Musicology Australia

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

Concepts, Terminology and Methodology in Music

Performativity Research

Margaret Kartomi

To cite this article: Margaret Kartomi (2014) Concepts, Terminology and Methodology
in Music Performativity Research, Musicology Australia, 36:2, 189-208, DOI:
10.1080/08145857.2014.958268

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2014.958268

Published online: 14 Nov 2014.

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Musicology Australia, 2014
Vol. 36, No. 2, 189–208, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2014.958268

Concepts, Terminology and Methodology in Music

Performativity Research
MARGARET KARTOMI

School of Music—Conservatorium, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

A music performance may be defined as the live presentation of a music event by musicians and other
participants or stakeholders at a given time and place, usually in the presence of an audience. The concept
of music performativity, on the other hand, includes not only the artist’s/artists’ production of sounds and
movements, persona (stage presence), competence, approach, and style, but also influential factors such as
the acoustics and style of the venue, the arrangement of the stage or arena, audience seating, the lighting,
and the contributions of the director, technicians, back-up artists, make-up artists, event organizers,
entrepreneurs, audience, and patrons; indeed everyone involved in the process of bringing a performance
to fruition. This article discusses the recent rise of thinking about performativity by interdisciplinary
scholars, performers, music scholars, and performer-scholars, and proposes a comprehensive four-level
methodology for research into music performativity. After investigating performative concepts such
as persona, competence, interaction, improvisatory practices, cueing, and related attributes such
as musicality, talent, and giftedness, the article discusses the factors of intersubjectivity (or group bonding),
entrainment or groove, and reception. Finally, a case study exemplifies the proposed methodology,
including how the members of a competent or accomplished Acehnese-Indonesian song–dance group
communicate while performing, how their persona and intersubjective bonding affects the way they
rehearse, cue, and perform their strenuous body percussion sounds, movements and songs with near-
perfectly synchronous entrainment, tone colour and intonation, and how they interact with each other and
the audience.

Introduction
The performance of music is a universal human activity, yet only in recent decades have
musicologists and performer-scholars begun to wrestle with the pertaining issues, such as
explaining the ‘magic’ of an exceptional performance. From the 1970s, a concept in
linguistic speech-act theory called ‘performativity’ developed in theatre and literary studies
and a few other disciplines, but the term ‘music performativity’ has been slow to enter the
parlance of musicians and music scholars,1 even among those who write about ‘music
performance’.2 What role, if any, can the concept of music performativity play in
music research? How can music performativity be defined, and how does it differ from
music performance?
Both terms, of course, derive from the verb ‘to perform’, meaning to ‘carry out
something’, but they differ in scope. A music performance may be defined as the live
presentation of an event by musicians at a given time and place, usually in the presence of

1 By ‘music scholars’ is meant musicologists and performer-scholars of western classical music,

ethnomusicologists, popular music scholars, music psychologists, music sociologists, music theorists, and
others who research and publish about music. Many music scholars are also performers or former performers,
and some are or have been composers.
2 For example, authors of chapters in John Rink (ed.), Music Performance: A Guide to Understanding
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
q 2014 Musicological Society of Australia
190 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

an audience, support staff, and other stakeholders. Performativity, on the other hand,
refers to all the describable and analysable aspects of a performer’s or group’s competence
or accomplishment while performing, including the sounds, movements, and gestures that
the artist(s) produce. Thus a musical event may be said to be ‘performative’ because it is
performed by musicians, is usually experienced directly by an audience, and it exemplifies
performance-related issues and techniques. Music may also be imagined performatively in
a person’s mind, as when a conductor studies a score and ‘hears’ it in his/her head, or a jazz
musician ‘hears’ an imaginary new take on an old song that may affect his/her conceptual
approach to performance.
In performance situations, performativity refers to the artist’s/artists’ persona,3
competence, approach, and style while performing and, more generally, to factors that
influence a performance, such as the artist’s/artists’ choice of repertoire, psychological
approach to rehearsal and performance, and—in group performances— the interactiveness
and intersubjectivity (bonding) within the group, the use of cueing and improvisatory
techniques, the desired degree of entrainment or groove (synchronous playing together).
Other factors include the acoustics and style of the venue, the arrangement of the performance
arena and audience seating, and the reception of the audience, including any qualitative data
collected about it. (Even if a performance lacks a live audience, as in a recording studio or
rehearsal, it can still be analysed in terms of the performers’ imagined audience.)
A performance’s success or failure depends, then, on the contributions of many
stakeholders, including (where relevant) sound and lighting technicians, costume and
make-up artists, backup artists, event organizers, entrepreneurs, patrons, musicological
programme writers, pre-concert lecturers, critics, and the media. If a music-performative
event includes other art forms such as dance, body movement, body percussion, drama, or
visual arts, many other issues will of course be involved, although the basic performative
concepts may be the same or similar.
Research into a performance needs to be conducted within its socio-cultural and
historical environment, for a sound or gesture in one cultural context may mean something
completely different in another. While some projects require the exploration of a particular
performance, or a given section of it, others look beyond the single event to compare two or
more performances, and may ultimately draw attention to the nature of performance itself.

The Development of Performance and Performativity Research

It is not possible, of course, to review here the huge literature on relevant aspects of music
psychology that impinge on performance research. The first music psychologist ‘to develop
and exploit new ways to study musical performance with . . . detail and precision’ was Carl
Seashore in the 1920s and 1930s. He shifted the discourse away from the previous
preoccupation with music perception to the psychology of music performance.4 However,
as Clarke has argued, it was not until the 1980s that Seashore’s level of musical and
technical sophistication was revived, mainly as a result of the musical analogy drawn from
an assertion by Noam Chomsky that linguistic competence must be understood as the
expression of a few grammatical rules that contain the otherwise infinite possibilities

3 ‘Persona’ is defined as the personal character that an artist assumes while performing (Karen Thomas, personal
communication 12 June, 2013).
4 Eric F. Clarke, Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts (eds), Music and Mind in Everday Life (Oxford: OUP,
2010), 172.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 191

of a language, and permit—via its ‘generative grammar’—the creation of an indefinite

number of new utterances.5 Like the speaking of language, music performance is infinitely
creative and yet highly structured. Thus, linguist Alton Becker and ethnomusicologist
Judith Becker were able to show how a finite set of rules— ‘a generative musical
grammar’—in Javanese gamelan music actually generates an infinite number of musical
expressions that are comprehensible to all those who know the rules.6 Neither Seashore,
Chomsky, nor the Beckers used the term performativity, but their ideas outlined above
led to a new understanding of creativity in performance.
The term performativity derives from language philosopher J.L. Austin’s founding
work in speech act theory. Austin applied the term ‘performative utterances’ to situations
in which ‘saying something’ was not just making ‘constative utterances’ (describing reality)
but actually ‘doing something as well’, as in the case of a bridal couple saying the words
‘I do’, with all its performative consequences.7 Although he did not use the noun
performativity, Austin proposed a three-level performative methodology for the study of
language, distinguishing between: the actual words spoken in a locution (the data that
most linguists wanted to analyse); what the speaker is attempting to do in uttering the
locution; and the actual effect the speaker has on the interlocutor by uttering the locution.
Sedgwick proposed a fourth (‘periperformative’) level, which referred to the contributions
of all stakeholders to the success of a performative event.8 Commenting on the success of
such an event clearly involves making evaluative statements.9
In the 1980s, linguist Noam Chomsky turned the attention away from behavioural
studies to a view of language as an endlessly creative yet rule-governed human activity.10
By analogy, the above-mentioned linguist-ethnomusicologist team Becker and Becker11
defined competent musicians as performers who have mastered their culture’s generative
musical grammar and can therefore create music that is comprehensible to all who have
mastered the rules of style. Since the 1980s there has been an explosion of writings on
performativity by linguists, philosophers of language, anthropologists,12 sociologists,13

