The idea that there is a correlation between the artistic quality of a musical performance and the performer's understanding of the nature and structure of the musical materials has a long history. Already during the eighteenth century, writers on performance pedagogy – including Johann Joachim Quantz, C. P. E. Bach, Leopold Mozart and Daniel Gottlob Türk – discussed the requirements of a ‘good’ performance (that is, intelligibility and expressiveness) in terms of this correlation.Footnote ¹ They argued that an intelligible delivery depends on the performer's ability to recognize and clearly delineate, through correct accentuation and punctuation, the boundaries of musical sense-units, and they explained the expressiveness of a performance invariably as a function of the performer's sensitivity and innate talent in inferring from the musical materials the affective content of each passage of music.Footnote ² While the idea of linking the aesthetic features of a performance to the performer's grasp of musical structures persisted into the nineteenth century (and well beyond, as we shall see), the new century gave rise to a significant development motivated by the gradual convergence of theories of rhythm and performance pedagogy, resulting from a new, organicist conception of musical form that came to replace the earlier static approaches: it is during this period that knowledge and insights about musical structures aimed at the performer started to be presented in rigorously music-theoretical contexts. Theories of musical rhythm put forward by some of the leading music theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Mathis Lussy (1828–1910), Hugo Riemann (1849–1919) and André Mocquereau (1849–1930) in Continental Europe, and Tobias Matthay (1858–1945), Stewart Macpherson (1865–1941) and John McEwen (1868–1948) in Britain, were thus presented at the same time as theories of phrasing.Footnote ³ Critical discourses on performance accordingly started to identify a correct understanding of the nature of rhythmic motion – the dynamics of alternating action and repose – implied by melodic and harmonic forces, and the shaping of this motion through good phrasing in performance, as the most basic skill of a performer.Footnote ⁴

This literature on rhythm and phrasing had far-reaching consequences for thinking about musical performance. Emerging against the backdrop of the newly rising academic disciplines of musicology and music analysis, which prepared the ground for the sacrosanctity of the musical score as well as the well-known pronouncements of Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker with regard to musical performance,Footnote ⁵ the discourses used by theorists of rhythm and phrasing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ushered in an era of hierarchy with regard to the order of musical knowledge. Accordingly, knowledge and insights about musical materials and structures that the performer requires for creating an artistic performance began to be produced, mediated and disseminated by theorists and analysts, reflecting in embryonic form the structure of authority and power in matters of musical epistemology that would become institutionalized and ideologized during the later part of the twentieth century.

While the writings of Erwin Stein (1885–1958) and Edward T. Cone (1917–2004) are usually referenced as pioneering texts that originated contemporary music analysis and performance studies,Footnote ⁶ the seeds of this subdiscipline of music theory were thus already sown in the writings of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists of musical rhythm and phrasing. Even though there are some important differences between these earlier theorists and the more recent writers on analysis and performance – for example, the former gave expression to their theories also in the form of performance editions, and did not yet identify the music with the scoreFootnote ⁷ – they nevertheless converge in sharing the conviction that theorists know how the performance of a piece of music should go, on the basis of their analyses and understanding of its structure. Already in 1912, Macpherson wrote, for example, that ‘half the unmeaning performances we hear in drawing-rooms and in concert-rooms result from the non-appreciation of Form and Shape in music’ and that even if the performer's natural musicality might save him from ‘utter failure […] his performance falls hopelessly short of what it should be, simply from a lack of an intelligent grasp of the Form of his music’.Footnote ⁸ The means towards the attainment of such an ‘intelligent grasp’ would inevitably be supplied for the performer by the theorist through music analysis.

