It is a sine qua non that music must be expressive of something in order to occupy a special affective habitus in human life. Yet what does it really mean to be expressive in music performance across diverse historical and cultural domains? The richness and ubiquity of expressive musical activity is fleetingly portrayed in the images of the book’s front cover but is comprehensively explored in 22 chapters that collectively constitute a compelling cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural investigation into the subject matter. This edited volume brings together an eclectic cast of established scholars and practitioners as well as upcoming researchers from an array of disciplinary specialities, reflecting not only key developments in the state of scholarship over the last few decades but also mapping out new directions for the future. In its breadth and scope, therefore, this book promises to satisfy many a discerning scholarly taste.

In defining expressiveness at the outset, the three editors are adamant to stress that ‘expressiveness does not refer to deviations from a written score, but rather the sound world that the score (should a score of music exist) attempts to represent in performance’ (p. xxi). Through the contextualization of expressiveness within the act of performance this book undeniably becomes snuggly entrenched in the recent disciplinary shift of studying music as performance, which has been instituted by publications such as Nicholas Cook’s Beyond the Score Footnote ¹ and international research hubs including the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP).Footnote ² The editors’ specific interest in the promotion of interdisciplinary approaches, moreover, offers a timely response to yet another disciplinary call issued by Georgina Born: the move towards a relational field of music studies.Footnote ³ Since one of the book’s objectives is to ‘foster dialog between diverse disciplinary approaches and varied repertories’ (p. xxii), I will use this as an impetus to take a selective tour of the content examining ostensibly connecting themes. I will discuss more extensively the first two parts which elucidate nuanced meanings of ‘expressiveness’ within and beyond western art music. The third part tends to be more heavily methodological and the fourth one functions mainly as a reflective epilogue.

The first part of the book deals exclusively with western art music. Mine Doğantan-Dack (Chapter 1) embarks on a historical survey of musical expressiveness from philosophical and empirical perspectives. Taking as her starting point the work of nineteenth-century theorist Mathis Lussy on expressive performance, which emphasized the ‘performer’s affective response to the tonal and rhythmic features of the music’ (p. 3), Doğantan-Dack scrutinizes the caveats of subsequent twentieth-century scientific methodologies and the dangers of making expressiveness synonymous with quantifiable phenomena. She argues instead for an inclusive notion of expressiveness that can accommodate the ‘valorised affective experiences elicited by musical performance’ (p. 16). By advocating this intimate interrelationship between expressiveness and affect and by dissociating affect from categorical emotion, Doğantan-Dack’s argument resonates with Brian Massumi’s earlier views on the pressing need for a cultural-theoretical vocabulary of affect that moves beyond the structuralist paradigm of meaning.Footnote ⁴ Doğantan-Dack’s novel contribution, nonetheless, is an astute exploration of these ideas within musical performance discourse.

In response to one of Doğantan-Dack’s calls for research in performance expressiveness to encompass the affective dimension, whether during actual performance or in the discourses surrounding performance (p. 17), Elena Alessandri’s investigation (Chapter 2) of the notion of expressiveness in music criticism offers an appeasing rapprochement. Although her study of record reviews of Beethoven piano sonatas published over an 80-year period in the Gramophone magazine is heavily indebted to quantification and measurement, her findings compellingly support uses of the term ‘express’ as the ‘manifestation of the performer’s inner state’ (pp. 30–31). The fact that twentieth-century critical performance discourse can easily slide in and out of emotive descriptions emphasizes the subjective component that has been so strongly associated with performance value for this type of canonical piano repertoire. Perhaps such empirical findings appear surprising to us now in view of the persistent Werktreue ideology underpinning the interpretation of Beethoven’s music. However, early- to mid-nineteenth-century music criticism, as well as contemporary performance theory and pedagogy, relied heavily on the use of metaphors of character and human emotional states as potent hermeneutic tools which carried equal discursive relevance for composers, performers and critics. The enduring relevance of a subjective vocabulary for today’s performers is further supported by Chapter 3.

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Helen Prior’s study of musicians’ use of heuristics and metaphors for performance (Chapter 3) offers, in my opinion, an even more fitting response to Doğantan-Dack’s plea by exemplifying more facets of the negotiation between objectivity and subjectivity in both the act of performance and its documentation in research. By combining a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, the investigators elucidate convincingly the rich reservoir of words and images that performers use during learning and highlight the putatively powerful multimodal means that are inherently involved in connecting performance action with affect. The pedagogical implications of this kind of research are further reiterated in Aaron Williamon’s contribution towards the end of the book (Chapter 22), which emphasizes that expressivity in performance can be taught and learnt through a variety of methods ranging from the use of apt metaphors to technology that can offer feedback on performers’ expressive actions. Only time will tell how successfully empirical research on expressiveness can be embedded in institutional music training.

