performance studies. Ultimately, the publication of this issue has particularly timely relevance for reevaluating the status of music (and music performance) within arts and humanities scholarship in the light of rapidly shifting sociopolitical, disciplinary, institutional and curricular debates and concerns given the many pressures on the contemporary neoliberal university.
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:
Email: Tom Armstrong – t.armstrong[at]surrey.ac.uk
Georgia Volioti – g.volioti[at]surrey.ac.uk
Christopher Wiley – c.wiley[at]surrey.ac.uk
The call for proposals provides full details: https://psn2022.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/cfp-performance-research-30.1-on-music.docx.pdf