A detailed examination of the sociocultural factors that led to the increasingly tyrannical tone of music theorists in relation to musical performance during the 50-year period separating Macpherson's book and Stein's Form and Performance (1962), which provided the impetus for the contemporary phase of analysis and performance studies, is beyond the scope of this article. The fact remains that Stein was instrumental not only in sustaining the belief in the superiority of the theorist and analyst in terms of musical epistemology, but also in initiating a blatantly authoritarian and prescriptive tradition of writing that at the same time devalues the performer's artistic skills and knowledge. Stein's book also set the stage for what Nicholas Cook has termed the ‘page-to-stage’ approach,Footnote ⁹ according to which musical understanding is derived ‘unambiguously […] from the score and applied to the performance’.Footnote ¹⁰ In discussing the idea that certain musical structures ‘necessitate’ certain expressive details in performance, Stein wrote:

The history of contemporary music analysis and performance studies from Stein onwards represents a faltering process towards the epistemological emancipation of the performer from the subjugating practices and discourses of institutionalized music theory and analysis. Broadly speaking, it has been a process defined on the one hand by publications that represent a one-way flow of knowledge and an authoritarian-prescriptive route from analysis to performance, and on the other hand by various writings that attempt – as reactions to the former texts – to value performance and performers as sources of musical knowledge, insight and understanding. Some of the best-known examples representing the former perspective include Cone's notion that a ‘valid’ performance depends on structural knowledge that analysis reveals;Footnote ¹² Janet Schmalfeldt's landmark article of 1985 where the fictive analyst lectures the fictive performer;Footnote ¹³ and Eugene Narmour's and Wallace Berry's controversial contributions of 1988 and 1989 respectively, where performers without analytical competence are portrayed as musicians essentially ignorant about musical interpretation.Footnote ¹⁴ Among responses that have countered this perspective by advocating the inclusion of the performer's insights and artistic outputs as sources of understanding within the analytical process, and thereby broadening the scope of academic analysis itself, are the various writings by John Rink, Joel Lester and Cook.Footnote ¹⁵ Within the broader disciplinary context, the emergence over the last decade of a ‘musicology of performance’, spearheaded by two research centres in the UK, namely CHARM and CMPCP,Footnote ¹⁶ and recognizing the crucial role of performances in the creation of musical meaning and signification, has also been instrumental in making progress towards the ‘emancipation’ of the performer. I should also mention the more or less simultaneous rise of practice-led research in music – particularly in the UK and Continental Europe – which continues to play an important role not only in bringing the artistic knowledge, expertise and ‘authentic’ discourses of performers into academic contexts and scholarly research, but also in promoting the interaction and collaboration of musicologists/theorists and performers as disciplinary equals. The founding in 2004 of the Society for Music Theory's Performance and Analysis Interest Group (PAIG), one aim of which is ‘to facilitate dialogue between performers and theorists, and to open new avenues for such interaction’,Footnote ¹⁷ has also been a step in the right direction to remedy the ills of authoritarian perspectives and has provided a positive momentum for analysis and performance studies in North America. Consequently, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic that we may have indeed left behind the attitude that ‘the analyst knows best’ which has largely characterized work in this area during the second half of the twentieth century.

In spite of these developments, the disciplinary relationship between analysis and performance continues to be troubling. In his recent publications, Cook has argued that ‘the basic topography of the relationship between theorists and performers that was established in the 1980s has not been entirely erased’,Footnote ¹⁸ and that while work on this relationship has ‘in some respects come a long way […] in others rather little has changed’.Footnote ¹⁹ I have discussed elsewhere Schmalfeldt's 2011 book In the Process of Becoming as an example displaying the latter tendency, and argued that even though she references her own practice and various recorded performances in developing interpretative approaches to the music she analyses, her book ‘continues to reinforce – in disguise – a discourse that gives the analyst the upper hand in musical epistemology, assigning the performer the role of “projecting” one or the other analytical reading of the music revealed by score analysis’.Footnote ²⁰ I noted that while Schmalfeldt frequently refers to the ‘freedom’ of the performer in choosing between alternatives, ‘the specified choices are always those offered (and allowed) by traditional analysis’.Footnote ²¹ The boundaries of the performer's artistic freedom are defined by reference to an authority derived from analytical knowledge.

