Musicology Australia

ISSN: 0814-5857 (Print) 1949-453X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmus20

Introducing the Issue of Performativity in Music

Jane W. Davidson

To cite this article: Jane W. Davidson (2014) Introducing the Issue of Performativity in Music,
Musicology Australia, 36:2, 179-188, DOI: 10.1080/08145857.2014.958269
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2014.958269

Published online: 14 Nov 2014.

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Musicology Australia, 2014
Vol. 36, No. 2, 179–188, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2014.958269

Introducing the Issue of Performativity in Music

JANE W. DAVIDSON

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Faculty of Victorian College of the Arts and
Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, The University of Melbourne, Southbank, Melbourne, VIC,
Australia

The term ‘performativity’ emerged from literary and linguistic studies, and was intended to
capture the process by which semiotic expression produces results in the extra-semiotic
reality. In other words, reality is constituted both through language(s) as well as other
physical acts, ‘neither merely [as a] natural body nor merely a social construction,
but a gradual, compelling formation of acts’ that permit us to experience culture as an
interactive process.1 As such, Judith Butler has defined ‘performativity’ as ‘ . . . that
reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’.2
The concept has developed complex semantic shades, and is becoming increasingly varied,
owing to the broadening of its disciplinary adoptions that have embraced linguistics
through to anthropology and stretched across to the ever-growing field of performance
studies, with its theoretical and reflective practice strands. In music study generally,
the concept of performativity has been introduced slowly, even though musicians deal with
the competencies of performers as articulated and consolidated in repertoires, events and
practices; in other words, performativities. As a form of expression not found in material
culture, performativity in music demands that we explore what is embodied, and also
brings to the fore the socio-cultural environments in which performances exist.
The current issue emerged from a colloquium funded by the Hawke Research Institute,
University of South Australia that was also a satellite event of the Musicological Society
of Australia’s 35th Annual Conference ‘The Politics of Music’, 3– 5 December 2012,
Canberra. The presentations dealt with a broad range of topics under the banner of
‘Performative Voices: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Music Research’.3 Everything from
creating and re-creating musical works through to the music critic’s explanations of how
a piece of music ‘works’ in performance was explored. The papers presented in this issue of
Musicology Australia represent a distillation of the breadth of scholarship offered at the
colloquium.
The issue opens with a paper by Margaret Kartomi that gives an overview of the
concepts and methods employed in performativity research. The paper draws on the
foundational work from literature and linguistics by both J.L. Austin4 and E. Sedgwick,5

1 Sruti Bala, ‘The Entlangled Vocabulary of Performance’, Rupkatha Journal On Interdisciplinary Studies in
Humanities 5/2 (2013), 19.
2 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 2.
3 See the programme: , http://unisa.edu.au/PageFiles/20244/Music%20Research%20Colloquium%
20Program.pdf..
4 John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
5 Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2003).
q 2014 Musicological Society of Australia
180 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

and goes on to propose a research framework for performativity studies in music. In the
course of the paper, Kartomi develops a hybridized four-level methodology for the study of
music, distinguishing between: the music performed; the execution of the music and
factors affecting it; the effects of the performers on the audience and vice versa; and the
contributions of all the stakeholders to the success of the event. She also notes that in
performance situations performativity refers to persona, competence and group
interaction, improvisatory practices, emotion and inter-subjectivity, entrainment or
groove, and reception. She highlights that by considering performativity, many possible
questions that can be explored, such as why are some performances more coherent or offer
more creative ‘magic’ than others? A case study of an Acehnese song – dance troupe,
the Sangaar Kuta Alam troupe, offers an example of Kartomi’s own consideration of
performativity from her position as an ethnomusicologist, thus offering some contexts for
the questions raised in her paper.
As a music psychologist I explore performativity drawing on both idiographic and
nomothetic research paradigms, and at the colloquium I provided examples of several
studies for consideration. In light of Kartomi’s detailed outline of performativity in music
and along with her plea for interdisciplinary research, I will explore a few of my own
examples as I introduce the articles that appear in the current issue, using them to extend
the discussion and capture a sense of the richness of performativity as a concept to
underpin music performance research.
My first example focuses on the performances of concert pianist Lang Lang, selected
here because Kartomi presents him as an example of someone who displays a strong
performance persona. As she says, there are certainly many, perhaps innumerable, factors
that contribute to his performances, and whilst various commentators have offered
accounts of Lang Lang’s performances, few have provided evidence showing how he
communicates his repertoire and ‘character’ through ‘stage presentations’. The example
offered here is taken from an analysis of a performance of Liszt’s Liebestraum (Dream of
love), Nocturne no. 3,6 a piece Lang Lang frequently plays as an encore at concerts.7
The work itself is based on a strong textual narrative on the ‘all-conquering power of
love and kindness’. Whether or not Liszt followed the narrative in a detailed sequence is
unclear, but the piece is based on the poem by Freiligrath, O lieb, so lang du lieben Kannst
(O Love, as Long as You Can Love), which urges lovers to love with the essence of their
beings and never to express a harsh word, for death soon brings separation and regret.
The musical material draws upon techniques familiar to Liszt’s overall compositional style
and historical context, building to an intense climax through a series of harmonic tensions
and increasing tempi and dynamics.
A short indicative example of the fuller analysis can be ‘seen’ at the climax of the piece at
bars 55– 59, illustrated in still images from the performance, and shown here as a sequence
(Figures 1– 4).8
Figure 1 reveals a forward-surging, upper-body movement that builds through the first
part of bar 55. At this moment, Lang Lang’s facial expression reveals muscular tension,
with closed eyes and contracted facial muscles, his mouth slightly opened. Figure 2,

