Practice-as-research in music performance

This chapter investigates the shift in the contemporary music studies landscape from a primarily text-based ideology to include performance as embodied construction of subjectivity and knowledge, thus moving away from a primarily monomodal towards a multimodal approach to performance studies. The chapter argues for the vital importance of practice-based research projects undertaken by performers for the continual thriving of performance studies within contemporary Musicology. In spite of the recent paradigm shift from a score-based to a performance-based understanding of music, the dominant disciplinary discourse in music performance studies involves traces of a monomodal conception of music – and of musical performance – that regards them as functioning similarly to a musical score-cum-literary text. The pervasive textual ideology diminishes the role and value of aesthetic-existential experiences, as well as the expert skills and knowledge of musicians in performance making. The chapter also puts forward the argument that while digital technologies played a crucial role in the establishment of Performance Studies as a discipline, the potentials they offer for multimodal knowledge production and dissemination, and for a multimodal conception of musical performance have not been exploited: digital technologies present performer-researchers with unprecedented opportunities to represent their artistry and scholarship through aural-discursive multimodal discourses to be listened to and read as both artistic practice and research. As a case study of a practice-based research project, the chapter presents the author’s Alchemy project, which explores the processes of live musical performance and the embodied-aesthetic quest driving the practice.