Transcript of a roundtable discussion convened as part of the Middlesex University Music Department One-day conference, held at the University on 20th May 2000. The title of the roundtable was: Comparative Music Praxes: Issues and Concepts, Debates and Dilemmas.

The following participants contributed:

Michael Bridger (MB - Chair); Stephen Cottrell (SC); Michael Frith (MF); John Harborne (JH); Roger Heaton (RH); Colin Lawson (CL); Allan Moore (AM); Eddie Parker (EP); John Rink (JR).

The roundtable began with a short paper from Stephen Cottrell.

SC: It is clear from the papers we have heard today that the study of musical performance covers a particularly wide intellectual area. Indeed, given that music appears to be a human universal, that is, there is no culture we have yet found which does not perform something that we in the West would describe as music we can see that performance studies represents a potentially wide-ranging and significant field of academic discourse.

It is also the case that performance studies, as a sub-component of western musicology, is in some ways a relatively young field. Whereas one might trace its parental discipline back over more than a hundred years, 'performance studies' as such seems to have come particularly to the fore in the last few decades, when, as John Rink points out in the introduction to his book 'The Practice of Performance' there has been 'a virtual explosion in scholarly writing about musical performance'. Professor Rink notes particularly the ever-expanding literature on historically informed performance practice, the psychology of performance, the relationship between analysis and performance, and the study of 'interpretation', broadly defined.

While not disagreeing with any of this, I would like to start by observing that the term 'performance studies', often like the term 'music' itself, is in danger of becoming somewhat loaded, replete with an implied sub-text about what the term actually describes. So often when certain musicologists speak of music, 'the history of music', or 'the importance of music', what they actually mean but do not say is 'the western art music tradition', and so the term 'music' becomes a synonym for that particular tradition, rather than the more all-bracing term it should actually be. I worry that there is a danger that the term 'performance studies' is becoming similarly loaded. For example, Jonathan Dunsby's book 'Performing Music: Shared Concerns' is nothing of the sort, since there is not one reference to any musical style other than the western classical tradition, nor any rider or indication anywhere in the text that such inter-disciplinary or cross-cultural issues have been considered. Concerns, therefore, shared by whom, exactly? Again, what is implied but not stated, is the shared concerns of those performing WAM. Likewise the book I mentioned a moment ago 'The Practice of Performance', which, while being a very significant contribution to the discipline, contains only studies on issues relating to WAM. While I hope it is clear that I am not in any way denigrating the importance or value of either of these books, I would simply urge that the term 'performance studies' should be thought of as being fully inclusive of other musical genres, and that such philosophy be demonstrated in the actual practice of studying musical performance. It may be that developing the notion of 'comparative music praxes' could be an important step towards that.

When one reads some of these books and studies, however, it becomes clear that 'performance studies' as a discipline is a rather disparate field, drawing on methodologies derived not only from within western musicology (music theory and analysis, for example) but also from a number of adjacent academic disciplines, of which cognitive psychology would be one significant example. Nobody by now will be surprised that I should bring an ethnomusicological slant upon all of this, but I can't help noticing that this 'fragmentation' of the discipline, in which various approaches and methodologies are invoked in the cause of studying the act of musical performance which is at the heart of the discipline itself, is in some ways analogous to ethnomusicology, the advocates of which are expected to grapple with ideas from sociology, social and cultural anthropology, cultural theory, as well as cognitive and social psychology, and the obvious overlaps in critical theory and New Musicology. Indeed, I have heard one eminent ethnomusicologist offer 'the study of the musical performance event' as a loose but useful definition of what ethnomusicology actually is.

I offer this brief analogy in part because there is another connection with ethnomusicology which is particularly relevant to today's conference on comparative music praxes, and that is that in its earlier incarnation before the Second World War, what we now describe as ethnomusicology was in fact called 'comparative musicology'. I have no intention of turning this into a lecture on the history of ethnomusicology, but suffice it to say that part of the motivation behind this description was because scholars were comparing the various (and at that time, for them newly-discovered) musical traditions of the world, not only with each other, but also with the WAM tradition with which they were so familiar (and, incidentally, approaches drawn from the psychology of music were at the root of all this, providing another intriguing resonance).

