Aneirin Hirashiki
RSCH 201
Professor Gibson
3/3/2024
Article Analysis Creative Arts Article
In the article “Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto”, the author talks
about how music should be considered an academic performance. In music, the performance is
an important part that is deeper than just the music itself. It involves stage presence, audience
participation, and the meaning behind the lyrics. Philip Auslander wants to inform people that
music is just as important as math, English and science. Auslander states, “The principal journals
in the field seldom publish articles about music as performance or musicians as performers and
only a small number of papers on these topics are presented at conferences” (Auslander 2004).
He believes that music should be its own scholar subject, and that it needs to be mentioned more
in performance articles.
The author’s main idea for this article is to show the importance of incorporating music
and musical theatre, in an academic setting. He wanted to show how music could be looked at
from different perspectives, not just as a performing art. Auslander says,
“Scholars whose primary concern is with analyzing performances, whom one might
expect to be more open to the nonliterary aspects of performance, are no more willing
than traditional theatre historians to bring opera into the fold” (Auslander 2004).
The author makes it clear that people who study performance and traditional theatre don’t add
opera into their studies. One scholar by the name of Patrice Pavis says that it is easier to break
down and analyze theatrical performances, by separating them into different parts. Patrice Pavis
says,
“Despite the richness and diversity of opera’s signs and sources it lends itself poorly to an
enumeration of its materials. Under the influence of musical and gestural rhythm, these
elements have fused, mixing and melding together what seem to be opposing elements:
speech and music, time and space, the voice and the body, movement and stasis”
(Auslander 2004).
Compared to theatre, opera adds more elements, making it harder to break down. If you were to
break down opera, you would need to break down the different parts and everything else that is
in opera. For example, you would need to break down the way they talk, why they chose these
types of music, and the meaning behind body movements and what it is trying to portray. The
author knows that there is a difference between theatre and musical performance. When
performance is mentioned, it usually talks about theatre, dance, and film. However, as Auslander
stated, they don’t bring music into the genre of performance.
As Philip Auslander is questioning if music should be a scholarly subject or if it should
be left as its own separate category. The author argues that he believes that music should be
considered a scholarly subject. Auslander goes on to say, “Theatre studies generally stake out its
territory in such a way as to exclude music, and scholars in performance studies seem
unfortunately to have inherited this unwillingness to deal with musical forms” (Auslander 2004).
People who study theatre purposefully try to make ways to remove music from performance
studies. Scholars come up with ways to remove music from being in performance research.
Auslander later says,
“The score desk is an artifact of the traditional perception of music described by
Christopher Small, a way of thinking that locates ‘the essence of music and whatever
meanings it contains...in those things called musical works...’ not in performances of those
works” (Auslander 2004).
This shows that music is separated from performance studies and musical studies.
Philip wants to close the bridge between musical studies and the study of performance by
showing that they are quite similar. Both genres of study include the involvement of an audience.
They both have messages that can be interpreted and conveyed. Auslander says, “by encouraging
close readings of performances by popular musicians, readings that attend to the particulars of
physical movement, gesture, costume, and facial expression as much as voice and musical
sound.” Just like how studying performance can be broken down, so can music. There are things
in music that can be broken down and understood. Since performance, whether it be musical
performance or theatrical performance, it all comes down to the audience. In a way the audience
has a relationship with the performer. Auslander says,
“The real person is the dimension of performance to which the audience has the least
direct access, since the audience generally infers what the performer is like as a real
person from his performance persona and the characters he portrays” (Auslander 2004).
The audience can only guess what the performer is like. They don’t know for sure what the artist
is really like. This is because in our eyes, the performer is only showing a filtered version of
themselves. We can make assumptions about who they are based on how they act but even then,
it may not be true.
This article is different from the humanities and science articles because the science
article was based on more quantitative research and experiment based. The humanities and
creative arts article use qualitative research. The humanities research paper is more based on
putting theories to the test, and the creative arts is based on how the different performers
performed. The author is also proving his point through their performances. In the textbook
(Hark 19) says, “using music to understand the construction of meaning and provide insights to
social understandings,” is another art-based research method. The arts article talks about the
different performances. To prove each performance, we can just look at the performers to prove
this author’s opinion. In the scientific article tests are run and experiments are done, to prove a
fact. If the experiment goes wrong, there is a bigger risk, and this can ruin whatever the
researchers were researching for. However, in this opinionated paper things can change based on
the performance of the performer.
In “Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto,” wants music to be
recognized for academics as a performance art. He argues that music captures more than just the
audience themselves. It’s about the audience’s engagement, and the meaning behind the lyrics of
the song. Philip goes against scholars and academic sources that remove and overlook music in
performance studies, even though music has history and culture behind it. He goes onto say that
music should be treated the same way math and literature are treated. Philip challenges the
separation of music from performance studies, saying that they find ways to take music out of
their analyses. He explains that there needs to be a more inclusive way to add music to their
studies because of how diverse musical performances are. When looking closer to popular music,
he suggests that there are deeper parts of music that can be discovered, such as deeper meaning
or greater significance. In Philip’s manifesto, it serves to close the dividing bridge between
musical performance and performance studies. It’s also a way of trying to put music into
academic environments. His goal is to help others understand how complex music can be, and
how it is an expressive art form that is worth getting scholarly attention.