5 Ibid., 173.
6 Alton Becker and Judith O. Becker, ‘A Musical Icon: Power and Meaning in Javanese Gamelan Music’, in
The Sign in Music and Literature, ed. Wendy Steiner (Austin: University of Texas, 1981), 207.
7 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 4–6.
8 Austin’s performative ideas have been extensively discussed in philosophy, literature, science, economics,
social sciences, and other interdisciplinary areas and led to the development of further innovative research. For
example, Sedgwick described queer performativity in language behaviour as an ongoing project for
transforming the way we may define, and break, boundaries to identity. See Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Touching
Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 67– 91.
9 What is the nature of such evaluative statements? As performances always involve the actions and perceptions
of human beings, it is arguably not possible for researchers to avoid their subjective aspects altogether and
claim that their statements are objective. Like other evaluative utterances, then, critical statements about
performances cannot be said to be ‘true’ or ‘false’; they can only be described as (relatively) ‘successful’ or
‘unsuccessful’, according to whether the conditions required for their success have been met or not. Such
critical statements, of course, cannot be proven, unless both sides agree on their premises or intent in advance.
Whatever their degree of subjectivity, the statements need to be made convincingly, supported by arguments
and facts.
10 Clarke et al., Music and Mind, 173.
11 Becker and Becker, ‘A Musical Icon’, 207.
12 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company,
1969) wrote on the ‘theatre of ritual’ observed in his anthropological field research.
13 James Loxley, Performativity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 140.
192 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

and scholars of narratology, literature,14 art and design,15 film, drama, theatre, and
performance studies scholars.16

Toward A Research Methodology in Music Performativity

Arguably it is now time to develop a comprehensive methodology for research into music
performativity (i.e. the condition and behaviour of musicians while performing),
and ultimately into the whole musical and socio-cultural process of bringing performances
to fruition. By adapting Austin’s three-level framework and adding Sedgwick’s level as
a fourth, we obtain the following four-level model: the actual music performed, including the
rationale behind repertoire choice; the execution of the music and factors that affect it, such
as performance style and the performers’ persona, competence, ensemble interaction,
cueing techniques, entrainment, and attitudes to tempo, tone colour, intonation, and so
forth; the effects of the performers on the audience and vice versa; and the contributions of all
stakeholders to the success of the event, including the roles of the event organizers, technicians
in charge of the venue’s spatial and acoustic conditions, private and public fundraisers,
publicists, entrepreneurs, technicians, and the media. By adopting this model and
systematically comparing the findings about each event with comparable performative
events, researchers may draw general conclusions about performative issues and,
eventually, about the nature of music performativity itself.
Many questions arise from contemplation of this model. For example, why do
performers and audiences find that some repertoire combinations gel as a unit better than
others? How can one account for the ‘magic’ of some performances compared with others?
Does a musical group’s competence and creativity depend on its individual members’
musicality, talent, or giftedness? How can one best gauge a group of performers’ musical
interaction with each other while performing?17 How does each performing group achieve
its desired tone quality and other desired musical attributes? How does it reach the
standard of compact timing or entrainment that the relevant culture expects?
How important is the factor of intonation vis-a`-vis the tolerance of pitch variability of
some performing groups? How does a group develop its distinctive persona? How do
group members’ feelings of empathy for each other—their intersubjectivity or shared
subjective states—influence their success? How does a group succeed in moving its
audience? Why is it that audiences warm especially to groups whose members relax and
communicate effortlessly with each other while continually surprising them with the
beauty and virtuosity of the music they create? How does audience reception within its

14 See Ute Berns, ‘Performativity’, in Handbook of Narratology, ed. J. Pier, P. Huehn and W. Schmid (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2009), 370–5. See also ,http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Main_
Page..
15 A practice-based research strategy in art and design also began to emerge in the United Kingdom in the mid-
1990s in the framework of higher degree developments in universities, following extensive debate about
whether ‘practice is research’, ‘practice is research equivalent’, or ‘no way is practice research’. See Carole Gray
and Julian Malins, Visualising Research (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 3.
16 Theatre director and performance studies scholar Richard Schechner, in Performance Studies. An Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 2006), distinguished between two senses of performance, which he viewed as opposite
ends of a continuum: the performance as the enactment of the informal scenarios of everyday life; and the
performance as a framed event that enacts a convention and tradition (ibid., 38) such as, for instance, a concert
of classical Indian music.
17 The related question as to whether a performer’s success is partly due to the transmission of skills from his/her
teachers (i.e. his/her pedagogical pedigree) goes beyond the scope of this article.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 193

socio-historical context influence the performers’ creativity?18 What are the performative
qualities demanded by critics and juries in group competitions within a culture?
Researchers into music performativity include performers, performer-scholars,
musicologists, ethnomusicologists, popular music specialists, music psychologists,
and music theorists.19 They investigate issues affecting performances and apply aural,
analytical, historical, sociological, or other disciplinary skills to understand aspects of style
and performance in their socio-historical context and research outcomes. Performer-
scholars divide their time between two poles of activity: performing and writing academic
articles, books, and editions,20 which includes analysing music to help produce
performances appropriate for the relevant culture and/or era; and publishing both
annotated recordings and academic articles, books, and editions. Performers tend to
produce performances of pieces that they have analysed, and sometimes edited,
plus recordings of their performances with annotations or liner notes that document their
research.21
Performers may adopt a different method of analysis from scholars. A musician who is
preparing a performance normally bases their analysis of the chosen piece on what Rink has

18 Some other important performative research questions are listed on the webpage of Cambridge University’s
Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (Accessed 21 May 2013), ,http://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/
research/centres/cmpcp/..
19 Although a few composers double as music theorists and/or musicologists (e.g. Paul Hindemith, 1895–1963),
they have rarely written on performative issues.
20 An example of a performer-scholar is Roy Howat, who spends as much time playing French piano music as
researching, including editing much of Debussy’s piano music, writing books on French Piano Works and
Debussy—see Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983)—and producing Urtext volumes of Fauré’s works. Other performer-scholars are the pianist Peter
Hill, who has researched and performed the complete piano works of Olivier Messiaen—see Peter Hill (ed.),
The Messiaen Companion (London: Faber and Faber, 1994)—and the ethnomusicologist Adrian McNeil, who
performs sarod with top Indian musicians in India and Australia and published the definitive book on the
sarod—see Adrian McNeil, Inventing the Sarod: A Cultural History (Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2004).
21 A debate about whether musicians actually engage in analysis and research when bringing music to
performance has dominated recent thinking about performativity in some universities and research funding
bodies. Those in the affirmative argue that research is implicit in what performers do and that the outcomes
can be supplemented by the written documentation of research methods used and the findings, while the
naysayers argue that performers only carry out research-equivalent creative activity, and must acquire deep
theoretical and analytical competence even to know how to interpret music properly—Eugene Narmour, ‘On
the Relationship of Analytical Theory to Performance and Interpretation’, in Explorations in Music, the Arts
and Ideas, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1988), 319 and 340—the
implication being that most have not. While Webster’s International English Dictionary (3rd ed.) defines ‘to
research’ as ‘to search or investigate a problem’, it defines ‘basic research’ as ‘the documentation, discovery, and
interpretation, or the development of methods and systems, to advance human knowledge’. However, the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines research and experimental
development (R&D) as ‘creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of
knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise
new applications’. See Frascati Manual: Proposed Standard Practice for Surveys on Research and Experimental
Development, 6th ed., 2002, chapter 2 (Accessed 10 June 2013), ,www.oecd.org/sti/frascatimanual.. The
implication here is that there is a special category of research that may be called ‘artistic’ or ‘practice-based
research’ which considers creative works to constitute both the research and the object of the research itself.
Thus if acts of music performance are regarded as creative works, they may be seen as constituting both the
research and the objects of research. However, as their research components are not self-evident, they need to
be accompanied by written explanations about their contributions to the store of knowledge of man, culture
and society.
194 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