So my next observation would be that in attempting to formulate a broader approach to the study of musical performance, we must at least be aware of some of the work already done in this area by ethnomusicologists and certain others, such as sociologists or cultural theorists, who have also at times put the study of musical performance under their own particular spotlights; not only in terms of musical perception and cognition, but also in areas such as the consideration of musical performance as process rather than act, or, to take another example, in the social aspects of musical performance.

Equally, of course, one would hope that other fields might benefit from the advances made so far within the discipline of performance studies itself. But there are problematic issues here, which in part, I think, stem from the continuing importance attached to the musical score. Much work on performance in the WAM tradition remains dependent on the score in some way or other, either because it provides some kind of benchmark (real or ideal) against which different performances may be measured or compared, or because it serves as the basis for considerations of analytical structures of one sort or another, or perhaps because scholars can pore over the minutiae of the composer's and/or editor's detail and consider their importance for performers, etc., etc. These kinds of approaches would seem inevitably diminished in those areas where there is no score, or where the score fulfils very different functions. In jazz, of course, the score, such as it is, may provide only cursory performance instructions, albeit ones which may be followed in highly practised ways. In rock and pop music the score may be little more than an annotated sheet of lyrics, written out post-hoc after what might be an essentially collaborative compositional period, and yet which may be recreated, paradoxically, in far more rigorous or unvarying ways in the performance situation than their WAM equivalents. Some non-Western traditions do have notated performance instructions of one sort or another; many others, of course, are non-literate, although this does not necessarily imply the music is improvised. All of this requires us to think very carefully about the relationship between the performers and whatever it is they take to be the guiding principles behind their actions. And it certainly makes the notion of comparison between these different genres, in this area at least, rather more difficult.

No doubt some of these issues will surface again in the next hour. But to finish this brief offering, I might note that the term 'comparative music praxes' throws up numerous difficult questions: what exactly is it we seek to compare, and on what grounds? How can we be sure such comparisons are valid, or even meaningful? Are there any musical genres which might be specifically excluded from such an approach, and why? And what is included under the term musical praxis? Performance, obviously. But are not activities such as composition or analysis also types of musical practice? And if so, where does one begin to draw the line in all of this...?

The questions are easy to formulate, but the answers much more difficult to come by. That is why I am going to stop here and leave those challenges for everybody else...

JR: One of our difficulties is what does the term 'performance studies' actually cover? It could be very inclusive and involve the study of any activity that involved performance, or one could try to limit the term to what the performer does, how the performer conceives music, so that it becomes very performer centred. I think that would be a useful way to start off. This is something that came up at the Southampton conference, this distinction between the fully inclusive....In which case it may not be a useful term at all. We were doing all of these things before, we're now doing new things, so why pretend that there's a discipline out there - it's just a lot of things to do with performance. Whereas it may be a useful concept if the accent is on what the performer does, the choices in interpretation and what informs them.

CL: I'm reminded by that of an experience I had a couple of years ago at an interview, where there was a very eminent member of the performance studies coterie on the other side of the table, and I said to him, rather naively, that the trouble with performance studies was that most performers didn't understand what was going on. And he replied, well does it matter? And I thought afterwards well yes, are we talking pure or applied here.

JH: I think the biggest problem with academic studies overall, is the fact that some of the way things are talked about, some of the terminology that's used, excludes the people they are talking about. Musicians can't understand what academics are talking about. And it also excludes members of the general public who might be interested in these things. I realise how difficult it is to talk about these things, how do you verbalise these things? It's really difficult to talk about them, and write about them, but I think this is something that should be addressed, it's important.

MB: One of the things that has struck me today is the breadth of styles that have been covered. We've had early music, pop, Latin, western art music, electronic music, and that delights me. But of course there's no reason why things shouldn't simply happen in their own separate boxes, and the problem in my mind is what is gained by actually comparing these things, bringing them into some common forum? Is it actually best to just leave them out there getting on with their own thing?

CL: No, because it's good for us to meet and discuss these things. At the moment we're playing a series of little games. We go to conferences and give papers, then other people ask difficult questions and get some brownie points, and then I go back to Goldsmiths, some students give some recitals, I mark them out of a hundred which in global terms is a useless activity, listening to someone play for half-an-hour and giving them a mark out of a hundred, it's absolutely crackers! But if we can dismantle some of this and talk to each other...communication to me is absolutely at the heart of this.