The latest contribution to analysis and performance studies in book form, Jeffrey Swinkin's Performative Analysis: Reimagining Music Theory for Performance, published as part of Eastman Studies in Music in 2016, is another example that, while aspiring to give performers ‘freedom’ in matters of musical interpretation, ends up for the most part grafting the epistemology of musical performance onto traditional and institutionalized music-analytical ways of thinking about music. In many respects, this situation might be symptomatic of an attitude identified by Daniel Barolsky:

Swinkin himself pinpoints a similar stance when he identifies the readership of his book primarily as ‘music theorists and musicologists who […] are probably already sympathetic to performance, and who view it as worthy of intellectual contemplation’ (p. 17; emphasis added). One consequence of not fully embracing and valuing performance and performers as sources of musical knowledge and understanding within scholarly practices and discourses, which represents a decisively outmoded perspective particularly in light of the research produced by CHARM and CMPCP, is that even those theorists who have first-hand knowledge of performing music in public proceed from a deeply engrained ‘cognitive map’ that is shaped by institutionalized music theory. Such is the case with Swinkin's book: consisting of an introduction and five chapters, it unfolds amidst an inherent tension between the author's desire to acknowledge and give credit, where credit is due, to performers and his underlying assumptions that sustain the primacy of analytical knowledge and discourse, and thereby the epistemological hierarchizing of analysts and performers.

In addition to the short analytical opener presented in the form of an inner monologue as the author practises the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 14 no. 1, the book is structured around the (mainly Schenkerian) analyses of three canonic pieces from the tonal repertory: Chopin's Nocturne in C minor, op. 48 no.1, in Chapter 3; the first movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C minor, op. 18 no. 4, in Chapter 4; and Schumann's lied ‘Du Ring an meinem Finger’ from his op. 42 Frauenliebe und -leben song cycle in Chapter 5. The approach adopted in the book can be identified as ‘structuralist’ and ‘textualist’ in that the expressive content of music is predicated upon structural analysis of the musical text; performance is then regarded as the mapping of the emotional-physical connotations of the musical structures identified by the analyst onto the sounding event. Maintaining the master-narrative of academic music theory prioritizing structure and score, and grounding performance choices in structural knowledge derived from score-based analysis, the book thus exemplifies the page-to-stage approach. The problem with this approach is not that understanding ‘the page’ through score-based analysis necessarily leads to a conception of ‘the stage’ that constrains and oppresses the artistic activity of the performer; it is rather that understanding ‘the page’ is regarded as sufficient for creating and explaining ‘the stage’, and analysis is assigned the function of revealing facts both about the score and about its performances.

As I have argued elsewhere, dualisms such as ‘page–stage’, ‘thinking–doing’ and ‘theory–practice’ highlight the favouritism towards the first elements in dominant musicological discourse rather than assert an essentialist position with regard to the second elements.Footnote ²³ To repeat:

While for performers the page and the stage represent phases in a continuum for musical understanding and interpretation, analysis and performance studies that subscribe to the page-to-stage perspective totally disregard the performative knowledge, understanding and meanings that are (and indeed can only be) generated on stage, thereby devaluing the skills, artistry and expertise of performers that allow such knowledge and understanding to arise.

On the face of it, Swinkin appears critical of methods that consider analysis a fact-finding and truth-revealing endeavour, and advocates a view of analysis that is performative in educing ‘multiple structural potentials’ (p. 25); accordingly, the performer's role is not confined to communicating facts and truths about musical works, and even when a given analytical interpretation determines a singular structural reading, the performer is free to choose among multiple interpretative tactics in ‘projecting’ this reading.Footnote ²⁵ However, this apparently progressive and liberal model rises upon two unquestioned assumptions that continue to subjugate performance to analysis.