called a ‘performer’s analysis’.22 Rather than applying an independent procedure to the act
of interpretation, one focuses on analysing pragmatically significant matters such as the
shaping of phrases, rhythmic details, tone quality, tempo, dynamics, and overall structure,
the aim being to bring a performance to fruition in a manner that the relevant culture finds
creative and satisfying. Although a performer often adopts procedures that are more
intuitive than systematic, she/he weighs up the myriad choices about every performance
detail with great care:

Even the simplest passage—a scale or a perfect cadence, for instance—will be shaped
according to the performer’s understanding of how it fits into a given piece and the
expressive prerogatives that he or she brings to bear upon it.23

Performers in other music cultures deal with other relevant pragmatic matters.
Studies of individual musicians such as Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum24 have become
increasingly common in recent years, especially in ethnomusicology. However, some
aspects of performativity research (e.g. intersubjectivity) to date are relevant only to groups.
The discussion below will therefore focus on research into group performances, will discuss
some of the concepts inherent in the model proposed above, and will conclude with a case
study that exemplifies some of the issues involved.

Recent Forays into Music Performativity Research

Music is, of course, performed sound, yet many musicologists have researched western
classical music primarily on the basis of score analysis. Especially since the 1990s, however,
some musicologists and performer-scholars have been expanding their approach to engage in
aspects of performativity research. They took measures to overcome the mainly score-based
approach of the discipline and the historical bias that favoured composers’ ‘god-like’ creativity
over that of performers and also began to ask serious questions about performativity.
Nicholas Cook was one who suggested that musicologists of western classical music and
musicians alike would benefit from thinking of scores not as fixed texts to be reproduced in
performance but as scripts25 that guide their performative interpretations.26 In defence of
the musicians’ creativity, Cook wrote:

22 John Rink, ‘Analysis and (or?) Performance’, in Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 42.
23 Ibid., 35.
24 Virginia Louise Danielson, ‘The Voice of Egypt’: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song and Egyptian Society in the
Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
25 Nicholas Cook, ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance’, Music Theory Online (point 7) 7/2
(2001) (Accessed 21 June 2013), , www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook.html.. ‘Whereas
to think of a Mozart quartet as a “text” is to construe it as a half-sonic, half-ideal object reproduced in
performance, to think of it as a “script” is to see it as choreographing a series of real-time, social interactions
between players: a series of mutual acts of listening and communal gestures that enact a particular vision of
human society, the communication of which to the audience is one of the special characteristics of chamber
music’ (ibid., point 15).
26 The argument holds that the experience and meaning of a piece of music lies not only in the score but also in
its performed realization, which includes the relationship between the performers and members of an
audience, who do not just passively accept the performance of a creative work but interpret it on the basis of
their individual cultural backgrounds and life experiences. Thus Kpelle African and German listeners of a
Bach cantata and a Kpelle song respectively will receive both performances in very different ways.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 195

There are decisions of dynamics and timbre which the performer must make but which
are not specified in the score; there are nuances of timing that contribute essentially to
performance interpretation, that involve deviating from the metronomically-notated
specifications of the score.27

Moreover, ‘In ensemble music such unnotated but musically significant values are
negotiated between performers (that is a large part of what happens in rehearsal)’.
He argued that performance is a social phenomenon, not a private communication from
composer to listener, and that it needs to be researched in terms of the interactions
between performing groups and their producers, managers, technical personnel, and
commentators.28
Yet composers did not always disguise their contempt for mere practitioners. For
example, a comment supposedly attributable to the composer Arnold Schoenberg reads:
‘The performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally unnecessary, except as his
interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough to be
unable to read it in print’.29 Although it has not been proven that Schoenberg said those
precise words, their repetition in Newlin and elsewhere cannot of course help improve
relations between performers, composers, and scholars.
The conceptualizing of music performance in ethnomusicology became
increasingly influential after Ruth Stone’s 1982 work on traditional Kpelle music and
dance culture of Liberia, which she studied in the context of total ‘performance events’.
She investigated not only the artists’ behaviour before and during performances, but also
the event organizers’ role, the locale and timing of events, audience responses, and
so forth.30
Stone and other ethnomusicologists had already distanced themselves from their
comparative-musicologist predecessors by insisting on doing field work with competent
musicians and other stakeholders in the society studied, and observing the music as part of
its whole socio-artistic context. Many also felt the need to experience a culture’s music
from the inside—by learning to perform it, thereby coming vividly to appreciate the social,
emotional, and rational affects embedded in its practices.
While in the field, they also tried to identify native performative concepts. For example,
Ben Brinner researched Javanese gamelan players’ ‘musical competence’ and collaborative
‘musical interaction’,31 concluding that musical meaning in the culture is largely re-
constructed in each performance through interactive negotiation between competent
performers, and between performers and their audiences.
The increasing academic achievements of jazz and popular music scholars in the 1980s
and 1990s also drew attention to additional performative issues. Like ethnomusicologists,

27 Ibid., point 11.

28 Ibid., point 11. See also Nicholas Cook, ‘Music Minus One: Rock, Theory and Performance’, New
Foundations 27 (1996), 23 –41.
29 Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938–76) (New York: Pendragon Press,
1980), 164.
30 Ruth M. Stone, ‘Let the Inside be Sweet’: The Interpretation of Music Event among the Kpelle of Liberia
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982).
31 Ben Brinner, Knowing Music, Making Music: Javanese Gamelan and the Theory of Musical Competence and
Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
196 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

