Anno 2021/1

If there is one trope that has become the lynchpin of the origin narratives of the young discipline of music performance studies, it is the idea that musical performance represents the “other” of the musical score. Many of the recent debates that effected a paradigm shift in music scholarship highlight the ontological and epistemological divergences between the score and musical performance, and also debunk the various myths and prejudices that have been woven around music performances and performers through the textualist paradigm, which essential- ised and naturalised the musical score as the holder of “the music” and the source of disciplinary knowledge

Fanny Hensel (1805–1847), an excellent musician and composer no less gifted than her brother Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, has a collection of 460 compositions, but until a few years ago only a small amount of her music had been published. Up until 1989, when the first manuscript (MA Ms. 47) was published in Furore Verlag, Das Jahr (1841–1842) was also unknown. However, it was only in 2000 that the first piano calendar in the history of music could be fully appreciated, when the same publishing house published the finished copy (MA Ms. 155). This copy contains, in addition to Fanny’s music, illustrations on coloured paper sheets, made by her husband Wilhelm Hensel (1794–1861) and poetic verses by various authors.

Every performer refers to the score to transform signs into sounds, rendering thoughts, body and feelings to this goal. In this process there is a moment when the performer goes beyond the score and transforms it into gestures and sounds by embodying it, revealing it as something that is embodied in blood, soul and thought before being transformed into an artistic event.

The aim of this case study is to explore what embodying the score can mean for a musician, by looking into a performance from a holistic perspective, observing the context in which the embodiment of the score is achieved, rather than embodiment as such, and interviewing the performer on the most important aspects of this process. It involves the analysis of the chosen score, and of its performance, as the result of an artistic process, and the investigation of the performer’s training context, above all in relation to the use of performative and learning strategies.

Nowadays, the reflections on the relationship between analysis and music performance are objects of an open debate in musicology, artistic research and performance studies.
The approach of the performative analysis in this study aims to contribute to the challenges (which are also characteristics) of the research in arts. Its languages are projected towards the evolution of some terms, in respect of the present philosophical and aesthetical context; its methods cannot marginalize the voice of the performers and their desire to communicate and share knowledge about the performance from their own creative experience conducted as artistic research.