The first of these assumptions concerns the function of music analysis. According to Swinkin:

Swinkin's identification of the musical experience with the reading of a text already renders the performer's role in the creation of musical meaning secondary and derivative of the score. More importantly, however, there is no empirical evidence to support the claim, which once again holds up the hegemony of analysis over performance, that performers, let alone listeners, require academic analysis to engage imaginatively with pieces of music. In fact, the recent literature on strong experiences with music provides ample evidence that listeners with no theoretical background, and even complete novices with no stylistic competency, can imagine emotional and motional qualities when listening to classical music, and can have powerful transformative, transcendent aesthetic experiences in the absence of any prior analytical, propositional knowledge about its structures.Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore, imaginings, and the attendant metaphors employed to express them in discourse, are a routine part of performance pedagogy, which does not standardly proceed to performance interpretation from the kind of academic analysis Swinkin advocates.Footnote ²⁷ In developing metaphors and imagery to teach performance students to play expressively, performance teachers typically take their cues from their own cognitive and affective responses to the sounding music, shaped through extensive practical, aural experience as well as technical knowledge about embodying music, rather than some analytical reading of the structural implications of the notated symbols. There is no research to suggest that music-analytical competence is necessary to imagine music as having certain emotional, physical or narrative qualities, and that performances informed by academic analysis are consistently experienced and valued by listeners as aesthetically more satisfying.Footnote ²⁸

The second assumption behind Swinkin's model concerns the idea that analytical constructs – for example, various structural processes such as interruption, motivic parallelism, reaching over and so on – are ‘metaphors for physical and emotive states’ (p. 16) or ‘tokens of somatic schemata’ (p. 75) which the performer can readily embody. He argues that because Schenkerian analysis ‘is grounded in the same sorts of tangible experiences that performers are necessarily concerned with projecting’ (p. 41) it is ‘deeply compatible with performance’ (p. 94). In Swinkin's model, what analysis does is to offer the performer ‘metaphors for physical and emotional experience’ (p. 42) and ‘opportunities for sensuous embodiment’ (p. 16): ‘not prescriptions but rather something to respond to freely’ (p. 76) and to engage with in a dialogue (p. 40).

Attempting to establish epistemological commensurability among different cultural practices by reference to the mechanisms of embodied cognition, however, is not sufficient to bring these practices epistemologically up to par with each other.Footnote ²⁹ Bodily experiences and the affective states associated with them function as determinants of thought processes, conceptualizations and image schemasFootnote ³⁰ in many diverse fields of cultural practice – and scholarly disciplines – ranging from nursing, sports, community work, arts, natural sciences and so on.Footnote ³¹ The kinds of emotional and physical experiences, and the metaphorical discourses used in expressing and communicating them, which are said to inform analysis and performance, in fact inform all these practices and disciplines. Claiming epistemological equality between music analysis and performance on the basis of widely shared physical and emotional human experiences that our embodied interaction with the world generates simply downplays their significant differences, and indeed their ‘epistemological incommensurability’ in ‘key respects’.Footnote ³² It devalues the unique features of performance knowledge, and what ‘the stage’ brings to musical experience.

Furthermore, metaphors, which in the proposed model mediate the musical structures identified by the analyst and their analytical interpretations, are not merely ways of naming but, more importantly, ways of guiding – and constraining – thinking. They have implications for the world-views they help to construct, and set terms of intelligibility and communication; crucially, they also influence the affective attitudes speakers take to the phenomena being talked about.Footnote ³³ Throughout Performative Analysis, the metaphors for the physical and emotional states suggested by analytical constructs are made by the ‘imaginative’ analyst and then ‘offered’ to the performer to adopt or empathize with as a means of shaping the expressive details of performance (p. 97).Footnote ³⁴ They are also framed as representing associations that analysts would naturally make by ‘detecting and expressing the physical or emotional quality that most analytical assertions embody or connote’ (p. 7; emphasis added). In this way, Swinkin's model becomes a way of constraining and subjugating the performer's thought processes, emotions, imagination and body as well as the expressiveness of the performance to analysis – and to the analyst who appears as an expert in the construction of expressive meanings. The idea that the performer can respond freely to an analysis and enter a dialogue with it becomes illusory. In any case, it is one thing to be assigned the role of only ‘responding’ to something or someone as in Swinkin's model, and quite another thing to ‘initiate’ a dialogue and originary meaning. Even if we grant that the performer herself can come up with a relevant metaphor in response to an analytical construct, this would imply academic analytical competence on the part of the performer in interpreting musical materials and their relationships, thrusting us back to a view that prioritizes analytical intelligence in the creation of performance interpretation.