The ensuing two chapters (4 and 5) deal with the legacy of recordings, especially early recordings, and how meaningful expressive information can be harnessed from these historical sources. (These chapters are complemented by material in the second part of the book featuring analyses of recordings of popular and ethnomusicological genres.) The thrust of Dorottya Fabian’s argument (Chapter 4), which takes the form of a review survey that also draws from her own research of Bach recordings and baroque performance practice, is that recordings challenge the predominant view that expressive musical performance must ‘bring out the compositional structure’ (pp. 75–6). As the historical evidence strongly attests, performers continually negotiate expressiveness through moment-to-moment decisions, and consequently conceptions of formal structure change with historical periods, type of repertoire and, of course, the individual performer. Fabian’s message that contemporary psychological research, especially models of expressive music performance, must take notice of the evidence from recordings strongly recalls Leech-Wilkinson’s similar warning issued at the music scientific community in an earlier publication.Footnote ⁵ Concerning some of the reasons why such developments might be taking longer than anticipated, the readers are gently prompted to Chapter 14 (Anders Friberg and Erica Bisesi), which reviews generative, rule-based models of expression. Despite the book’s optimistic outlook, caution is warranted, since accommodating historical and cultural variation in the explanatory heaven of a set of prefigured generative rules might be more easily said than done. In a witty and thoroughly entertaining paper, Peter Desain and Henkjan Honing have brilliantly captured the fundamentally different epistemological drives of musicologists, psychologists and computer scientists.Footnote ⁶ Fabian’s most recent monograph further re-iterates the creative tensions that exist for music scholars or practitioners who pursue research at the intersection of objectively measurable and subjectively accountable musical phenomena like performance.Footnote ⁷

David Milsom and Neal Peres Da Costa (Chapter 5) pursue in greater detail the notion of ‘moment-to-moment’ expressiveness in early recordings through a study of nineteenth-century rhetorical performing practices in violin and piano repertoire. Their discussion focuses mainly on two performers of the ‘classical German’ school: Joseph Joachim’s vibrato and portamento and Carl Reinecke’s un-notated arpeggiations and hand dislocation. Much of the material is an elaboration or extension of previous work by the authors, who also demonstrate in this chapter the fruits of their academic research in their own historically informed performances (pp. 91–4). Perhaps the scope of their practical applications, however, could have been extended to broader considerations of the putative pedagogical gains of imitative learning from early recordings for modern performers who are not necessarily ardent followers of historically informed practices. Studies by Bruno Repp and Tânia Lisboa, just to name a few, have already highlighted the usefulness of recordings in enhancing performers’ creative space without stifling individuality.Footnote ⁸

The first part of the book concludes with a critical interrogation of the orthodox ideas about musical expressiveness, which are customarily associated with canonical nineteenth-century repertoire, in relation to contemporary concert music. As Eric Clarke and Mark Doffman argue (Chapter 6), the notational, instrumental and technological complexities of new music in the twentieth century vehemently challenge traditional views of how expressiveness is manifested in performance and communicated to the listener: instead of hearing or feeling this type of music in relation to a recognizable hierarchical structure ‘the gestural and mimetic character of the music takes on a life of its own’ (p. 110). The caveats exposed and the significant lack of research in the expressive qualities of contemporary music further highlight the epistemological impasse created when expressivity is connected to a particular genre or canon – mainly nineteenth-century tonal music – and not others.

In contrast to western art music, popular genres invariably unleash a far greater cultural force of expressive, performative components during live or technologically mediated renditions. Nicola Dibben (Chapter 7) succinctly but aptly illustrates the vital contribution of signal-processing techniques during record production, which construct many expressive features of pop music through the acoustic treatment and positioning of sounds within the virtual environment of the recording. Richard Ashley’s discussion of funk music and its persistent, relatively stable, repetitive rhythmic structures (Chapter 9), confronts head-on the traditional psychological view of ‘expression as deviation’. Instead, in this genre it is micro-variations in the musical texture that create an appealing groove feel, reiterating once more within the book as a whole the affective and phenomenological dimension of expressiveness that may elude empirical measurement. The message from both Dibben and Ashley, which in my view could have been made even more strongly, is that notions of distributed creativity, material agency (instrumental and technological) and collaborative performing practices (live and recorded) urgently await more research. This message poignantly reminds us that despite the book’s timely appearance much remains to be done.

