Music Performance Studies Today: “21st-Century Pianism: Retrospection, New Directions, and Interpretative Communities”

With ever-greater frequency, dedicated listeners, artists, pedagogues, and scholars tend to remark that contemporary performances of the core classical repertory sound remarkably alike in both live and recorded contexts. Considering the possibility that piano culture has entered an age of contemporary, back-and-forth reproduction, this panel considers the following: 1. To borrow from literary theorist Stanley Fish, how might a pianist navigate various “interpretative communities” of the core repertory when dealing with varying politics of taste? 2. How might a pianist listen to and theorize about past recordings to reinvigorate today’s performance approaches? 3. What are ways a pianist might introduce direct compositional changes to existing works to reboot the core performing repertory? 4. What does it mean to evaluate a performance?

Panelists and Presentation titles

• Luca Chiantore (Universidade de Aveiro INET-md), “IN-Versions: subversive musicology-based approaches to the performance of Western art music”
• Pheaross Graham (UCLA), “Sonic Erasure of Subject Position in the Reception of Rachmaninoff’s Pianism: A Performance Analysis Study”
• John Rink (University of Cambridge), “Informed listening in action–or, how might ‘knowledge’ shape how we hear and judge performances?”
• Mine Doğantan-Dack (University of Cambridge), “Revisiting the ‘page and the stage'”
• William Kinderman (UCLA), “Revisiting Beethoven’s Piano Works: From the ‘Tempest’ Sonata to the ‘Diabelli’ Variations and Last Sonata, Op. 111”

This is the fourth event in the Music Performance Studies Today series. Considering musics from a variety of traditions, this symposium aims to bring visibility to the field of music performance studies and generate scholarly momentum in its realm at UCLA.

Click here to visit the Symposium Website

Event Co-Sponsors

UCLA Music Library
UCLA Center for Musical Humanities and the Joyce S. and Robert U. Nelson Fund
UCLA Arts Initiative
UCLA Center for Performance Studies
UCLA Department of Musicology
American Society for Theatre Research

This program is made possible by the Joyce S. and Robert U. Nelson Fund. Robert Uriel Nelson was a revered musicologist and music professor at UCLA, who, together with his wife, established a generous endowment for the university to make programs like this possible.