Musical Performance and Audiences

Without a doubt, performance is the oldest form of musical activity, but its origins are difficult to pinpoint. Steven J. Mithen posits a series of cultural "sparks" during the middle-upper Paleolithic transition, culminating in the first appearances of art objects in Europe some forty thousand years ago. Basing his theories on the work of cognitive scientists, Mithen argues that these sparks resulted from the coalescing of several human intelligences—technical, natural history, social, and linguistic—which in turn opened the door to the development of artistic and religious practices. Although archaeologists have discovered instruments made from mammoth bones in 18,000 B.C.E., the oldest known forms of written music survive on Mesopotamian clay tablets dating from at least 3,000 to 2,000 years B.C.E. Other tablets of the same era make reference to instrumentalists and singers. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, c. 2400 B.C.E., comprise the earliest surviving representations of performing musicians. The ancient Greeks also depicted music-making (and listening); figure 2 portrays a young woman playing the aulos for a reclining male guest. Besides illustrating music as entertainment, Greek iconography also depicts other broad categories of musical performances, such as music for dance and music in support of religious beliefs.

Performance as background activity.

The convention of an audience gathering specifically to listen to a scheduled musical event is a relatively modern phenomenon. Historically, much musical entertainment was presented at the convenience of its patrons, while many other forms of music-making were (and still are) almost entirely subordinate to some other fore-ground Figure 3. A man dressed as a komuso (beggar priest) plays a flute-like shakuhachi. Photograph c. 1901–1920. © UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD/CORBIS purpose, such as worship, dancing, military maneuvers, and other activities.

Music in religious observance. Cultures all over the world incorporate music into their sacred and ceremonial activities. Jews and early Christians both made use of chant in their devotions, regarding this as a means of uplifting the mind as well as a method of worship. In the Fuke sect of Japanese Buddhism, komuso (beggar priests) play the flute-like shakuhachi (figure 3), not as an instrument per se, but rather as a spiritual tool that assists its player in reaching enlightenment. In contrast, the West African Ewe people believe they are guided through life by ancestral spirits, so a musician often regards music-making as his destiny, thanks to the inherited spirit of an ancestor who has determined the course of his life. An Ewe funeral is a celebratory affair because its ritual drumming, singing, and dancing enable the soul to become an ancestral spirit. According to Charlotte J. Frisbee, the Navajo Indians make a semantic distinction between "performing," which is the music-making during ceremonies, and "playing," which describes all other forms of musical activity. Music is even more deeply imbedded in the intertribal Native American Church; its adherents view music itself as prayer. Music as a function Figure 4. A field show presented by the marching band of the University of California, Los Angeles. ALYSON MCLAMORE of religious observance is by no means universal; for instance, music is forbidden in the Algerian Mozabite Muslim sect.

Music and dance. Music is also almost always an essential component of dance (and, indeed, dance and religion go hand in hand in many cultures). Customarily, music is subsidiary to the movements of the dancers, even though it controls (or reflects) their actions to varying degrees. In its simplest form, music for dance maintains the beat and tempo; various other aspects of the musical performance might guide more nuanced gestures. By actions such as foot stamping, whistling, clapping, or singing, the dancers themselves might produce the accompanimental music. Filipino Bontok musicians of Sadanga, Luzon, when playing gangsa (flat gongs) sound the gongs with sticks and dance in circles and spirals. More commonly, dancers move while stationary musicians perform, as in a processional Renaissance dance performed at a fifteenth-century Burgundian wedding. The shawm and sackbut players stand in an elevated side gallery apart from the dancers, and their status as "background" performers is reinforced visually by their plain, matching tunics.