6 The performance was accessed through YouTube. See ‘Lang Lang Plays Liebestraum’ (Accessed 18 August
2014), ,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼ ubVVSWHkxs8 . .
7 Jane Whitfield Davidson, ‘Bodily Movement and Facial Actions in Expressive Musical Performance by Solo
and Duo Instrumentalists: Two Distinctive Case Studies’, Psychology of Music 40/5 (2012), 595–633.
8 Ibid., 620 –2. These figures are reprinted by permission of SAGE.
 Jane W. Davidson, Issue of Performativity in Music 181

Figure 1. Bar 55: Lang Lang Plays the First Chord of the Bar.

Figure 2. Bar 55: Lang Lang Plays the Octave Gs, the Notes of the Phrase Climax.
182 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

Figure 3. Bar 56: Lang Lang Plays the Descending Quaver Passage as the Musical Climax Subsides.

Figure 4. Lang Lang as he Plays the Last Two Crotchet Octaves of Bar 56.

the musical climax on the high G octaves in bar 55, shows the left hand and arm erupting
away from the chords, the face revealing an open-mouthed release of tension.
In Figure 3, after the moment of climax, the body surges backwards and the downward
octave melody in bar 56 is played with emphasis on every note. Lang Lang’s head tilts away
 Jane W. Davidson, Issue of Performativity in Music 183

from the piano, and his closed eyes and slightly opening mouth, whilst raising the left arm
and hand, indicate a release of tension.
Figure 4 shows the start of the new phrase at the end of bar 56, the right hand ascending
crotchet octaves, with the inclined head and raised arm and hand revealing a softer, more
gentle appearance.
After this short period of seeming musical and physical relaxation, the music builds
again (bars 57 –59) and forward and backward swaying once more begins to build in
momentum. In Figure 5, Lang Lang reveals a tear-filled expression with frowning
eyebrows, closed eyes, and upward moving cheek muscles causing the edge of the lips to
rise into a recognizable sobbing appearance.
Lang Lang may have read and interpreted the notes, followed the expressive
instructions indicated on Liszt’s score, and built upon socially modelled behaviours that
undoubtedly develop from role-models and other performance experiences. Nonetheless,
this description of his performance reveals that the embodied performance brings the work
to life, drawing on highly expressive physical gestures that are used in a range of other types
of social encounters. As audience members it seems that we read into these performance
gestures a deep emotional investment, a musico-personal climax, with the actions being
closely aligned to those of a sexual encounter. Lang Lang’s long experience of performing
for and with others (teachers, friends, larger audiences) will certainly have contributed
much to his style. But the particular degree of investment and explicitness of the musico-
emotional embodied engagement offers a unique persona.
Investigate any of Lang Lang’s performances of the Liebestraum, or indeed any other
piece of music available on YouTube, and you will find some striking similarities: similar
sorts of expressive timing profiles according to specific types of musical structure,