these scholars adopted a holistic view of music in society32 and tended to focus on the
totality of the artistic event—including the occasion, venue, acoustics, choice of music
performed, artists’ behaviour and persona, seating of the audience, the performance event
itself, the relationships between groups of performers and their music producers, reception,
commercialization, modernization, and technological improvements in sound production
and recordings. Some also made detailed analytical and contextual studies of improvisatory
musical practices, the kinetic frameworks of ‘groove’ or ‘feel’, and the patterned
communications between performing artists that included devices such as syncopation,
overlay, displacement, offbeat phrasing, polyrhythm/polymetre, hocketing, heterophony,
swing, speech-based rhythms, and call and response. Some also studied the phenomenon
of entrainment.33
One reason for the recent rise in performance-based research has been the insistence by
many university administrations and government funding bodies that at least thirty per
cent of academic staff time and salaries be devoted to producing research outcomes and the
remainder to teaching and administrative work. This requirement, operating from
approximately the 1970s in the United Kingdom and the late 1990s in Australasia to the
time of writing, asks performers, composers, actors, dancers, creative writers, visual artists,
and other practice-based staff to produce practice-based research outcomes with written
accounts of their research components for the authorities to compare them with the
published outcomes of staff in the humanities, sciences, and other disciplines.34 Similarly,
higher degree candidates in performance are required to prepare substantial written
exegeses that explain the nature, methodology, and findings of their practice-led
research.35 These research quality exercises are used as the basis of government models for
allocating funding to university schools and departments.
Not surprisingly, these requirements have created tensions between staff in tertiary
music departments who are mainly practice based as opposed to staff who produce
published research; tensions that have been exacerbated by the artificial economy of
research funding in many countries (including Australia) and the demands expressed in
academic employment contracts. Some performers (who prefer to remain anonymous)
have asserted that they carry out research every time they prepare music for performance,
while others claim, less convincingly perhaps, that only performers can be trusted to carry
out performance research. They have been urging governments to fund their performance
outcomes and to accept that their recordings of performances released by respected
commercial outlets are equivalent in rigour to the traditional research outcomes published
in blind, double-peer reviewed scholarly journals and monographs.
One protagonist even claimed that practice-based research is built on a different
‘epistemology’ from other research and therefore requires the adoption of a ‘third
methodology’ that is appropriate only for practitioners and differs from the quantitative

32 Simon Frith, ‘Editorial’, New Formations 27 (1996), xi.

33 For example, Jeff Pressing, ‘Black Atlantic Rhythm: its Computational and Transcultural Foundations’, Music
Perception 19/3 (2002, Spring), 285–310.
34 The insistence began in the United Kingdom during Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership (1979–1990)
and in the USA at around the same time, beginning in New Zealand and Australia from the late 1990s.
35 An exegesis (from the Greek ἐjήghsi6 and ἐjhgeῖsuai, meaning ‘to lead out’) is a critical explanation or
interpretation of a text, where ‘text’ is understood not only as literary work but also as a performed
representation of a musical piece, film or other artistic work, and may include its compositional process and its
cultural and historical background. However, there is insufficient space in this article to discuss the research
components of composers’ creative works.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 197

and qualitative research procedures normally used in research.36 However, the expression
of this sentiment has been divisive. The consensus of opinion is that all bona fide
investigators should be allies in the process of creating and understanding music and its
performativity; that rather than dividing into camps or ‘going it alone’, it behoves us
to engage in productive dialogue with each other in order to reach a deeper understanding
of the issues involved in music performativity. The integrity of universities demands,
of course, that all degrees be comparable, whatever the discipline or field.
The next section of this article discusses select concepts relevant to the performativity
research model proposed above—persona, musicality, talent, giftedness, competence,
interaction, improvisatory practices, cueing, intersubjectivity, entrainment, and reception.

Some Concepts and Terms in Performativity Research

Persona
Like professional actors performing parts in a play or film, individual musicians and groups
often assume a persona when performing in a performance arena, an identity that may be
notably different from the one they feel comfortable with in real life.37 For example,
a group performing a passionate movement of, say, a Dvorak piano trio may seem to be
swept up in a sea of emotion as they throw their heads back passionately and raise their
arms at the end of a phrase, yet they may say afterwards that they played their parts in
a calculated manner, without actually feeling any passionate emotion at all. Their audience
believed that their performative act was motivated by their real ‘inner core’ even though in
fact they only created the illusion of an inner core.38 A persona is virtually always built up
with the help of fellow artists, technicians, entrepreneurs, patrons, music critics, music
scholars, and audiences.
The personae of international celebrity musicians such as Chinese classical pianist Lang
Lang may be constructed and built up by commercial advisors who make the most of his
‘most exciting young keyboard talent and . . . total mastery of the piano’ and his
charismatic ‘flair and great communicative power’ when he speaks on stage.39 His success is
partly due to the propagation of such personal stories as having watched the Tom and Jerry
episode of the Cat Concert accompanied by Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 at the age
of two, and his progress from ‘poverty to stardom’.40 Even the negative criticism of those
who claim his playing lacks sensitivity and nickname him ‘Bang Bang’ does not seem to

36 B.C. Haseman, ‘A Manifesto for Performative Research’, Media International Australia Incorporating Culture
and Policy: Quarterly Journal of Media Research and Resources (2006), 103.There is no reason why performers
cannot use arguments based on rationalist, empiricist, and intuitivist epistemologies like other researchers in
the humanities. Haseman’s claim that practice-led researchers differ from other qualitative researchers in that
their research outputs and claims of knowing are made through the symbolic forms and language of their
practice (ibid., 100) is mystifying and contributes little to the debate.
37 Just as in everyday life a person can assume a different identity in the company of different people, performers
can assume different personae on different occasions. Moreover, in the speech act literature, reference is often
made to the ability of a person’s speech and gesture to ‘perform an identity’ as opposed to expressing it, thus
reversing the idea that identity is the source of more secondary actions such as speech, gestures, or playing
music.
38 Henry Spiller, personal communication, September 2012.
39 These are the words of Lang Lang’s conductor Jahja Ling (Accessed 22 May 2013), ,http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Lang_Lang_%28pianist%29..
40 Ibid.
198 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

detract from his ability to conquer audiences—indeed the controversy attracts further
public attention to him—while a report in The Financial Times that he is ‘evangelical in
his efforts to spread the popularity of classical music’ endears him to all supporters of that
music. His stage presence is a mix of cultural characteristics: thus he not only bows to the
rapturous acclaim of his audiences in typical western concert-hall fashion, but he also bows
in Chinese style to his Chinese conductor Jahja Ling who bows back to him, a touch that
appeals to Asian and western audiences alike.
Throughout the world one finds successful performing groups with stage personalities
that succeed in attracting loyal audiences. Some musicians speak during their concerts to
their audiences about the music they play, often in a humorous and informative way, and
sometimes even self-deprecatingly, while others choose to let the music speak for itself.
For example, Melbourne pianist Tony Gould and ’cellist Imogen Manins attract a crowd
of regular concert-goers by their mix of improvised and composed classical and jazz
repertoire in their annual concert series, held in an attractive venue. Audiences like their
‘take’ on familiar ‘tunes’ (such as Billy Joel’s ‘She’s Always a Woman To Me’) leavened by
some harmonic and melodic twists and turns and other musical surprises, and they show
appreciation of the varied assembly of guest musicians who improvise with them on
different instruments.
However, not all musicians can manage to create a consistent presence by talking as well
as playing when on stage. Some prefer to concentrate only on performing the music as
creatively and convincingly as they can without the potential distraction of verbal
engagement with their audience. They believe they can succeed in moving their audiences
by letting their performance speak for itself.

