The World According to Musical Performance

Abstract

The changing relationship between disciplinary and performative elements in musical performance practice is a fundamental process, which engenders essential changes in musical performance. Not so much the arrival of new electronic music devices, globalization, or the Internet as such, but the distinction between personal achievement and having performative potential creates new types of musical performers and new types of musical performances. It is the difference between performing something for its own sake, and performing something from the perspective of its effectiveness in a particular situation and compared to other concepts. Considered in a wider perspective, this change of relationship between values seems an indication that we are leaving the Foucauldian paradigm of discipline and are moving toward a society in which performance related aspects become the essential factor in forming discourse and from which knowledge and power are constructed. Change in the structures of musical performance is considered from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory. Change is a result of musical performance's connection with the environment of which the most defining quality is instability. This causes constant pressure for the musical performance system to organize adjustments. In considering the structures that enable these adjustments, the focus concerns change in relationship with boundary construction.