Figure 5. Bars 57– 59 and the Music Excerpt from the Score.
184 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

and a tendency to use similar vocabularies of movement. But, equally, you may find that
some performances are far more ‘engaged’ and ‘engaging’ than others. These may vary
depending on a range of factors such as Lang Lang’s mood, overarching physical health,
degree of personal commitment to the performance, or indeed the nature of the audience
with whom he is interacting, and so forth. In other words, the performance will differ
according to a complex array of other and often interacting social and cultural influences,
and often highly complex intrapersonal factors. Further to this, our reception of
the performance will depend on our own attunement to the languages of performance
(the sounds and gestures, and the context in which it is viewed). Of course, this simple
example highlights that the perceptual experience of Lang Lang on YouTube is different
to attending a live performance, and Figures 1 –5 offer a further perspective—the
representation of persona being reduced to snapshots, rather than the dynamic embodied
musical information revealed in the live performance. Thus, the example brings with it
many questions relating to performativity. One route for enquiry is to unravel concerns
about the degree to which these physical/mental actions reflect and/or generate the
narrative being created as the work is performed. It seems likely that some moments will
anticipate the musical structure about to unfurl, whilst others will be immediate reactions
to the sounds produced, based on developed associations of meaning in the musical code,
and a further set may simply be random fluctuation in the performance.
One area of performativity study Kartomi explores relates to the capacity to make music
and the degree to which it is regarded as a gift or a talent. Giftedness is a narrative that
predominates in western culture, where there is a tendency to report genetic predisposition
as the defining characteristic for all sorts of excellence, musical ability in particular. It is
certain that the concepts require much further study, but provide opportunity for me to
discuss a second personal example drawn from work on Vhavenda culture in South Africa.
In this society, all participants acknowledge a natural propensity for music-making, the
cultural expectation being that all will achieve a high degree of musical fluency.9 Indeed,
for the Vhavenda, music making is a core means to construct and disseminate cultural
knowledge, with certain concepts only being expressed through music. For them, these
performative actions offer strong associations with good health and well-being.10
I experienced an illuminating insight relating to music and performativity when
observing Vhavenda school students engage in many aspects of their traditional as well as
westernized curriculum. A class of teenage girls was performing an exercise routine within
their physical education class and could be seen bending and stretching and undertaking
a series of choreographed moves such as throwing a netball with either one or both arms.
They were not executing these movements with the sort of precision and physicality that
may have been expected of physical education, but rather they had structured the
performance within the framework of a familiar song’s rhythm, the exercises being imbued
with a musical structure. The result was a meaningful ‘performance’ of collective cultural
identity based in music, and was enjoyed and celebrated by all participants as they ‘danced’
the exercises rhythmically. This example strongly demonstrates how we function within

9 Andrea Emberly and Jane W. Davidson, ‘From the Kraal to the Classroom: Shifting Musical Arts Practice
from the Community to the School with Special Reference to Learning tshigombela in Limpopo, South
Africa’, International Journal of Music Education 29/3 (2012), 265 –82.
10 Andrea Emberly and Mudzunga Junniah Davhula, ‘Looking to the Past of Vhavenda Musical Culture to
Envision the Future’, in Looking Back, Looking Forward: Vhavenda Musical Life as Documented by John
Blacking, 1956–58, ed. Andrea Emberly and Mudzunga Junniah Davhula (Grahamstown: Rhodes University,
International Library of African Music, 2014), 26–37.
 Jane W. Davidson, Issue of Performativity in Music 185

our cultural frameworks, shaping and delimiting behaviours to accord with our knowledge,
customs and beliefs. For the Vhavenda girls, through the performative act of music,
meaning was given to the culturally distant activity of physical education.
The examples cited thus far have explored performance as an object of analysis, focusing on
elements and techniques of transfer. The second article in this special issue brings to the fore a
different facet of performativity, where the performance itself becomes an epistemology.
Daniela Kaleva undertakes a performance practice exploration of Monteverdi’s Lamento
d’Arianna. Kaleva’s paper reports her reflective historically informed experimentation to
re-create the famous recitative. The work first contextualizes the study by exploring readings
of historical source materials on rhetorical gesture, an element of the representative acting style
at the time of the lament’s premiere. The enquiry then moves to work with modern-day
musicians who specialize in baroque music and an expert in rhetorical gesture, with Kaleva
herself as dramaturg. As such, this work contributes to a growing area of research in baroque
music which stretches beyond that done in the early music revival movement where the focus
was more on decoding the music per se, rather than the implications of the ethos of baroque
performance. Kaleva’s study uniquely triangulates data from historical treatises, coupled with
evidence from period paintings and gaining knowledge of these materials through bodily
experimentation. The work thus offers methods that open new perspectives on the score,
where both text and music code for interpretation are found to reside. Performativity of this
type clearly assists in building knowledge around the specific challenges of historical
re-creation and begins to offer means to assess the elements that can be used in modern-day
contexts.
Other reflective practice work on historically informed productions has afforded slightly
different insights, leading me to add a third personal example for discussion. Researching
how modern-day productions arrive at decisions about historical concerns and their
execution, insights reveal just how crucial the group identity is to performativity of the
historical works in question.11 Group experimental practice produces affective insight that
has resonances with the ‘flow’ experience reported by Csı́kszentmihályi as:
. . . an immersion that represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the
emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just
contained and channelled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand . . . 12