Musicality, Talent, and Giftedness

In western secondary-level and tertiary-level music schools, teaching staff commonly
discuss their students’ musical skills, musicality, or talent with each other. Many tend to
accept the view without question that a musician’s success is based on his or her inborn
musicality, which they call talent. Yet as Kingsbury has written, success should also be seen
as the result of ‘collections of encounters and choices: pastiches of performances
experienced, lessons taken, people with whom s/he has played, and the technical and
cognitive limitations of his/her own musicianship’.41
Indeed, Kingsbury writes, to attribute a student with ‘talent’ in western institutions can
be ‘an albatross around one’s neck’, especially if the teachers disagree about whether or not
a student is really talented, and, if she/he is, how much talent she/he possesses. Skewed by
an inaccurate assessment of a student’s ‘talent’, a teacher sometimes expects too much—or
too little—of a student. Moreover, to say that a student from a small class in an institution
is talented is usually intended as a compliment and a mark of individuality, but in a larger
class at a tertiary conservatorium or in a national youth orchestra where all are regarded as
‘having talent’, it can become a mark of similarity.42
Given the problems with the term, Gagne suggests that ‘talent’ should be differentiated
from ‘giftedness’. As talent implies the possession not only of aptitude but also of

41 Henry Kingsbury, Music, Talent and Performance: a Conservatory Cultural System (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1988), 14.
42 See Margaret Kartomi, ‘Response to Two Problems in Music Education: The Young Australian Concert
Artists Program of the Australian Youth Orchestra’, Music Education Research 10/1 (2008), 141 –58.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 199

developed skills, he argues, the term talent should be used only in the sense of ‘an ability to
produce an exceptional performance’, while ‘giftedness’ should be used to denote ‘above-
average competence’.43 One performer’s seemingly greater talent than another’s may also
be a result of his/her putting in many more hours of practice. Thus, ‘highly talented’ young
people may proceed on the same developmental path as their ‘gifted’ peers, but tend to
devote themselves to longer hours of concentrated work.
The fact that the terms musicality, talent, and giftedness have many different meanings
cross-culturally needs considerable research. Rasmussen has made a start in her study of
aptitude in Middle Eastern music performance,44 along with other ethnomusicologists
who have written on giftedness in other cultures.45 The dominant view of talent among
western musicians appears to be the exact opposite of the view held in many cultures—that
all normal human beings, not just the so-called ‘talented’, are capable of a very high degree
of musical competence. Competence in non-text-based cultures can range from the ability
to obey the leader in cases of strict performer hierarchies, although sometimes bending
them creatively (as in the Acehnese case study below), to a looser following of the rules in
more improvisational performance cultures that feature accepted improvisational
techniques (e.g. when based on the melodic and rhythmic concepts of rag and tal
in Indian classical music).

Competence and Group Interaction

What makes a competent musician? ‘Competence’ has been defined as ‘the knowledge and
abilities that can engender good, excellent and superlative performance rather than the
potential for knowledge’.46 It encompasses ‘all the kinds of knowledge and skills that
a musician may need’, including knowledge of the relevant musical tradition, an ability to
make aesthetic judgements, and an advanced ability for ‘group interaction’; that is, each
member of an ensemble must be able to listen closely to and coordinate his/her phrasing,
dynamics, tempo, articulation and so forth with the others and to lead or follow as
appropriate, while not allowing any soloistic tendencies to dominate.47 Clearly, a young
musician may be talented or gifted, by whatever standard is applied, but not yet fully
competent as a performer.
Competence also requires an ability to make a ‘performer’s analysis’ of the music to be
played in order to discover its shape and structure, to help solve conceptual or technical
problems that arise, and to combat performance anxiety. Competent performers also
regularly analyse and evaluate their performances after the event for the sake of the next
performance.48
As Brinner has shown, members of a group with high-level interaction skills normally
need to have acquired multiple musical competences, including a well-developed ear,
physical coordination, a quick learning aptitude for pitch, rhythm, and timing, interactive

43 F. Gagne, ‘Giftedness and Talent: Reexamining a Reexamination of the Definitions’, The Gifted Child
Quarterly 29/3 (1985), 3.
44 A.K. Rasmussen, 2004. ‘Insiders, Outsiders and the “Real Version” in Middle Eastern Music Performance’,
in Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles, ed. Ted Solis (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 205.
45 For example, see Solis (ed.), Performing Ethnomusicology, 225.
46 Brinner, Knowing Music, 2.
47 Ibid., 3.
48 Rink, ‘Analysis and (or?) Performance’, 37.
200 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

ensemble skills, performance leadership skills, knowledge of stage conventions, ability to

make good judgements of musical interpretation, and knowledge of music history and
repertoire. These competences need not be seen as special talents or gifts but as a quality of
musical authority that is built up over time and is subject to observation by others.
‘Competence entails not just what an individual knows but how much he or she projects
that knowledge or acts on it in the company of others, leading with authority, influencing
more subtly, or following meekly or with uncertainty’.49 Whether or not a group relies on
some form of musical notation or chart, members of every group need to employ modes of
formal or informal communication while performing in order to achieve the degree of
compactness expected of them and to communicate the emotional and rational impressions
or messages that they aim to put across through the improvisatory practices they may
employ, including visual and auditory cueing.

Improvisatory Practices—The Art of Cueing

Although it has ancient historical roots and is found in virtually all cultures, the concept of
improvisation has played a minor role in the history of musicology to date.50 This is partly
because practitioners and academics have been unable to define this term adequately,
the main reason being that ‘ . . . the things that we call improvisation encompass a vast
network of practices, with various artistic, political, social, and educational values’.51
As Whiteoak writes:

. . . some definitions of improvisation by excellent scholars are downright contradictory

. . . ,52 ranging from ‘spontaneous composition’ to certain classical practices
(e.g. realisations of cadenzas in concertos) or jazz practices (such as ‘free jazz’), while

49 Brinner, Knowing Music, 3–4.

50 Bruno Nettl with Melinda Russell (eds), In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Improvisation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1. A special issue of the Journal of Music Theory (2005) focused
on the analysis of improvised music, commenting that music educators are increasingly incorporating
improvisation into their pedagogical strategies, and that philosophers and scientists are beginning to
investigate improvisation as a lived experience. Besides publishing books on the state of musical improvisation
studies in the past ten years, the International Society for Improvised Music (founded in 2006) holds annual
conferences. Improvisation interest groups have recently formed in both the Society of Ethnomusicology and
the Society for Music Theory, and a journal dedicated to the topic, Critical Studies in Improvisation, began
publication in 2004. In addition, the Society for Music Theory’s Interest Group on Improvisation promotes
music-theoretical research on improvisation in concert music, jazz, multimedia performance, popular music,
sacred music, traditional music, and music from any culture or nation in ethnomusicology, historical
musicology, music theory and allied fields such as critical improvisation studies.
51 Bruno Nettl, in Musical Improvisation: Art, Education and Society, ed. Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), xi.
52 Whiteoak has pointed out that Roger Dean defines improvisation in music as ‘the simultaneous conception
and production of sound in performance’, although he does not regard the ‘fills’ required of commercial
musicians as ‘genuine improvisation’. Roger T. Dean, Creative Improvisation: Jazz, Contemporary Music and
Beyond (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), 136. To Bruce Johnson, however, the reverse is true.
As he writes: ‘[Improvisation] is almost always based on a prepared repertoire. The criticism that a musician
plays too many clichés is usually the reverse of the truth, because what has really been noticed is that the
repertoire of ‘clichés’, the stock, is too slender’. Bruce Johnson, ‘Orality and Jazz Education’, New Music
Articles 10 (1992), 39–43, 46. The implication is that purely spontaneous invention excludes all other forms of
improvisatory practice, including variation, embellishment, and Johnson’s ‘spontaneous linking of memorised
clichés’. See John Whiteoak, ‘Discussion Paper for the Australia Council’ (unpublished typescript on
Improvisation, 2000), 1.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 201

ethnomusicologists and popular music researchers claim that it includes such diverse
practices as the embellishments of modal formulae in Javanese music, the
ornamentation of yodellers, crooners or rock singers, and the scratch mixing of
contemporary DJs. Arguably it is culturally insensitive to lump all these and other cross-
cultural practices under the one heading of improvisation. In the absence of any
universally accepted definition, it is proposed that the term ‘improvisation’ whether in
Western or non-Western music, and whatever the genre, be substituted by the more
flexible term ‘improvisatory practices’.53