William Bauer’s study (Chapter 8) explores improvised jazz music by considering the links between expressive performance and linguistic prosody in Louis Armstrong’s vocal gestures and trumpet playing. Tracing the communicative potential of jazz from the standpoint of linguistic morphology appears to make good sense, as such an approach respects the oral and aural models of improvisation far more than notated models. In a similar vein, Pärtel Lippus and Jaan Ross (Chapter 11) investigate expressiveness in terms of the links between linguistic phonology and duration of song syllables in Estonian singing. This particular study, Bauer’s chapter and the earlier one by Milsom and Peres Da Costa, which focus on diverse cultural-historical contexts of vocal gestures in different repertories (nineteenth-century score-based instrumental music, improvised jazz and Estonian songs), coincide with the recent resurgence of scholarly interest in voice and vocality.Footnote ⁹ The exploration of the multifarious links between music and language – not just in terms of a generative grammar but as performed, culturally contingent phonology – offers additional means of humanizing a written score and embracing many of the deep-rooted affective qualities that are inherent in the embodiment of music performance which is a ubiquitous mode of expressive communication. Overall, chapters 7, 8, 9 and 11 also help outline the flexible boundary that exists between performance expression and compositional structures, especially in so far as the latter are not a priori defined but are created in the act of record production (Chapter 7), improvised, collaborative performance (Chapters 8 and 9) or culturally contingent linguistic phonology (Chapters 8 and 11).

Refreshing ethnomusicological perspectives on expressiveness are shed by two chapters in the second part of the book, which further expose the rather delimited nature of western art music practices. In Hindustani music, as Wim van der Meer discusses (Chapter 10), listeners can respond to a performer’s bhava (that which comes into being), thus identifying special affective moments in a performance through real-time interaction. Fabrice Marandola’s fascinating study (Chapter 12) of Bedzan Pygmies’ vocal polyphonies exposes the methodological and conceptual barriers that exist in tracking expressiveness in a musical practice that is replete with extreme variation. In this music, what appears to characterize expressiveness is ‘the absolute necessity for a group of performers to collaborate together’ to bring about the desired result (p. 216). Moreover, since there is no fixed benchmark (either written or oral tradition) to stipulate the conditions of variability in a given performance, expressiveness is inextricably interwoven into ‘the life of the musical system itself’, prompting Marandola to define expressiveness as ‘a field of possibilities’ (p. 216).

Nicholas Cook’s reflective comments (Chapter 18) offer a pertinent standpoint to summarize the relevance of the book for music studies. As Cook opines, the diverse perspectives on expressiveness demonstrated by the contributors’ research clearly articulate ‘a reorientation from the world of scores … to that of music as experienced, which is to say music as performed’ (p. 332). The more fundamental consequence of this transition is a reorientation in the object of investigation which brings with it significant ‘convergences between different areas of music studies … such as musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies’ (p. 333). Cook situates the book’s significance in the immense potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration that can elucidate music ‘as an agent of personal and social meaning, a basic dimension of what it is to be human’ (p. 333).

The book is on the whole neatly organized and presented, and individual chapters can be read as self-contained entities. The glossy colour images interpolated between pages 218 and 221 offer an attractive visual enticement and help accentuate the points discussed in the respective chapters. In addition, the range of methods, the freely accessible web tools and websites and the extensive up-to-date bibliography cited throughout are invaluable resources for students and scholars alike. There are, however, some teething problems in various end-of-chapter reference lists, with recurring formatting inconsistencies appearing rather frequently (e.g. p. 56 duplicate of Leech-Wilkinson 2009a reference; p. 119 Ashley 2009 reference not cited in the reference list although it becomes obvious in subsequent chapters; p. 131 Lacasse 2009 should be 2010 in Bayley’s book which is listed by two different titles; other formatting inconsistencies occur in pp. xxx, 95, 112, 183, 199, 238, 278, 279, 280, 281, 300, 342, 350 and 351). Notwithstanding that there is still much to be discovered about expressiveness in classical, popular and world music, this publication will undoubtedly form a staple academic resource in the teaching, study and research of interdisciplinary musical performance studies.