The underestimation of the role of performers and performances in the creation of musical understanding and meaning is also part of an important methodological problem in Performative Analysis. In the book, the author proceeds from an imagined performance style to analytical assertions, which are then used to make performance recommendations, rendering the whole process circular. This is in fact a problem common to the analysis and performance literature in general. In an article entitled ‘Compositions, Scores, Performances, Meanings’ from 2012, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has argued that ‘scholars of music absorb from their performance-surroundings ways of understanding the nature of compositions’ and that ‘performance lies beneath all hearings (including all imaginings) of scores and thus all conceptions of composition (and analysis)’.Footnote ³⁵ This is because ‘as soon as we start to think about the relationships between notes we have to imagine those notes sounding. And as soon as we imagine music sounding we imagine it in a particular performance style, the performance style current around us.’Footnote ³⁶ The imagined performance style then prompts the ascription of a certain expressive content to the music.

In this connection, Swinkin regularly attributes expressive meaning to pitch structures as if the former is a totally natural manifestation of the latter. In discussing the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E major, op. 14 no. 1, for example, he writes with reference to a particular passage:

He then goes on to state that as he plays the passage he will think about what going home means to him to allow tempo and dynamic inflections to arise ‘organically’. Again, in discussing the first phrase of Chopin's Nocturne in C minor, op. 48 no.1, he infers the qualities of ‘weakness, tentativeness, anxiety, tension, pessimism’ and an ‘enervated persona’ from his voice-leading, motivic, topical and rhythmic analysis of the phrase and suggests that the ‘pianist can express this [enervated persona] through slightly unsteady timing, thus creating a musical limp’ (p. 82). The problem here is not so much that the passage from thought to action is mystified,Footnote ³⁷ but, as I have discussed in greater detail in another publication:

With regard to the first phrase of Chopin's Nocturne op. 48 no.1, for example, the expressive content Swinkin ascribes to it on the basis of his analytical interpretation can arise only if the phrase is performed (in reality or imagination) at a certain tempo, with certain dynamic and timing inflections – in other words, only if a particular aural image guides the analytical process. While Swinkin does not specify the tempo he imagines when analysing this and other pieces of music, the expressive meanings he suggests indicate that he starts the analytical process with mainstream performance interpretations in mind. However, if one starts from a different performance interpretation, the analytical interpretation of the structural relationships between musical materials would also change. For example, I, for one, can imagine a heroic/patriotic interpretation of Chopin's Nocturne op. 48 no. 1 based on a tempo that is faster than the standard performances we currently hear, and uses dynamic inflections to befit this interpretation. Consequently, it is not analysis that says ‘hear the music as if … ’ (p. 75), but rather the imagined performance guiding the analytical process. Attributing expressive content to musical structures while bypassing the imagined or real performances behind these attributions undervalues the very real contribution performers make to our understanding and aesthetic appreciation of musical phenomena.

The deleterious effects of the analyst's epistemological reign over performers, which rob them of ‘their musical personae and artistic prerogatives, transforming them into […] theorists and analysts, at the expense of their identities as musicians’,Footnote ³⁹ are most acute in Chapter 4 of Performative Analysis, entitled ‘An Analytical Dialogue: Beethoven, String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4, First Movement’. Written in the form of a Socratic dialogue between an analyst-teacher and fictional student performers in the context of a fictional graduate analysis-and-performance seminar, the chapter aims, in the words of the analyst-teacher, ‘to explore how music analysis can awaken us to new possibilities’ (p. 96). The underlying assumption of the chapter is the idea that music performance is epistemologically and aesthetically creditworthy when its sonic features are justified by a rational, analytical, discursive knowledge basis. The discourse that Swinkin employs to represent and give voice to the fictional student performers is that of the analyst and does not allow the students a subject position from which to speak as performers. Instead, they speak as budding analysts, as when the cellist and the first violinist voice their analytical observations regarding a particular passage from the music:

