Performing Beethoven’s musical dynamics

Abstract

Twentieth-century musicology frequently invoked the music of Beethoven to validate its work-centred, textualist and structuralist agenda. This article re-orients Beethoven’s music towards the performance studies paradigm, which places the music making body and material contexts of performing at the centre of its disciplinary epistemology, by weaving a novel discursive context around the composer’s unusual dynamics markings. Through a historical case study of the premiere of his Op. 70 No. 2 piano trio, I explore the connections between the performance experience of Beethoven’s dynamics and some of the philosophical and cultural discourses emerging in Europe during the early nineteenth century on the body and the self, and thereby construct novel meanings for his expressive performance practice. By bringing together interdisciplinary historical scholarship, phenomenological reflection, analytical thought and practice-based enquiry, I open up a neglected area of research that lies at the intersection of the performance experience of musical dynamics, sensory history and somatic musical archeology.

Art-cycle model: a holistic approach toward artistic experience in music performance

“…Apart from the controversies, the impact of autoethnography is understandable given the flexibility of the method in embracing not only individual but also collective contexts (including Doğantan-Dack, 2012;Armstrong & Desbruslais, 2014;Sutherland, 2015) across different musical genres -from Western art music (Benetti, 2017) and pop (Kennett, 2008), to jazz and blues (Spry, 2010), punk rock and hardcore rock (Attfield, 2011). Furthermore, contemporary forms of recording, documenting and disseminating have become attractive to researchers due to the needs arising from the artistic nature of the object of scientific study, such as audio-collage and creative writing (narrative fiction, creative non-fiction, ethnodrama, poetry) (Wiley, 2019).…”