In addition to reporting the activity of the production team, the audience’s reception of the
performances has also been investigated. In work on Monteverdi’s Orfeo, one audience
member noted:
I was touched by the emotional clarity, commitment and directness of the music and
the staging. There was a concentrated energy flowing from the stage towards me. It was
a riveting experience. I felt part of the collective experience.13

11 Jane Whitfield Davidson, ‘Directing La pùrpura de la rosa’, in Bringing the First Latin-American Opera to Life:
Staging La pu`rpura de la rosa in Sheffield, ed. Jane Whitfield Davidson and Anthony Trippett (Durham, UK:
Durham Modern Languages Series, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, 2007),
215 –50.
12 Mihályi Csı́kszentmihályi, cited in Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ
(New York: Bantam Books, 1995), 91.
13 Jane Whitfield Davidson, ‘Creative Collaboration in Generating an Affective Contemporary Production of
a Seventeenth Century Opera’, in Collaborative Creativity in Musical Thought and Activity, ed. Margaret
Barrett (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming), 183.
186 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

Intriguingly, this spectator’s description connects to the intention of the art of rhetoric,
with the performer’s primary goal being to move the passions/emotions of the audience.
There is, of course, a persistent thread to be pursued through investigations aiming to
imbue the performance of a historical work with its original intention. Detailed studies of
the type Kaleva has undertaken promise to give a new kind of embodied insight; indeed,
her data seem to show that performers can move from peripheral interest to committed
embodied understanding, through a process of experimentation and gradual assimilation
of the historical material.
In the special issue’s third article, Anne-Marie Forbes articulates the four different
methodological areas of concern for performativity outlined by Kartomi, now in an
exploration of Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. In her work, Forbes explores how the
singer, being the ‘voice’ of poet and composer, becomes the medium through which both
textual and musical expression is mediated in performance. In particular, the paper explores
the role of vocal technique and controlled expression to enact the ‘sorrowful voices’ in the
cycle. The paper also reflects on other ‘voices’ in performances of Mahler’s
Kindertotenlieder, the ‘personal voice’ of the individual performer, previous interpretations
by famous singers, and ‘mythological voices’ that stem from superstitions surrounding the
work.
Forbes’ exploration brings me to my fourth personal example, for it resonates
strongly with elements of Simon Frith’s sociological analysis of performance,14 in which it
is observed that performance involves thoughts and actions that are not only related to the
music to be performed (historical aspects and associations with the work, and the musical
material’s narrative content) but also to the occasion itself (e.g. the specificities of
a performance context or a particular performance). Frith also highlights how the
performer deals with the stage persona as well as dealing with their personal inner ‘private’
states (current mood, sense of self, capacity to execute the performance material),
thus negotiating several identities. This suggests that there is potential for tensions
between the information contained in the music (its own narrative content),
the performer’s inner state (the individual performer on stage, presenting their own
personalities), and behaviours engaged in to present the music to co-performers
and audience. I undertook an intriguing study that addressed these very complex
performative aspects in an analysis of a performance given by pop singer Annie Lennox.15
In the data, she sings Who’s That Girl? and can be seen flipping in and out of
enactments of the song’s narrative and a rousing engagement with the audience that was
totally distinct and separate from the narrative of the song being performed. In addition to
this, not only did Annie Lennox project a staged persona, communicated mainly through
grandiose illustrative and emblematic gestures, but she also spent moments of the
performance engaging in small-scale adaptive actions (which are well reported as elements
of non-verbal communication that reveal much about the actor’s inner states and
reflections).
The rich web of information offered through vocal performance is elaborated in the
fourth article in this special issue. Written by Michael Halliwell, the article explores the
materiality of the singer’s voice; that is, how the voice itself adds significance and meaning