When the students contemplate how they will convey a certain analytical idea, they rationalize the process and declare in detail how they might go about playing the passage in question – something that a professional performer would rarely, if ever, do:

Throughout the chapter, the analyst-teacher continuously praises the students, using enthusiastic exclamations – ‘I'm genuinely impressed!' (p. 98), ‘Great’ (p. 105), ‘Good insights, all’ (p. 107), ‘Excellent’ (p. 121) – whenever they display analytical competence and knowledge. On the other hand, when they try out on their instruments various passages of music in accordance with the analytical interpretation they have been discussing, the analyst-teacher's response is either non-existent or consistently lukewarm – ‘Promising start’ (p. 109), ‘Okay, in time, you'll have more opportunity to integrate all these insights’ (p. 121). Clearly the fictional student performers are not very skilled in playing but are very promising as analysts.

At some point during the fictional seminar, as the student ensemble plays a certain section and musical details begin to emerge, the analyst-teacher thinks to himself:

What may be the purpose of such an interjection that makes a value judgment about the imaginary playing, in a fictional context, of a passage of music that none can actually experience? What is it exactly that the reader is supposed to imagine at this point, since they cannot experience, in reality or imagination, the sounds of the fictional ensemble's uniquely coloured and timed hairpin? In effect, this inner monologue represents a deeply entrenched ideology within music theory and musicology that ‘reduces practice to a supplement of research’;Footnote ⁴⁰ it extends the epistemological tyranny of analysis over performance into the aesthetic realm even as the precise mechanisms of the analyst's judgment cannot be determined. As I already noted, there is no empirical evidence that performances informed by academic analysis are valued more highly by listeners. Since, however, the absence of such evidence threatens to collapse the whole enterprise of establishing an essential connection between the performer's understanding of musical structures in (Schenkerian) analytical terms and the artistic quality of a musical performance, the only strategy left to legitimize this connection is to resort to rhetorical-persuasive strategies as in this monologue as part of a pervasive ideology.Footnote ⁴¹

The most damaging blow to the progress made in recent years in analysis and performance studies to emancipate performers from the authoritarian practices and discourses of institutionalized music theory comes when the fictional student cellist ‘confesses’ to ‘feeling a bit frustrated. […] We're moving so slowly! Is ours really a feasible way to learn a piece?’ (p. 136). In response, the analyst-teacher states:

Swinkin's patronizing and offensive idea that thousands of performers around the globe, who are part of a most exacting cultural practice, who daily engage in one of the most complex and demanding tasks human beings accomplish,Footnote ⁴² and who take classical music to audiences in venues small and large, touching and transforming their lives in many different ways, have little or no value (they are a dime a dozen!), and that they cannot engage with music fully and richly enough because they do not undertake academic analysis, belongs to a ‘long tradition of disparaging performers’Footnote ⁴³ going back to Schenker, Schoenberg and Adorno. The stark discrepancy between Swinkin's unfortunate remarks and a comment he makes earlier in the book when reviewing literature related to the hegemony of music scholarship – that ‘we should never be complacent about the very real people behind musical performance, the very real labor such performance requires’ (p. 14) – is a manifestation of his wavering attitude towards the value of performance in relation to music analysis, underlying the tension that permeates his book.