JR: Well, I think what it does is prevents us from attributing truth value to what we're doing in our own little boxes. I don't think it means that we shouldn't do what we do in our own little boxes, you have to. It's part of an institutional exercise and that's why we get a monthly pay-cheque! Let's not be too coy about that. The point is not to dilute what we're doing in the separate boxes, but to prevent us from claiming that what we are doing represents reality across the board.

AM: I actually think that point about what we do, in order to get the pay-cheque, is quite fundamental. Because that is the one commonality across all these styles that we're looking at. This is an end for the vast majority of performers, and therefore to compare the different strategies that musicians in different styles adopt either in order to make that work for their benefit or perhaps to try and enable them to ignore that that's the reason they're doing it, is actually one very good reason for such a comparative study.

CL: But I think there is a danger of standardising the response to the pay cheque in that. Every one of my colleagues has a different view of the pay-cheque, I suspect. Clearly it's in the back of my mind at Goldsmiths, but I'm very interested in all the things that I do.

AM: Oh sure. But I'm thinking about performing musicians who perform only. Now for many of them it is only at the back of their mind, but what's the difference between those for whom it's at the back of their mind and those for whom it is not? And is that a difference which is within particular style practices or that goes across styles? And what effect does that have?

JH: I think if you asked any professional performing musician, the ones for whom the financial considerations were at the back of their mind are those who are in regular employment and didn't have to worry about it too much. And as soon as you don't have very much work those considerations go straight to the front.

CL: Sure. But it was the monthly pay cheque we were particularly discussing...

RH: Something that is happening in Higher Education, and probably in the so-called new universities rather than the older ones, is the way in which degrees are changing. The whole way it's being taught and assessed is changing, certainly where I teach, and it's being modelled more on what happens in the real world. As a performing musician, as a useful skill-based musician actually going out and being employed. Whereas doing a course that looks at Josquin and does Schenker and set-theory and something else, means that the only thing you can do is carry on giving that to other people. It's not an employable skill. The first situation is all well and good but is it still a discipline? Is it a degree situation that can be structured and marked? Is it an intellectual activity or is it an apprentice scheme?

JR: Another way of inflecting this has to do with an RAE mentality. We may be driving towards defining a discipline partly because it has value in that exercise. That was once said to me, that the analysis in performance area had taken off because people realised that analysis as a discipline was dead, and we no longer believed in works etc., and what we could now do was study analysis in performance. And I took exception to this, because I actually wrote my undergraduate dissertation more than 20 years ago on analysis in performance, long before it was at all fashionable, or necessary from the RAE standpoint. But I think there's a ring of truth about that.

CL: We're getting a lot of mixed messages from the government on all of this, I think, on the status of performance. You write an article for Music and Letters which is peer-reviewed and that's ok. You go away and make a CD, perhaps because you've managed to get £10,000 from somebody and put it on a good label, is that peer review or not? Anything to do with performance is difficult to quantify, and therefore causes problems for the boffins.

MB: Yes, the notion of academic respectability.

EP: Isn't this something to do with the kind of society we find ourselves living in, and what we want it to be as well. There's another thing which we all share here, which is that most of us are involved in music, and in teaching music, because somehow we believe that's going to do some good in the world. The situation we find ourselves in now is a multi-cultural society, it means there are a lot of conflicting value systems going on, there are a lot of competing specialisms and bodies of knowledge. We were talking earlier about the fact that you may spend many years of your life learning a discipline, and for some reason it has to get shelved, it's no longer appropriate. But nevertheless we still have all that knowledge there. But what's it there for? Habermas said something about societies need to have not only the materialistic things, but they also need to have some way of motivating themselves otherwise they go into tailspin; motivation crisis is how he characterised it. And I think that's part of what we're doing. Being involved in music in whatever way is contributing to that layer of stuff which makes human beings human beings. And I think that also goes back to the stone age as well, the fact that a flute will not keep you warm, but it will help to try and make sense of the world. What happens now is that we're in a situation where there seem to be hundreds of specialisms and cultures and we're trying to make sense of it all. So I would broaden the whole thing out to include all kinds of musical experiences, not just performing. I don't think that performance skills will ever be replaced. The fact that people can sample things and put them into a sequencer and then speed them up so that it sounds fantastic doesn't go against the fact that there is a need for highly refined performance skills. Digital skills, hours of playing scales and so on. They'll never be replaced. But all the stuff that goes into how you form ideas about music, and what you perform, and how listeners experience music, that's the business of this...