Nevertheless, Pressing has investigated many of the psychological processes involved in

musical improvisation.54 John Griffiths has also proposed using the term ‘extemporization’
to denote the insertion of pre-learnt material in real time as distinct from ‘making it up on
the spot improvisation’ (personal communication).
A plethora of questions arise from viewing musicians whose performances are based on
an extensive system of improvisatory techniques and auditory and visual cues, as in jazz or
in Javanese gamelan groups, both of which are highly interactive musical traditions that
involve improvisation.
If, for example, we want to know how members of a group coordinate their playing with
each other, we may note that their body language, body or eye contact, and auditory cues
affect the quality of their performances. Do their interpersonal relationships or ability to
bond socially affect their artistic competence? Do the cueing practices they use vary
according to the sound qualities of an ensemble player’s instrument or voice, or his/her
seating arrangement in the group, as some claim? Analyses of a corpus of performances of
the same piece by thirty pairs of jazz pianists and saxophonists playing face-to-face and via
remote video began to indicate partial answers to these questions. As Schober and Levine
write:

While playing in ensemble musicians are faced with many competing cognitive
demands for planning and executing their own performances while monitoring those of
their partners. The evidence suggests that different cues are used at different moments
during a piece. During an ongoing rhythm, for example, visual information from one’s
partner is not useful, and can even be distracting for the saxophonist during an
improvised solo, but it is very useful for producing a simultaneous attack.55

Clearly, a great deal more empirical and comparative research is needed before an adequate
understanding of the idiosyncrasies and creative results of the various improvisatory and
cueing systems can be reached. The cueing systems alone vary considerably across the
genres and cultures. For example, the members of a jazz group may start off on an equal
footing and then break into a selection of lead solos (e.g. by a trombonist, then a guitarist,
then a pianist, etc.) with the others providing the backing, and end with a return to equal
group work again. In stark contrast (see the case study below), the leader of a hierarchical
row of Acehnese singer – dancers passes cues or commands on to the deputy leader who

53 Whiteoak, ‘Discussion Paper for the Australia Council’, 1. See also John Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib:
Improvisatory Music in Australia: 1836–1970 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999).
54 Jeff Pressing, ‘Improvisation: Methods and Models’, in Generative Processes in Music, ed. J. Sloboda
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
55 Michael F. Schober and Michelle F. Levine, ‘Visual and Auditory Cues in Jazz Musicians’ Ensemble
Performance’, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Performance Science (2011), 553–4.
202 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

then passes them on to the ‘left lieutenant’, and so forth, while the solo vocalist improvises
freely on an established or a new melody, presenting contrasting sections of relative
freedom and military-like precision.56 In both cases, the artists creatively adhere to a set of
culturally determined rules from which they are allowed to deviate within the bounds of
the style.

Emotion and Intersubjectivity

One of the most extensively studied areas of music psychology has been the element of
emotion in music performance and listening, including the intersubjectivity (shared
subjective states) between the members of performing groups and with audiences, topics
that are now being investigated.57 The question of how to explain the exceptional or
would-be inexplicable in solo and group performance, however, deserves more attention.58
Music scholars have generally believed that people’s emotional responses to music were
so unpredictable that they could not be systematically or empirically researched. However,
research by Brinner, for one, has indicated that creative performance is particularly
sensitive to interactive knowledge shared by ensemble groups. To enhance their musical
competence and musicality, novice musicians learn how to relate to each other subjectively
and socially as well as musically, thereby developing their self-confidence, emotional
maturity, and social skills, qualities that are transferable to the novices’ playing and other
aspects of living.59 A researcher into the intersubjectivity of a performing group (as in the
case study below) may note systematically how its members bond with, depend on, and
relate to each other before, during, and after performing, and whether and how their
empathy or shared intersubjectivity facilitates their group creativity; that is, the quality that
reaches beyond individual originality and convention-breaking innovation to the socio-
cultural context of the collective.
As social beings, humans’ view of the world cannot be just a subjective one; it is melded
in part by others’ perspectives. A purely objective view would underestimate the variable
perceptions and interpretations of subjects about the world, while a purely subjective
perspective could easily become detached from reality. Pursuit of an intersubjective
perspective seeks to escape this dilemma by requiring subjects to submit their subjective
interpretations to comparison with those of other participants. Intersubjectivity builds a
socio-cognitive framework for approaching agreement that transcends the limits of the
individual subject, thereby evading the twin pitfalls of isolated subjectivity and inert
objectivity. Critical statements made about the relative success or failure of a performance
need also to be informed by the subjective interpretations of other stakeholders in the
performative event, and supported by convincing range of facts and evidence.
Not all musicians, of course, possess adequate musical or personal communication skills.
Some groups may have a leader who is an immensely creative performer but has minimal
verbal and other social skills, yet if she/he has earned the musical respect of fellow artists

56 Margaret Kartomi, Musical Journeys in Sumatra (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 292.
57 For example, a current research project entitled ‘The History of Emotions’ (led by Philippa Maddern and
musicologist Jane Davidson) is investigating the use of music as a means of emotional regulation at individual
and communal levels, current interactions with music and associated beliefs, and attitudes surrounding
musical behaviour (Accessed 21 June 2013), ,http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/about-the-centre/who-
we-are/chief-investigators.aspx..
58 John Griffiths, personal communication, 21 July, 2014.
59 Brinner, Knowing Music, 3–4.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 203

and audiences, they may tolerate her/his personal quirks and inadequacies and audiences
may be unaware of them. While in some cases personal closeness between a group of artists
can bring with it the instability of emotional involvement, in other cases it may allow a
group to interact with each other more effectively on the musical level as well as
reaching the degree of rhythmic flow and synchrony, or entrainment, that is expected by
the culture.