The author's ambivalent stance with regard to performance expertise, skill and knowledge, and his lack of concern for the ‘authentic’ discourses of performers and how these might be integrated into an analytical process, is also manifest in Chapter 5. Here, Swinkin focuses on ‘Du Ring an meinem Finger’ from Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben, op. 42, which has been critiqued by some musicologists for entertaining misogynist sentiments.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the chapter, Swinkin teases out, through analysis, ‘strains of resistance from the score so as to equip the performers to challenge the cycle's ideological aspects’ (p. 210). In particular, he develops ‘a music-analytical metaphor for the female seeking to emancipate herself from the enclosure of the proverbial ring’ by ‘seizing on melodic and harmonic entities that appear to challenge the enclosure of a Schenkerian hierarchy, that seem to strive for autonomy or emancipation’ (pp. 180–1). Swinkin writes that his working method in this chapter was ‘to analyze the music, construe the results metaphorically, as symbolic of emotional states, then concretize those states in the form of an inner monologue’ and finally present this to the soprano Jennifer Goltz, ‘who developed her interpretation in response to it’ (p. 181).Footnote ⁴⁵ While this chapter provides an ideal opportunity to explain and discuss in detail, through the authentic voice of a real performer, how a performer responds to an analysis and enters into a dialogue with it, this process is not described in any significant detail: we do not know the thought processes of the singer, or the physical and emotional artistic negotiations and decisions she made as she developed her interpretation. It is ironic that while Swinkin gave detailed ‘voice’ to fictional student performers in the previous chapter, he clearly judged it appropriate not to make room in the text for the authentic discourse of the real performer detailing at least some of the expert performerly knowledge that is behind the recorded interpretations.

Swinkin claims that the performances he developed with Goltz as part of Chapter 5 resist not only the potentially misogynist features of Schumann's ‘Du Ring an meinem Finger’, but also ‘the potentially oppressive dimension of music theory, of hierarchical hegemony in particular’ and ‘the twin notions of the transcendent work and the subservience of interpretation to it (Werktreue)’ (p. 209). However, using (Schenkerian) analysis as a means of resisting the oppression of theory – and of ‘the work’ – in fact becomes a strategy to legitimize potentially non-conformist performances, which otherwise might risk becoming marginalized or rejected altogether: it becomes markedly easier for any performance to be accepted within the institutional hierarchy as a valid artistic outcome when some sanctioned analytical method is invoked to justify it. Consequently, as long as the performer's ‘freedom’ is restricted to acting out only those meanings that can be unearthed through structural analysis, even when these meanings have the potential to resist some oppressive ideology, the regime of institutionalized theory continues to subjugate practice to analysis, and performance expertise to analytical intelligence. Within this regime, any performative ‘resistance’, the source of which is attributable only to the performer, would be suspect. Truly challenging the various oppressive ideologies and myths of music theory and musicology requires expressive freedom that goes far beyond the analytical confines endorsed by Swinkin – and crucially, it does not necessitate academic music analysis as a means. A practice-based project that I have initiated recently with Leech-Wilkinson attests to the fact that when performers are encouraged to interact with musical scores without the limitations imposed on their creativity by the ideology of the ‘work’, and by stylistic norms and expectations, they can develop artistically convincing results that move beyond culturally approved ways of interpreting canonic works, and resist the constraints of ideology by drawing on their professional, artistic expertise.Footnote ⁴⁶

The model of performance interpretation advocated in Performative Analysis disregards such artistic expertise, which originates in sustained and intense physical and affective experiences vis-à-vis the music which are lived in the flesh rather than understood cerebrally through some analytical construct. It also takes no notice of the fundamental cultural-historical contingency of performance interpretation and the act of performing. As such, it reduces performing to ‘sounded writing’,Footnote ⁴⁷ and packages it as in essence an analytical act the purpose of which is the construction of ‘a compelling way to hear and understand’ (p. 15; emphasis added) a piece on a particular occasion. Accordingly, the musical experience of the listener turns into an exercise in ‘picking up on’ the sonic analogies of certain physical and emotional states the performer represents (p. 97). Expressive meanings that emerge during a live event are not merely a function of composed and analysable musical structures, however. Among time-based arts, music is particularly complex in the ways it affords expressive – motional and emotional – qualities, and thereby narrative and dramatic meanings, in the act of music-making: dynamic forms that tonal relationships generate and the movements of the performer's body interact in complex and at times unpredictable ways to create the unique expressive content of music that audiences experience multimodally on a particular occasion.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, the expressive meanings emanating from the sounds of a musical performance are the reflection of complex social dynamics, and cannot be understood without taking into account the role of the listener in the performance-making process.Footnote ⁴⁹ Since existing theoretical frameworks incorporate neither the contributions of the performing body and its ways of knowing music nor the effects of the dynamics between the performer and the audience into their explanatory mechanisms, the expressive content of music is theorized only in terms of musical structures and the imaginary physical and emotional qualities attributed to them by analytical readings. In this connection, the model of performance interpretation and musical communication advocated in Performative Analysis is far from capturing the expressive meanings that are generated during the social context of a live performance, and consequently far from guiding performance students as they prepare to move from ‘the page’ to ‘the stage’ by leaving behind various kinds of ‘understanding’ that may be acquired while preparing for a performance and stepping into that drastic moment when a shared space and time is created between the performer and the audience, permitting an aesthetic and affectively transformational experience. When academic analysis thus filters out all the complex features of live performing in accordance with the cognitive map – the established conceptualizations and explanatory tools – of music theorists and analysts, and assumes that the stage can be directly accessed from the page, the claim that analysis and performance are ‘deeply compatible’Footnote ⁵⁰ becomes unsustainable. In this sense, Performative Analysis is strictly not about performing, but about a potential preparatory process based on ‘the page’, the effectiveness of which remains uncertain.