MB: Part of the initiative for this arising here is because in Middlesex we do have the jazz course and a more conventional music programme sitting alongside each other, and we have a sonic arts programme, and it seems to me that what ought to be happening at Middlesex is to look across the boundaries there. Not that this is a unique situation, there are other combinations of programmes like that. So it is useful to have this sort of discussion to check that we're doing something worthwhile, even though we're not quite sure what it is yet, and to begin to define how it might work. I'm not quite sure what we would end up with. What sort of new concepts and jargon we might develop to deal with it. What it would reveal, I've really no idea...

JH: I'd be interested to know whether people think that the notion of making it inclusive of all kinds of music is actually practical.

MB: Well that's one of the issues.

JH: If I'm going to start trying to explain to people what I've discovered about playing Latin American music, maybe the technical details of what's going on in that music, because of where I come from and maybe where everybody else comes from, I'm going to couch that in terms of a western musician. So immediately western art music is reinforced there because you're going to talk about other musics in those terms as well. Or is it possible to avoid that I wonder?

SC: I'm not sure that that's necessarily the case. The terms in which we talk about music are a currency that we can all understand. This is what Alan and I were talking about this morning, a body of music theory which we use to describe something that we are already familiar with. How useful is it to take that terminology and apply it to other fields? Well, the first level of usefulness is that it is actually a language that most people can understand, in the western world at least. My worry is that virtually everything that happens in music ultimately feeds into musical performance. Nobody composes in the abstract sense of never having their work performed. We can see analysis crossing over into performance. Even historical musicology in the sense of historically informed performances. So much of what we do feeds into musical performance, that if you then multiply that and say, not only are we going to deal with that in western art music but we're also going to deal with a similar scope of approaches in jazz, and then in non-western musics, of which there are thousands...it's just trying to sketch out the boundaries of what's included and what's not.

JR: Well you talk about things relating to performance, but let's say you take as an example a study of eighteenth-century bowing techniques, which is a purely historical endeavour, let's say, does that really belong to performance studies as a discipline? Or is it more of a historical thing? I don't think everything is necessarily related to the act of performance in the way you're suggesting. I would not necessarily want to go down the pure and applied route, distinguishing between them in that way, but that may useful to some extent. But I think we can separate out those things which don't have to do with the act of performance.

RH: I think this is why it's such a good idea to identify a performance studies discipline, because it brings together lots of different things which have been hidden in other areas.

MB: Has such a study been identified yet? Is there a body of precepts...

JR: Well I've been thinking a lot about this, whether it does mean anything at all. As I was just saying, work that focuses on the act of performance, that's the only useful way of defining it as, well discipline's too strong a word...

SC: But under that sort of definition then, composition would be ruled out, would it?

JR: Not necessarily, history certainly would come into play, but of a particular kind. Analysis obviously, etc. But we're just not trying to encompass everything.

SC: No, I agree.

JR: And I wanted to pick up on the point you made in your comments about Jonathon Dunsby's book and my own relating only to western art music, which I absolutely agree with. But there are several things to point out. One is the difficulty of getting a book published which doesn't have a really concentrated focus and a centre, and I think the forum for debate across practices is probably this kind of thing rather than in a published book. There might be a place in the world for a book, if you can get it published, that covers all kinds of different persuasions and pursuits, but it's going to be harder to get published. And it may be harder, for the same reason, for one reader to understand everything. It's hard enough even in a book like The Practice of Performance, or this new book which Colin is writing, which met with a lot of opposition from some, because they were concerned that a lot of the chapters just wouldn't make sense to readers.

SC: Which brings one back to the world of RAE and realpolitik, because of if you can't get publications out, or a significant book out...

JR: Well I find that sort of attitude very regrettable, because I have benefited enormously from research in the psychology of performance, not that one accepts everything and one can see flaws in all kinds of things, but I've found it extremely enlightening. So it's a bit of a shame to see resistance, just as it's a shame that this kind of conference isn't populated by 300 people in the audience, or the one in Southampton which attracted many fewer than a hundred. When you might have said that performance is so central to musical existence that it probably should have attracted many more than usual.

CL: Well I wonder if the possible dismissal of 18th century bowing technique offers us a clue to this, because actually technique seems to be fundamental to everything that we've talked about. If you don't have the technique you can't play it, and therefore bowing technique is very important because you won't understand 18th century music unless you have the skill...