Entrainment, Groove
The ability of a group to perform synchronously in time with each other in the relevant
genre or style, or entrainment, is another topic that needs more cross-cultural research.
The phenomenon of entrainment in physics was discovered and named in approximately
1666 by Christian Huygens, a Dutch scientist who observed that the swinging pendulums
of a group of clocks in a room fell into synchronization with each other over time, even
when he started them swinging at different times; and his further experiments duplicated
the results of this process.60
Musical entrainment involves subtle communicative negotiation between musicians in
an ensemble. Achieving a high level of synchronized interaction between a group’s
independent rhythmic lines is especially significant in music that requires the extensive use
of improvised techniques, as in Indian musicians’ tanpura playing and beat markings,61 in
West African rhythms,62 and in jazz. When a group of jazz performers reach a high degree
of synchronization of gesture, physical movement, and technique, they often say that they
feel a shared rhythmic flow or groove, which denotes ‘a sense of propulsive rhythmic feel or
swing created by interaction of the music with the band’s rhythm section’.63
The expected degree of entrainment in different cultures’ ensembles varies considerably.
For example, song – dance groups who perform concerted body percussion in Aceh,
Indonesia, do so with a very high degree of military-like precision or ‘compactness’
(kekompakan), as discussed below. A very different attitude to entrainment is found among
gamelan ensemble musicians in Java. If after playing for some time the players are cued to
slow down, for example, only some instruments (e.g. the keyed percussion) are expected to
be played in perfect time with each other while others (e.g. the suspended or boxed gongs)
are deliberately sounded just after the main gong stroke. From a western audience’s
viewpoint, the gongs in the decelerating passage are perceived as ‘coming in late’, but for
Javanese audiences the gong players are simply adjusting to the gradual slowing-down of
the ensemble. The two contrasting attitudes to entrainment in these two Indonesian
cultures are an important aspect of the different expectations of their audiences, who also
engage in quite different habits of reception.

60 The musicologist Jordania recently suggested that the human ability to be entrained was developed by natural
selection as part of achieving an altered state of consciousness: that is, battle trance, in which humans lose their
individuality, do not feel fear or pain, and act in the best interests of the group. Entrainment was crucial for the
physical survival of our ancestors against the big African predators. Joseph Jordania, Why Do People Sing?
Music in Human Evolution (Tbilisi: Logos, 2011).
61 Martin Clayton, ‘Observing Entrainment in Music Performance: Video-based Observational Analysis of
Indian Musicians’ Tanpura Playing and Beat Marking’, Musica Scientiae 11/1 (2007), 27 –59.
62 Jonathan M. Magill and Jeffrey L. Pressing, ‘Asymmetric Cognitive Clock Structures in West African
Rhythms’, Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15/2 (1997, Winter), 189 –221.
63 Mark Doffman, ‘Making it Groove! Entrainment, Participation and Discrepancy in the “Conversation” of
a Jazz Trio’, Language and History 52/1 (May, 2009), 131.
204 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

Reception
Because audience engagement is a crucial psychological stimulus for musicians, the way an
audience receives, spontaneously listens to, and reacts to a performance is an important
topic in performativity research. Like a novel, movie, or other creative work, a music
performance is not just passively accepted by its audience. On the contrary, its members
condition and interpret the performance according to their individual life experiences
and give it meaning. Indeed, without the audience’s shared knowledge of the
performance conventions and its enthusiastic attention to happenings in the stage arena,
a performance cannot be judged a success, or—arguably—even be regarded as a proper
performative event.
Audience reception theory developed in literary studies in the late 1960s and in cultural
studies in the 1970s. Media and communication studies theorist Stuart Hall offered
a theoretical approach to understanding how messages in the media are produced,
disseminated, and interpreted. He argued that an audience does not passively accept
a message or creative work, but interprets it according to its members’ dominant cultural
background; moreover, its response possesses scope for negotiation and opposition.64
The implications of these arguments for music reception research in various cultures and
genres need to be further developed.
In the past three decades, music psychologists have researched listeners’ perception and
cognition of musical structures (such as rhythms, melodic contours, and textures) in
western classical music.65 Extensive advances have been made in the historical reception
theory of European music66 and in popular music studies, where reception issues have
regularly been addressed, among the earliest by Philip Tagg,67 but they have hardly been
touched on in studies of many other kinds of musical events.
Modern music psychologists distinguish between various ways in which audiences
listen, ranging from the theoretical type of listening to western classical music (which
needs to be learned through aural training) to the acts of spontaneous listening in most
other genres and cultures. Musicologists have normally tackled listening in
a predominantly structuralist fashion, yet a ‘little reflection . . . leads one to realize that
a good deal of music perception is contingent, situational, and subject to biases of culture
and experience’.68

Indeed it will be hard to deny that all music reception involves ‘biases of culture and
experience’ . . . A number of authors have recently argued for the potential of an
ecological approach to listening, in which the relation between the perceiver and the
environment (natural and cultural) is taken to be fundamental. Central is the idea that
perceptual information specifies objects and events in the world, and that perception
and action are indissolubly linked.69

64 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart
Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980/1973), 128 –38.
65 Clarke et al., Music and Mind, 66.
66 Mark Everist, ‘Reception Theories, Canonic Discourses and Musical Value’, in Rethinking Music, ed.
Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 378 –402.
67 Philip Tagg, ‘Analyzing Popular Music’, Popular Music 2 (1982), 37–65.
68 Robert Gjerdingen, ‘An Experimental Music Theory?’, in Cooke and Everist (eds), Rethinking Music, 168.
69 Eric F. Clarke, ‘What’s Going On: Music, Psychology, and Ecological Theory’, in The Cultural Study of Music:
A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 336.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 205

Reception studies thus need to gauge the effect on the audience of the environment,
including the location, architecture, and acoustics of the building or open space in which
the event is held, and to note the rituals engaged in by the audience before, during, and
after a performance,70 when its members’ critical judgements are open to revision.
Audience behaviour, expectations, and reception in commercial pop concerts are
naturally very different in western classical music concerts, when audiences sit still in
darkened concert halls and express their reaction to a performance by their applause at the
end of a piece. Popular music audiences are much less reserved, expressing their physical,
motor, and emotional response to a performance in an extrovert way during and after
a performance, while jazz audiences characteristically clap after each solo.

A Performative Case Study

I shall now apply my four-level performativity methodology in an Acehnese case study,
which: describes the music and dance performed; comments on its execution; refers to
interaction between performers and audience (including judges); and discusses the
contributions of the many stakeholders, and refers to many of the above-mentioned
performative terms and concepts. The study is based on my interviews with and
observations of a song – dance troupe named Sanggar Kuta Alam71 whose rehearsals and
performance I recorded in an arts competition in Aceh, Indonesia, in November 2012.72
According to the leader, the troupe had rehearsed for many hours that week to achieve
its desired performance quality.
The troupe was fourth in a total of fifteen troupes who competed that night. Led by
their vocal soloist, a group of ten young male ratoˆh duek singer-dancers called the rakan
(‘troops’, ‘comrades’) filed in line onto the stage and kneeled on their heels with shoulders
touching in a tight horizontal row. The two end artists leaned inwards a little to keep
members of the row upright. Their dance leader had briefed them beforehand on which
songs, movements, and body percussion to perform on the occasion, and they had
thoroughly rehearsed their routines by practising their responses to the cues of their dance
leader (made through eye contact and other body language) and the cues of their song
leader (made through the double meanings of the texts he sang). Their body language
exuded deference to the unquestioned authority of their song and dance leaders.
The lead dancer (sye`h) knelt in the middle of the row so that his rhythmically audible
body percussive cues (e.g. to change tempo or dynamic level) could be passed along to
members of the row via the assistant leader, four assistant sub-leaders, and three lower-
ranking dancers. By means of verbal allusions in his song texts, the lead singer also cued the
members of the row every time they were about to start a new song or change tempo. They
began to sing and dance with a high degree of rhythmic flow and synchronized
compactness, which they had perfected in rehearsal.
First their lead soloist sang an improvised poetic lyric to welcome members of the
audience, delighting them with his subsequent improvisatory verses about topical political