By assigning to the performer the role of embodying imagined physical and emotional states that symbolize analytical processes, Swinkin constructs an artificial subjectivity to be acted out in accordance with an objectively grasped, acultural and ahistorical interiority, rather than one that grows from the performer's personal, cognitive, affective, embodied engagement with the musical materials within a particular historical-cultural context, forming the basis of performance knowledge: knowledge not only about how to achieve continuity/discontinuity, contrast, different levels of intensity or gestural shapes with a particular instrument, but also about when a change in any of these parameters would yield aesthetically satisfying results in agreement or disagreement with stylistic norms and thereby hold the attention of listeners. An authentic subjectivity based on such performerly engagement is shaped also by the material conditions and affordances of being a professional performer, which include a rigorous practice routine, becoming one with one's instrument physically and psychologically, frequent encounters with the public in concert venues and, indispensably, the pleasures of performing – the flow, the sense of bliss, the becoming and the feeling of presence that are so highly valued by performers.Footnote ⁵¹ Performance epistemology is moulded by all these complex factors; music analysis will become more compatible with performance to the extent that novel analytical approaches are developed that incorporate into their explanatory framework more of the characteristics of this epistemology, and more of the wonderful complexity and richness of the phenomenal experience of performing music.

Limitations of space do not allow me to discuss other important issues with regard to the relationship between analysis and performance as represented in Performative Analysis, including the obsession to find the source of all performance expression in ‘background’ structures; the neglect of the performer's technique, emotions and personal artistic voice as tools for creativity in performance preparation; and the disregard for the non-conceptual, non-linguistic and embodied processes involved in developing a performance interpretation. There remains one question, however, that must be addressed: should performance students study academic analysis? Already in her 1985 article, Schmalfeldt spoke about ‘convincing’ performers of the benefits of analysis, which in the current neo-liberal university has become a necessity: in order to justify the courses they teach to student ‘customers’, higher-education institutions are under pressure to identify their practical benefits and even economic gain. While the idea that studying music analysis makes better performers may meet this current demand, it is, in my view, a poor justification for teaching analysis, the value of which as a discipline is not in doubt. I do not think that the rationale for teaching analysis to performance students is to be sought in highly questionable links forged between analysis and performance. In the neo-liberal age, where ‘independent knowledge underpinned by academic freedom’Footnote ⁵² and ‘thinking critically and embracing forceful new angles of vision’Footnote ⁵³ are under threat, the greatest value of teaching music analysis to performance students, who face the challenge of finding the means for developing personal artistic voices within mass-producing educational systems, lies in the opportunities it can offer them for critical thinking per se, and for instilling a sense of wonder, awe and curiosity regarding the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the magic that classical music performs for audiences. It would then be up to each performer to explore if and how such critical skills and aesthetic values might find their way into their performance interpretations, and serve them in their lifelong quest for the development of expressive freedom and a personal artistic voice.Footnote ⁵⁴