JR: Well I wasn't dismissing it at all...

CL: No, but within this I thought you might be...

JR: Well not necessarily. It was just the way in which it was studied. I could go and look at treatises and manuscripts and all kind of things and produce something which had nothing to do with how performance took place then or might take place now.

CL: Or you might.

JR: Or I might. But when I'm in that category then of course it's relevant. Then it becomes a performance studies kind of thing.

MB: The rather narrowly defined area of technique runs into one of the themes which has run through today which is of authenticity, which I think is a very nice peg which we can hang a lot of ideas on. The idea of what is an authentic performance, an authentic idiom, an authentic musical experience...

CL: Well there are some interesting connections within this umbrella. The jazz/baroque one is often made. Improvisation, and notation which is a sketch for what's going to go on, and I'm sure there must be a lot of other interesting connections to be made, which is an argument for inclusivity.

JH: I'm still worried about comparatives, actually. I think one of the reasons they gave up calling Comparative Musicology is that because those people who came up with the new word Ethnomusicology said that they weren't doing anything that was any more comparative than any other discipline. But I think the fundamental problem is that you can't really compare the things. I don't know if you agree with me?...

SC: Well I agree with the first bit. I'm not sure that I agree that you can't compare things, but I agree that there are difficulties in comparing things which can be so fundamentally different. But there are ways into that. Somebody said a moment ago if you are looking at what performers do, then that is a way of comparing things between different disciplines. The work on the psychology of musical performance tends to be very centred on western art musicians, and I understand the reasons why, but that would be another area, particularly given the very exact way in which psychologists go about their work, with their graphs, tables and statistics and so forth. That would be a way in which it would be possible to achieve comparisons between what performers are doing in different musical situations. I would also have reservations but I'm not sure that it is entirely a forlorn hope.

MF: And even if we can't actually go as far as that there is still the opportunity for individuals to gain insight on hearing how other people work in their different fields. It struck me this morning in the first paper on first, third and second person authenticity, that it was not so far removed from the different categories of authenticity defined in the philosophical study by Peter Kivy, what the composer's intention is and all that sort of thing. But these different categories of authenticity, not just confined to the now perhaps slightly discredited performance practice but broadening it out and including different definitions, the realisation that these parallel types of authenticity exist in other musical traditions, and between them, is a valuable thing that can come to light in meetings like this.

JR: The other thing that follows on from Allan's paper is that it would be very valuable to have a day called comparative performance praxes which weren't just related to music. You were talking about the dance arts and the dramatic arts and so forth with regard to this issue of authenticity. But one could construct a very interesting day when performers and people studying performers across those different fields could come together and compare notes.

MF: Which is another thing you didn't mention in your introduction, the performing arts tradition, the interdisciplinary music, dance and drama...

MB: There is a research centre here, RESCEN...

MF: ...so we're quite well placed to make a start in that field.

CL: It seems to me that the psychology of music is a classic case of something that tends to be rather self contained. I've had the opportunity to read quite a lot of papers, and they always quote each other. They don't talk about Boult or Toscanini or anybody...

JR: Well they sometimes do and its usually in an embarrassing way!

CL: ...well yes there are exceptions that prove the rule. But essentially it's a self-contained study and I think they could actually achieve a lot more by working with what I would call musicians, which I won't bother to define at the moment.

AM: That's the case with any of the abutting disciplines. There's a lot of ethnographic work on performers, but I would be surprised if very many musicologists knew of it, or did anything with it. Its simply another approach which could yield quite a lot.

JH: Maybe what the performers actually do when they play is something that has been overlooked before, in ethnomusicology.

SC: What performers actually do in what sense?

JH: In how they go about playing the music.

JR: In conceptual approach?...

JH: It's not so much that. There's been an interest in what the music was and how it was constructed. And then that interest has shifted to more of an anthropological approach. Some of my fellow students have complained that there's not much attention to what the music is itself, and what the performers are actually doing when they're playing. Anything that brings the musicians back into the centre of what's being analysed is good...

Conference participant: Are you thinking cognitively or kinaesthetically?

