Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

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Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

76 episodes

9 months ago

The UN Human Rights Council advocates ‘the right ... to freely ... contribute to artistic expressions and creations'. This the classical music business does not currently permit. There’s no excuse for such a high-profile, high-status embodiment of Western cultural values not to be in conformity with its (now) foundational statement of ethical and political values. And no need either.

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The UN Human Rights Council advocates ‘the right ... to freely ... contribute to artistic expressions and creations'. This the classical music business does not currently permit. There’s no excuse for such a high-profile, high-status embodiment of Western cultural values not to be in conformity with its (now) foundational statement of ethical and political values. And no need either.

Show more...

Episodes (20/76)

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 23.1 : Exchanging the Moonlight and Erlkönig

Two striking examples of challenging performances that 'shouldn't' work but do.

10 months ago

10 minutes 41 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.3 : ‘Dido & Belinda’ -- what the performers thought

The results of a questionnaire among the performers of 'Dido & Belinda' finds most happy with both the process and the outcome, some to their great surprise.

10 months ago

11 minutes 17 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 23.3 : Further transgressive performances

An overview of the wide variety of creatively transgressive performances available on the Challenging Performance website, challengingperformance.com.

10 months ago

8 minutes 3 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 27 : Finally, the right to be different

The UN Human Rights Council advocates ‘the right ... to freely ... contribute to artistic expressions and creations'. This the classical music business does not currently permit. There’s no excuse for such a high-profile, high-status embodiment of Western cultural values not to be in conformity with its (now) foundational statement of ethical and political values. And no need either.

10 months ago

5 minutes 52 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 22.5 : Assessing non-standard performances

In the much more varied performance culture envisaged here, evaluation of performance need be no harder than it has always been: performances are made to engage, to stimulate, to excite, to fascinate, to challenge, to move, as ever.

10 months ago

4 minutes 34 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.2 : How we made ‘Dido & Belinda’

Ella Marchment (Helios Collective, director), Leo Geyer (conductor, composer) and I (as dramaturg) developed a reading of Purcell's 'Dido & Aeneas' score which made new, coherent sense of the text and the music, addressing themes of our time. Watch THE VIDEO at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h38DMVBi9IM&t=475s

10 months ago

4 minutes 9 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 25 : Speaking of contemporary concerns

Why does classical music figure so infrequently in media that regularly discuss art and theatre at a sophisticated level? GIven a working environment supportive of creative, topical interpretation, performers can readily enable scores to speak of contemporary concerns, attracting more diverse audiences eager for insight.

10 months ago

7 minutes 38 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 26 : Speaking of others

Like all music, classical music creates virtual others, usually others with whom we are already quite familiar. With goodwill and a determination to be inclusive and welcoming of difference, non-normative performance could allow us to make many very different others from the scores we know and love

10 months ago

2 minutes 26 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 22.4 : Music as social action

In performance one seeks to accomplish many things as well as moving and engaging listeners: these include creating benefits of various kinds, practical, social, financial, psychological, health-related, even in a broad sense political.

10 months ago

2 minutes 30 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 23.2 : How many Ave Marias?

Wondering how many different performances a classical musician could give of the same score, I asked friends and colleagues what they thought might be possible...

10 months ago

29 minutes 26 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.1 : Reinterpreting opera

In current opera productions the stage and music directors work alongside each other using completely different and incompatible belief systems. As we’ve seen, there is no good reason not to reread the score just as radically as the text, opening up the intriguing option of performing the score in such a way as to tell the same story as the staging...

10 months ago

5 minutes 8 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.4 : ‘Dido & Belinda’ -- what the audiences thought

The 'Dido & Belinda' audiences' questionnaire suggests that the audiences we can already see emerging with new venues and new forms of presentation are likely to be sympathetic to much more creative interactions with texts from the past. There are real possibilities here for generating new work and new audiences for adventurous young musicians.

10 months ago

10 minutes

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 20 : Why and How to make creative performances

A reminder of the overwhelming reasons to be innovative in classical music performance. Then, how are we to get these scores to work differently and variously? Ten approaches are suggested to get us started.

10 months ago

12 minutes 5 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 19.1 : Ethical relationships

Ignoring or transforming indications from the composer may allow us, ethically as well as practically, to learn much about how relationships can change, or be radically other, and still be profoundly satisfying.

10 months ago

5 minutes 50 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 22.2 : Musical dynamics and musical shape

The sense that music moves, is lifelike, and is like other kinds of changing feeling states and other everyday experiences, may be rooted in more basic experiences and responses to the world around us.

10 months ago

3 minutes 15 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 18.0 : Allowing creativity

A brief introduction to Part 3 of Challenging Performance (chapters 18–27), which looks at how creative and transgressive performances can be made, and at how people respond to them.

10 months ago

2 minutes 50 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 21 : Historical examples on record

Early recordings provide many revelatory examples of musicalities are quite unfamiliar to us now. They are excellent sources of models if we want to experiment with performing scores differently, for they present styles that we know were outstandingly successful in their time, however strange they may seem to us.

10 months ago

14 minutes 14 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 22.3 : Expression is dangerous

If how music feels matters more to our biology and psychology than how obedient it is—to traditions, rules and norms—then this only adds to its danger for those who feel entitled to rule on how it should sound.

10 months ago

3 minutes 47 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 13 : Musicians' lack of agency

Accepting that, as a classical musician, one has little agency (freedom to choose and the authority to act) makes the job less dispiriting. But that lack of agency is still (and quite rightly) felt as oppressive by many musicians, including many of those quoted here.

10 months ago

18 minutes 10 seconds

Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Challenging Performance, Chapter 18.2 : Comparison with theatre practice

We have only to imagine how dreary theatre would be if every performance of ‘Hamlet’ used the same gestures and the same intonations—all enforced by an ideologically-contrained community of actors and gatekeepers claiming to be faithful—to see how disastrously classical music has backed itself into a corner.

10 months ago

12 minutes 1 second