Exploring the text-performance continuum in music: Reflections on immediate mediation

This chapter outlines a theoretical model that considers musical text and musical performance in their productive relation rather than opposition, as is the case with a recent and highly influential strand of musicological discourse. To this end, I rely on a broad interdisciplinary framework. I start from a discussion of the recent performative turn in musicology which in spite of the intentions of its promoters has perhaps widened the gap between text and performance, creating an almost unbridgeable hiatus between ‘music as text’ and ‘music as performance’ as separate paradigms. To find a way out of this impasse, I draw from recent developments in different research areas. From media studies I draw the theories of remediation and radical mediation to suggest setting aside any hierarchy between musical text and performance since, according to the concept of ‘immediate mediation’, the two terms should be framed as ontologically equal forms of musical experience. Performance studies give then important hints not only to obtain a pragmatic view of musical performance, according to which music is an expressive resource of musicians to perform their ‘personae’, but also to reconsider musical texts in a pragmatic way as effective and relevant ingredients of performance. By combining these perspectives, I emphasise the complexity of the textual dimension and prepare the ground for a definition of ‘performance script’, triggered by the performers’ agency, as a decisive intermediate and mediating instance between musical text and performance. This concept is then further refined by means of cognitive schema theory as applied in ethnomusicology, which offers appropriate tools to fill the gap between text and performance as well as that between written and oral traditions. The aim of this chapter is to question and possibly overcome dichotomies in the musicological discourse on musical performance by encouraging more nuanced and flexible categorisations. Reconsidering musical text and performance as aspects of a cognitive continuum is crucial in this regard.