JH: That's a good question. I suppose both, but the cognitive things that Steve was talking about were of interest to me. When he played those four examples, in order to give four different versions of the same notes, he didn't have to increase his saxophone technique to do that, it was his conception of how to do the different versions of it which seemed to me to be a cognitive thing. I don't know anything about cognitive psychology at all, but that seems to me an area which might give some answers.

MB: We're all treading on fields we don't know too much about, but I don't think we should hesitate really.

EP: One of the reasons that all this interests me is because one of the things I do outside of here is that I run projects in schools. Educational projects leading to a performance involving not just kids in schools but a variety of client groups, with lots of very different kinds of backgrounds. Not only the clients in terms of the kids but also the teachers have a variety of backgrounds. I'm quite interested to try and identify what the 'meta-skills' are, if you like, which enable you to participate in music, which aren't necessarily locked within a particular style or genre, but can be extracted. It's tempting to talk about transferable skills these days, but which skills are they that are transferable and what for? What is the music which gets made in creative music workshops and so on, because its very often a bit of this and a bit of that. And so that's one kind of thing I'm interested in gleaning from the different kinds of specialist knowledge that are going on. And what's its value, and how does it get valued? By whose authority?

MB: This is very useful, but I'm rather conscious that we've spent quite a lot of time on the broad issue of this 'meta-subject', or 'mega-subject', whatever, that we're thinking about, and there might well be things that came up about the individual papers during the day that we should just round off.

JH: I wanted to ask John something. When you were talking about the way a great performer would do these things anyway, without reference to analysis in order to inform what they do, do you think that what you are referring to is some kind of intuition that they have about how to perform something?

JR: Yes. I've used a term 'informed intuition' in my writing to suggest that it is largely an intuitive thing but on the basis of a very solid body of knowledge and experience. We couldn't possibly claim that all the great performances that have taken place over the years have resulted from the sort of analytical processes that people like Narmour would have encouraged performers to do. That would be nonsense. But there must have been some sort of process going on in the mind of those performers that enabled them to make choices that led to the great interpretation, however we define it. 'Great' to me, of course, and not to you necessarily or somebody else. So we have to take that into account.

JH: I just wondered if you feel that there is a quality there that some musicians have?

JR: Yes, I think it's ultimately intuition. Absolutely. And what one does in the rehearsal room when you define a conception, and through a lot of work which to a considerable extent would be physical work, a physical conception, and ultimately you forget about it, and draw upon it. The psychologists talk about this thing called 'automaticity', when something becomes ingrained. You rehearse it and then you just draw upon it at a background level, you don't even think about it until you find yourself in trouble. And then you think, oh I'm approaching the climax point, here's where I've got to remember to use my third finger flat or else I'll stumble over the difficult passagework, or whatever. At that point you access and touch upon very detailed and specific knowledge, but most of it you've learnt in the practice room. Colin will correct me if I am wrong, but you just sort of forget about it. In the pianist's mind it's the sound image which takes you through the music rather than these other things.

CL: Yes. I am always saying to students the difference between rehearsing, practising and performing, and it's a lot to do with the craft and art of what one's about. You spend your time practising the scale of C major and then in the context of the performance your mind concentrates on something else.

MB: I wonder if it's true that without some level of automaticity music performance would simply be impossible. The stress is already bad enough, without switching to automatic pilot to some extent...

CL: Well I think this is very important in memorising music, the automatic bit. You hope that most of the time your fingers are just going to go.

RH: But there is the other way of doing it. A lot of performers, and one who comes to mind is Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, who, if you look at her scores, they're absolutely covered in pencil marks, all sorts of different colours and things, and she would practise her magic moments, all those things that we call intuition. You learn it, you make it work, and then you go out and do it on the stage. She would practise every moment, and it would be wonderful. It's wonderful in what it is, but one assumes that she could reproduce the magic moment, the intuitive thing, the thing that's difficult to get hold of, everywhere she went and in every performance she gave.

CL: Well you're cautioning us not to standardise our response so naturally I approve of that!

JR: But at the same time I'm sure that she retained the necessary flexibility that one would have to have, to deal with the phenomenon of the acoustic. I remember one concert I gave where I'd been practising in the hall, and had an idea of the sound, and I sat down in the concert and the first chord I played I realised it was a completely different acoustic with however many people were there. And all of the pedalling that I'd thought through, and the subtleties and so forth, just went, and I had to change it instantly on the spot. Now whether that was a good performance or not I can't say, but that's very important.