14 Simon Frith, Performance Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1998).
15 Jane Whitfield Davidson, ‘The Role of the Body in the Production and Perception of Solo Vocal
Performance: A Case Study of Annie Lennox’, Musicae Scientiae 2 (2001), 235–56.
 Jane W. Davidson, Issue of Performativity in Music 187

to the performance above and beyond what is being sung.16 By drawing on Roland
Barthes17 exploration of the voice’s ‘grain’, and geno- and pheno- song definitions,18
Halliwell explores not only how text of the poetry or libretto plus the music all come
together in the singer’s art, but how the timbre, volume, expression, breath, and even
dramatic pauses or sudden lack of voice all add to the performative process and meaning.
The focus of the analysis is on the operatic ‘voice’ and explores not only the delights of sung
voice when it functions as a revered object of attention, but also the performative
difficulties of voice when it draws attention away from the sound of voice to the concerns
of the performing artist. In other words, where the frailties of human performance slip into
the performance, the tension between voice-object and the performer of voice become
oppositional.
Considering the multi-dimensional aspects of the operatic voice, Halliwell draws out
a fascinating case study of Thomas Adès opera The Tempest (composed and performed in
2004, in a radical reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s play with a libretto created by Meredith
Oakes). In his analysis, amongst other matters, Halliwell considers the role of Ariel,
depicted by a coloratura soprano, singing at the upper limits of her voice. Halliwell
observes that Adès problematizes voice, the ‘grain’ being uncomfortable and ‘other’,
as such, representing the essence of Ariel’s spirit being. In terms of the framework of
performativity, the meaning of Ariel’s role extends beyond the notes or text of her singing,
to the limits and construction of what makes ‘voice’. Ariel’s performance literally puts us on
the edge of our seats as the singer works at the upper limits of what is possible to vocalize.
Here, vocal engagement stretches beyond texts: the ‘spoken text’ is unintelligible, and the
‘musical text’ includes little accompaniment, with the voice left bare to stimulate visceral,
emotional as well as intellectual responses.
The fifth and final article in this issue turns away from performances that engage
performers and audiences to ludomusicology and Iain Hart’s research on music for video
games. Hart discusses how video games lack static and repeatable form, and so present
unique challenges to understanding because they can never be played the same twice.
In the game, the player’s unique series of actions evolve into an interpretation of the
designers’ preconceived ideas of the game experience. In the paper, the musical experience
of game play is investigated as a text that the player has a crucial role in creating.
The enquiry provokes important discussion, for, on the one hand, whilst the video-game
player has no audience, it is possible to reframe the video game itself as a virtual audience;
yet on the other hand, the conditions of performance can be seen to reflect certain
non-interactional cultural practices—such as prayer—where performance can occur with
or without an audience. Through elaborate consideration of the context of the video game,
Hart incorporates a performative approach to interactivity and thinking about the game.
By considering the elaborate contexts of performers and their audiences and the unique
context of the video-game player, I cannot resist thinking about experiments I experienced
with artistic flash mobs and the exhilarating reflexive turn that was offered as I became an
unwitting performer as mob performances unfurled. For example, I recall walking through
a shopping mall in Sheffield, UK, and suddenly found myself in an opera with singers and
dancers swirling around me, interacting with me, my own presence becoming an integral

16 The paper received the Musicological Society of Australia (MSA) Keynote Address Prize, giving Halliwell the
opportunity to present a keynote speech at the MSA Annual Conference in 2013.
17 Roland Barthes, Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Fontana, 1977).
18 Ibid., 182.
188 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

part of the performance. This experience not only offered powerful affect, but ‘a fluidity of
interaction . . . [and] opened up complex networks that evince the interdependence among
musical, political, social, and cultural structures’.19
Rethinking assumptions about music and how it functions for the performer and the
audience is the provocation that performativity offers. I sincerely hope this issue
encourages scholars and performers alike to consider the scope of performance and
embrace it both as an exciting object of analysis as well as an epistemology where, as Kaleva
highlighted in her paper, embodied practices offer a methodological lens.

Author Biography
Jane Davidson is Professor of Creative and Performing Arts (Music) at the Faculty of the Victorian College of
the Arts and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at The University of Melbourne. She is also Deputy
Director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Her research
areas include music psychology, history of emotions, and reflective practice. She is former President of the
Musicological Society of Australia, former Vice-President of the European Society of the Cognitive Sciences of
Music, and was editor of the international journal Psychology of Music. As a practitioner, she has worked as an
opera singer and a music theatre director.

Email: j.davidson@unimelb.edu.au

19 Jann Pasler, Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), viii.