For this week’s writing assignment, summarize Cook 1999’s (chapter from Rethinking Music)

and Abbate 2004’s positions on analysis and performance. Then, critique their positions. What
do you agree and disagree with each?
In Nicholas Cook’s chapter “Performing Analysis, Analyzing Performance” from the edited
volume Rethinking Music, he provides an extensive literature review of major works in
performance and analysis scholarship at that point, including writings we have read so far in this
seminar. Cook’s methodology reveals not only the trends of performance and analysis
scholarship, but also the zeitgeist of music theory and the field has been dominated by
structuralist and monumentalist schools of thought. This prevailing scholarly trend has been
represented by the likes of Wallace Berry, Eugene Narmour, Heinrich Schenker, and Fred
Lerdehl, who collectively believed in the inherent structure of music and considered performance
as an expression of said structure, therefore serving a subservient role that is expected to translate
analytical wisdom to performance. Cook echoes many scholars’ critiques of Janet Schmalfeldt’s
1985 Beethoven article, namely the looming presence of Schmalfeldt the scholar overwhelms
Schmalfeldt the pianist, again perpetuating the structuralist ethos despite her genuine attempt at
establishing a dialectic between performer and theorist. In response to structuralism, Cook
advocates for a more epistemological approach to performance and analysis, citing Judith
Butler’s concept of performativity and arguing for a critical inquiry of the performative act of
analysis. He is interested in the process and act of analysis in this scholarly area, similar to what
Howell argued in his chapter that we read. Cook encourages a more pluralistic approach to such
inquiry rather than perpetuating a culture of structuralism and werktreue, one that actively
considers the performativity of music as well as analysis while recognizing the differences
between them as identified by Jonathan Dunsby.
In Carolyn Abbate’s article “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?”, she presents a similar, drastic
(to use Abbate’s term) critique of musicology and its relationship to performance. Using the
French philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankelevitch’s theory of the Ineffable as her basis,
Abbate argues for scholars to get away from being preoccupied with gnostic discourse and
intellectuality and instead engage more closely with various kinds of drastic experiences and
contexts she believes are more relevant and consequential than what hermeneutics can offer.
Abbate identifies a problem in musicology a lack of critical engagement with not just
performance as a scholarly area, but experiences of a live performance especially. She did
recognize the emerging field of performance scholarship, however, citing the articles of Cook
and Elisabeth Le Guin in which music performance is front and center, in addition to scholars
like Richard Taruskin who are engaging with issues posed by the Historical Performance
movement, but her critique is aimed especially at the hermeneutic discourse of musicology as a
whole. Abbate criticized how musicologists are often focused on overly intellectual and abstract
discourse that seem to isolate music from the cultural context they belong to. While such
discussion aspires to a lofty aim of maintaining a high status of music, Abbate believed that they
instead become alien to the real and experiential phenomena that musicians and audience
resonate with more, a difference illustrated by her anecdotes of accompanying a Mozart aria and
attended two back-to-back performances of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg.
 While both readings present more proposals of potential approaches rather than providing
concrete solutions to the scholarly problems they identify, I overall agree with their propositions
and perspectives on the matter. With the Cook chapter, I agree with the premise to challenge
scholars to reflect on their research process and the performativity of their work. Especially with
this area of performance and analysis, the research process is highlighted in a way that they
deserve to be foregrounded and explained methodologically. Also, I find Cook’s advocacy of
plurality echoeing a similar ethos as Rothstein’s concept of synthesis, specifically how
performance and analysis research can hold more scholarly and artistic currency if it was to
combine and synergize multiple perspectives rather than dogmatically following a singular
approach. I would have like to see examples of what kinds of pluralistic and performative
analysis he may have imagined, though perhaps that is answered in his 2001 MTO article.
While I also agree with Abbate’s criticisms of musicology and its work-centered
tendencies, I don’t really agree with the dismissive tone she has about hermeneutics. As it is
about two decades since the article’s publication, the highly intellectual discourse in musicology
persists, and it is safe to say that it would not be going anywhere even in a more “evolved” form.
There is still a place where more gnostic hermeneutics and discourse is fostered by academic
programs and societies. Moreover, I believe that a wholesale rejection of a gnostic discourse
would hinder the efforts of performance scholarship, which despite academic dogmas still plays
a major role in this scholarly area in conjunction with the more drastic activities in music. In
another words, the drastic side of music scholarship and activities still needs the gnostic side to
foster intellectual and artistic advancements in music. That said, I believe that Abbate’s
argument is well-taken, and that scholarship should strive more to develop and refine
methodologies that could better synthesize and discuss drastic experiences of music, in the vein
of articles she mentioned that moves in that direction (namely Cook and Le Guin).