Music in the military. Since antiquity, as armies grew too large for vocal commands to be heard, a system of musical signals was adopted by various military groups. Some of these "calls" regulated the soldiers' daily activities, ranging from the early-morning reveille to the bedtime tattoo; other forms of music passed along orders during battle. Military musical ensembles also supported morale among the troops, and although live musicians have seldom been used during actual warfare since the early twentieth century, many military units still use bands as a public-relations bridge feature, thereby moving their musical performances to the "foreground." In North America, in particular, the military bands influenced the development of various school ensembles; these ensembles consist of not only stationary "concert" bands of wind players and percussionists, but also marching bands. The mobile marching ensembles perform in two main contexts: street parades, in which they perform music while passing in front of viewers (who therefore hear only a portion of a work before the band passes out of hearing range), and field shows (see figure 4), in which the band members create elaborate designs and patterns with their bodies while playing.

Music in other contexts. Musical performance has functioned as a backdrop to many other forms of human activity, ranging from lullabies sung to infants to children's games to banquet music to the elaborate vocal and orchestral performances that entertained strolling patrons in eighteenth-century Georgian pleasure gardens (see figure 5). The French composer Erik Satie was fascinated by the possibilities of what he called musique d'ameublement (furniture music), which was intended to be ignored, but found in 1920 that it was difficult to keep audiences talking and moving about while musicians were performing at a drawing exhibition. Nevertheless, modern-day shoppers seem to have little difficulty in ignoring live pianists playing in department stores, undoubtedly conditioned to this lack of response by the prevalence of recorded Muzak and other forms of "canned" environmental music.

Performance as foreground focus.

Many cultures that use music for background purposes also host activities in which artistic music-making is the primary focus of the enterprise. Since the music itself commands attention, these endeavors might collectively be labeled "art music," although the term "classical music" is often used interchangeably. ("Popular music," in contrast, usually puts less emphasis on artistry and more focus on commercial qualities; in individual cases, of course, the level of artistic achievement in popular music may be extremely high.) In many instances, specialized venues (music rooms, concert halls, theaters) have been built to accommodate performances of art music (in figure 6, see Thomas Mace's 1676 plans for a dedicated "Musick-Roome"). Nevertheless, within art music's concert and theatrical presentations, the type of musical activity can vary widely; musicians might improvise freely or provide their own interpretations of traditional repertory, or, at the opposite extreme, they may be endeavoring to recreate a preexisting musical artwork as exactly as possible. Correspondingly, performers are viewed varyingly as free agents, composers' interpreters or "ambassadors," and even automatons.

Improvisation as performance. Various music education methodologies, such as Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's eurythmics or the Orff-Schulwerk pioneered by Carl Orff, allow children to improvise freely on instruments or vocally, which appears to be a natural tendency of childhood exploratory development. In most cultures, however, audiences expect improvisers to be highly trained experts in their media, and thus the improvised portions of performances carry great prestige; the cadenzas in concertos, the "solos" in jazz works, and the taqsīm in Arabic and Turkish music are all highlights for listeners. In both Western and non-Western traditions, some performers may study with masters for many years before embarking on their first public improvisations. Performers in other cultures may adopt entirely different attitudes toward improvisation, however; through fasting and self-torture, North American Plains Indians seek visions in which new songs might appear to them, whereas Pima Indians regard improvisation as a process of "unraveling" the songs already present in the supernatural world. Of course, due to its spontaneous and unnotated nature, improvisation is one of the most difficult aspects of music to study historically.

Re-creative performance.In contrast to improvisation—or, sometimes, in partnership with it—much musical performance is the (re-)enactment of a piece according to predetermined specifications. In some traditions, the musical works are conveyed via oral transmission and rote mimicry, while other cultures have developed various forms of musical notation to guide performances (see figure 7 for a manuscript excerpt from a chorus of Thomas Linley's 1777 oratorio The Song of Moses). For performers, however, any score—the handwritten or printed record of a composer's intentions—is incapable of telling the "whole story." Just as in the case of skilled improvisers, musicians performing from scores usually need substantial prior training to understand the conventions of a particular style of music before they are considered ready for public performance.