JH: When I was talking about intuition I was thinking more in terms of the reasons that a person would make those, even if they were already prearranged magic moments, and they were going to do this and this was their show, like a cabaret almost, the reasons why they would decide that they were going to take that particular point. I'm not saying it would have to be a spontaneous thing, in performance, but something in the music that they bring out, and why they choose to do that.

JR: I would say that it's not intuitive, that kind of thing, it's on the basis of something they've learnt, maybe early on from a teacher that they've imitated. I don't think there are any instincts in performance, or not many. There are very few musical elements of expression which are truly natural and innate, most of them are encultured.

CL: But I think this is really the delicious thing about having a foot in the performing and academic camps, that as a performer you are always making instant decisions, sub-consciously or consciously, of the sort you've just described, whereas in the academic field you're also trying to produce papers over two or three months and so on. Even if you're giving a lecture you can pause in the middle of a sentence and think what's happening. Everything works at a slightly different tempo. And I think it's a great privilege to be working, as we all are, in these different environments.

MF: And if you're a composer you can go slower still!

RH: Also there are composers who don't compose music to be heard.

SC: Well they're few and far between!

EP: That's another kind of appeal to what kind of authority...What is it that makes people write music when they know they don't have a hope of getting a recording deal or something like that. Very few people get that, but nevertheless one carries on. Because somehow you've got to believe in what you're doing.

RH: That's right, and I was going to pick you up on what you said before when you said that music is to do with what you do for other people, or something like that. What was it you said?

EP: Putting something good into the world.

RH: That's it. Which I don't believe at all - I just do it for me. I enrich my own life, and if other people like it then that's great, but I don't care.

SC: But you don't always do it on that basis, because you have your price, just like I do. I can offer you enough money to do a piece of music, and then you wouldn't be doing that for you!

MB: I'm getting a dissonance here between Eddie's idealism and the mercenary professionals!

SC: But there's a serious point here that the motivation for musical performance can come from all sorts of different directions and is not just for oneself. It would be lovely to think that every time we perform we are either doing it just for ourselves, or doing it because we want to put something back, or preferably both. But I'm afraid it's a good deal more complicated than that.

MB: It's just after five o'clock so I'm looking for a ringing phrase from someone to end up on. Are you going to provide it for us Mike?

MF: No, but it might be the penultimate one. Just as we've almost, in a sense, begun to detach ourselves from the study of music as it has developed in western Europe in the art tradition, which focussed almost entirely on the composition, the work, we've begun slightly to distance ourselves from that, but we're still, in our deliberations, looking back at the composer as the person who has provided the initial impetus for this. And there's the field of simultaneous composition and performance - jazz people are doing this all the time, it's second nature to them. It should be second nature, and was until a hundred years or so ago, in the western art tradition, and still is in some quarters. And also, of course, thinking of the people who actually pay us to do the performance, the performance looking the other way, onto the reception, and how it is perceived, and the cultural baggage that listeners bring to what we perform, that needs to be taken into account just as much, in any future deliberations or further things going on from this.

MB: That's another argument for an inclusive and wide agenda.

MF: We would be in danger of Hans Keller's famous definition of a phoney profession, which creates a prestige for itself, it talks a language which excludes other people, and creates problems which it then fails to solve, and thus just perpetuates itself.

MB: You're not talking about Schenkerian analysis are you?!

MF: No, I was just trying to remember Hans Keller's definition of phoney professions, which included criticism, teaching, viola playing and conducting.

MB: As you know I can never resist a chance to have a go at Schenkerian analysis.

JH: I have a feeling really, that there aren't any definite, concrete answers to these kinds of things. I don't know whether other people would agree with that. I think that there are lots of very interesting questions to be looked at, and that is what should be done.

SC: Well I think the notion of whether there are definite, concrete answers rather depends on what the question was in the first place.

JH: But in the sort of broad topics we're talking about, whether it's possible to really make these cross-cultural comparisons. In some cases it might be, but in a broad overall view?...

MB: Well we certainly are in an enormous sea of questions, we have been all today, and a lot more have arisen in the last hour or so. But I think probably I should draw it to a close, because we could go on for a very long time. I hope that in some way this dialogue does go on, and we hope to get something out electronically which might enable the debate to continue. So with your consent and my thanks to everyone who's been here, we shall stop there.