70 Christopher Small explores this aspect in Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening (Hanover, N.
H.: University Press of England, 1998).
71 As its leader requested, the real name of this troupe is not given here.
72 For a more detailed description of an Acehnese sitting song-dance performance, see Margaret Kartomi, ‘Some
Implications of Local Concepts of Space in the Dance, Music and Visual Arts of Aceh’, Yearbook for
Traditional Music 36 (2004), 12– 38.
206 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

personages, and his ornamented melodic surprises. While swaying continually to left and
right the troupe then sang a response. Between songs, the artists performed body
percussion episodes—snapping their fingers, clapping their hands, and beating their
thighs, knees, and lower shoulders and on the floor. They performed with a high degree of
precision and compactness (kekompakan), indeed with virtually perfect entrainment. After
accelerating the tempo to very fast, they ended each section with a sudden halt.
The audience showed its appreciation by paying close attention to their every sound and
movement. They called out appreciative comments when surprised by a particularly
beautiful turn of phrase, alluring rhythmic motive, or melodic ornamental passage.
This increased the performers’ confidence and enjoyment of the occasion. Members of the
jury were clearly impressed, as indicated by their broader than usual smiles.
Kneeling in the middle of the row, the dance leader then cued the group to start singing
a new melody set to the second verse of the song with a novel body percussion rhythm.
In the most highly improvisatory sections the lead singer continually astonished the
audience with his improvised jokes, ironic or sarcastic social and political comments and
critiques, and impressive vocal embellishments, while the chorus again achieved near
perfect entrainment in its singing, dancing and body-percussion via their leader’s cueing
system. The lead singer also improvised clever answers in song to questions (about love,
religion, etc.) that had been posed in the previous team’s songs, as required by the
competition regulations. With loud body claps he finally cued them to change the tempo to
very fast and the dynamic level to very loud before coming to a sudden halt.
At the end of the night, the members of the jury went to the microphone and
commented critically on each troupe’s performance. When they came to the Kuta Alam
troupe they commended the litheness and entrainment of their body percussion and dance
movements, their old and newly improvised song texts, the skilful application of
improvisatory techniques to well-known and new melodies, and the stamina (keuleten),
cooperativeness ( peseduren), and entrainment or ‘compactness’ (kerempaken, kekompakan)
of the troupe’s singing, dance movements, and body-clapping rhythms, especially when
accelerating to a remarkably fast tempo. They also praised their responsiveness
( penjeweban) to their opponents’ rhythmic and textual challenges ( pemulewan), their
ability to pose new challenges to the next performing troupe, and their distinctive identity
(kepribadian).73 The jury mentioned that they had made a few mistakes but had lost fewer
marks than the other troupes. Deeming the Kuta Alam troupe to be the most disciplined
and creative of all, they announced that they had won first prize, to a full minute of
audience applause and calls.
After their performance, I asked the individual artists how difficult it was to learn the
complex, interweaving, bodily movements and respond to the cues in rehearsal. They
answered that at times they cannot help accidentally hurting each other (e.g. banging their
heads together) when learning to perform, so they start slowly and gradually build up
speed. I also asked whether all the participants could keep up their high level of discipline
while performing the strenuous body percussion routines. They answered that a fellow
performer had voluntarily left the troupe because he could not keep up with the art form’s
strenuous physical demands, and that another had been asked to leave because he lacked
discipline and attended rehearsals irregularly. They attributed their success in part to their
intimate physical and emotional bonding with each other as they synchronized the
strenuous body percussion routines, dance movements and songs, in part to their shared

73 All foreign words in this section are given in the Indonesian language.
 Margaret Kartomi, Music Performativity Research 207

highs and lows in winning and losing competitions, and in part to their audiences’
expressions of appreciation. They were likely, they said, to remain friends for life.
Members of the jury commented to me later on the vigour and effective interaction of
the troupe’s performance which contributed to its ‘special identity’, or persona. They felt
that the leader’s singing voice was more beautiful and his melodious improvisatory style
and humorously improvised lyrics were more creative than in other groups and that their
dance and body percussion style was more lively. They also commented on the skill of the
lead dancer, who continually excited the audience by cueing the row of dancers to
accelerate their singing, dancing, and body percussion to an extremely fast tempo, followed
by a sudden stop.
Because performative individualism is not highly prized in the society, the qualities of
musicality, talent, and giftedness were not even mentioned. The operative qualities were
the troupe’s identity or persona, performance competence, group interaction,
improvisatory techniques, cueing, group intersubjectivity, entrainment, and the reception
of the audience. These factors encapsulate the key performative values of the culture.

Conclusion
The limited amount of research into music performativity carried out to date has drawn
attention to the need to develop a potentially comprehensive methodology with which to
document and analyse the complex issues involved. The four-level research model
suggested above investigates: the actual choices of music presented at performance events;
the attributes of particular performing groups; the groups’ effects on their audiences and
vice versa; and the contributions of all the stakeholders to the artistic and financial success
of a performance.
This methodology is applied in the above Acehnese case study, which describes the
music and dance performed, comments on its execution, refers to interaction between
performers and audience (including judges), and describes the contributions of the many
stakeholders. It discusses most of the above-mentioned issues that impact on
performance—persona, competence and group interaction, improvisatory practices and
cueing, emotion and intersubjectivity, entrainment, and reception—but not individualistic
qualities of musicality, talent, and giftedness, which Acehnese do not prize.
There are three main types of performativity research: that which performers
themselves believe or write about their performances; that which music scholars—most of
whom are former or current performers—write or say about others’ performances; and that
of performer-scholars who write about their work. Despite their different kinds of
outcomes, ranging from documented live and recorded performances to published research
findings, the three groups share much methodological common ground. The first pole of
activity involves the ‘performer’s analysis’ of select pieces of music and interpretations of
them in practice sessions that culminate in performances and annotated recordings.
The second involves ‘scholar’s analysis’ of designated research problems such as the music’s
structure and style that culminates in published outcomes. And the third combines the
other two. The partly different methodologies and their partly different research outcomes
are complementary.
When eventually the results of a sufficient number of studies in various genres and
cultures have been made, researchers will be able to compare them systematically and draw
useful cross-genre and cross-cultural conclusions from them. Such findings are likely to
208 Musicology Australia vol. 36, no. 2, 2014

lead to new knowledge and understandings of the nature and processes of music
performativity and its place in human life.

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Daniela Kaleva most warmly for stimulating her interest in music performativity and
for organizing the first Australian conference on the topic in November 2012. Thanks also to John Whiteoak for
his suggestions, and to Jane Davidson, Karen Thomas, Bronia Kornhauser, Joel Crotty, Paul Watt, and the
anonymous reviewers for their insightful critical readings of this article.

Author Biography
Margaret Kartomi is Professor of Music at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University. She has
published widely on aspects of western and non-western music cultures, including youth orchestras and theoretical
issues in musicology. Her current Australian Research Council-funded research project is on the changing
identity and sustainability of the music cultures and worldviews of the Riau Islands’ Sea Nomads and Sedentary
Malays. Her most recent book is Musical Journeys in Sumatra (University of Illinois Press, 2012).

E-mail: margaret.kartomi@monash.edu