musicology

The aesthetics of execution

My research proceeds from the premise that the interaction between composition and performance – what I call ‘the aesthetics of execution’ – is crucial to the understanding of various musical repertoires.

The case of opera immediately springs to mind, for here is a musical artefact which even nowadays seems to make sense only when performative and compositional elements are considered.

The same, however, cannot be said of other allegedly ‘peripheral’ musical genres for which a study of the aesthetics of execution is just as fundamental.

Musicology is, perhaps, methodologically ill-equipped to cope with aspects of musical practice that cannot be reduced to a written sign on a piece of ruled paper. This would explain why, for example, in the field of eighteenth-century music structural analysis looms so large.

However, if the familiar view of late eighteenth-century music as a ‘Classical style’ epitomised in the mature work of the Viennese troika Haydn–Mozart–Beethoven is a rather crude example of popular history, more recent musical-analytical endeavours have doubtless come nearer to a historically appropriate picture.

One obvious – indeed, fascinating – problem remains unresolved: that, no matter how much musicologists strive to uncover deep structures, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music does not sound all alike to ordinary listeners – now just as then.

The question is, therefore, whether such a phenomenon can be accounted for in scholarly terms: whether it may be possible to explain the outstanding diversity of the surface of musical works by unpacking the relationship between compositional thought and sound ideals; or whether, from a methodological point of view, a balance between generality and particularity can be attained.