The notion of ‘performance’ was central to the practice and ideology of ancient Greek and Roman societies: a politician's speech or a lawyer's closing, a choral exhibition or a sport competition were all interactive events whose fundamental components were the spectacle and its audience, both of which had an active role in the way they functioned.

This was particularly true for musical activities, whose civic and educational value was outstanding, especially in Classical Greece. Indeed, the ancient Greek culture of mousikē embraced the entire field of poetic performance to which the Muses gave their name, including song, poetry and bodily movement, all integrated within an event, which served to define culture, ethnicity and gender, and was a core element of religious and social rituals. The settings for such artistic performances ranged from entertainment in the private home to larger urban or pan-Hellenic festivals (i.e. ‘involving all Greeks’, not just a single polis), where competitive events took place in public. In these contexts the entire community, whether limited to a specific social elite or extended to the whole Hellenic society, was involved and found a common identity. These performances were thus not only a valuable means of reinforcing local individualities, but also a dynamic opportunity for exchange and interaction among different parts of the Greek world. It was through these occasions that regional identities consolidated their ‘Hellenic’ sense of affiliation.

Of styles and genres

The vast and far-reaching changes in musical style that have occurred in the past hundred years make it a richly rewarding period for singers. Faced with such a chaotic and variegated tapestry of stylistic strands, ranging from the truly bizarre to the comfortably familiar, the contemporary singer can be forgiven for proceeding with extreme caution. Yet, for those committed to keeping in touch with the new, it is a privilege to be caught up in the aftermath of the early twentieth century's exhilarating maelstrom of contrasting artistic influences, inspirations, experiments and occasional shockwaves, all of which reverberate to the present day.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many European ‘late Romantic’ composers were working within the basic vocal traditions of the nineteenth century, while others had chosen to strike out in bracing new directions. In opera, composers such as Puccini (1858–1924) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949) maintained the tradition of predominantly lyrical writing, with a growing diversity of vocal characterisation, and the less-known figures of Franz Schreker (1878–1934) and Erich Korngold (1897–1957) enjoyed runaway successes with Der ferne Klang (1912) and Die tote Stadt (1920). The emergence across Eastern Europe of a new kind of pungently declamatory vocal writing, pioneered in the previous century by Musorgsky (1839–81), found its fulfilment in the Janáček operas, and those of Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Shostakovich (1906–75).

An increasingly public milieu, as music moved from royal and aristocratic patronage at court to public concerts supported by newly enriched middle classes and promoted by newly independent musical entrepreneurs: thus runs the typical line of discussion in connection with eighteenth-century performance. Undoubtedly this is a useful snapshot for what is (in the broader sweep of musical history) a transitional phase towards a more widely dispersed musical culture and a more commercially oriented model of performance. Yet such a snapshot is not without its own historical difficulties, not least in the comparatively limited extent of truly public performance across Europe, and in the weight of association with a bourgeois culture that is itself often elusive or misleadingly overstated.

First, it is worth emphasising the sheer centrality of musical performance in every kind of social interaction, whether court or civic ceremonial, liturgical celebration, sociable club or mere domestic amusement. Music figured very largely in the social round of the elites of every European society, defining status and spending power as well as musical sophistication and refined taste. For the leisured classes, whether listeners or performers, it was symbolic of an abundance of time for indulgence of entertainment or intellectual pursuit. And as musical performance coalesced into standard patterns – opera seasons, winter subscription concerts and Lenten oratorios – they were appropriated and absorbed into the lives of an ever-widening sphere of music-lovers. This expansion may have brought about certain changes of tone, yet performance remained a shared experience, celebrating social differentiation while at the same time enabling cohesion and harmony by bringing different layers of society together in a neutral space not requiring the learning and social sensitivities inherent in conversation.

Much more information about musical performance in the period 1430–1600 comes down to us than for any preceding era. We would obviously expect more to survive as we draw nearer to the present, but this alone is not an adequate explanation for the apparent quantum leap in the detail and diversity of the material that survives from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The crucial difference lies in important changes in the nature of what comes down to us and also in the way it was distributed and used. As well as the familiar resources of archives and accounts – which themselves become more abundant and informative than before – we find a far more copious and varied iconography, a greater diversity of literary sources that contain realistic accounts of musical performance, and treatises and books on musical instruction that were aimed at cultivated amateurs as well as the scholarly elite. Most significantly of all, these are preserved not just in the traditional manuscript form, but additionally in the new medium of print, which ensured that all of these sources were both more numerous and more widely distributed than ever before.

If one single social change can be said to have shaped the development of musical performance in the Renaissance and to distinguish it from what went before, it is the increasing involvement of the amateur musician. The city states of Italy fostered the rise of a humanistically educated middle class with artistic aspirations and enough leisure time to pursue them. This in turn encouraged a new context of recreational performance, which, partly through the influence of books like Baldassare Castiglione’s II cortegiano, became an essential accomplishment in genteel society throughout Europe. More music was being performed by more people than had ever been the case previously, and with a different emphasis. The need for a professional to impress and entertain gives way to an aesthetic of elegance in which an amateur could succeed without necessarily being seen to try too hard.

Introduction

From the outset it is important to restate the inevitable disclaimer: our knowledge of medieval instruments and medieval instrumental performance practice is severely limited by the nature of the historical evidence at our disposal. Virtually no stringed instrument survives from before 1500, and even if several specimens had survived they could only represent a fraction of the vast array of instrument types that were produced in medieval Europe. Secondly, the problem of correctly matching the medieval representations and descriptions of musical instruments in visual and literary sources with their contemporaneous designations can be quite thorny in itself – witness the case of the gittern/citole/mandora/cittern discussed below – since those representations are very often frustratingly ambiguous on key details of manufacturing and performance practice (one case for all: the problem of bridge shapes in bowed instruments before c.1470). Given this scenario, the study of the history of medieval instruments relies more on arguments based on inference, common sense and musical judgement, than on the evidence of the primary sources.

If the goal of accurately reconstructing the musical instruments used centuries ago faces insurmountable difficulties, the related task of pinpointing the specific contexts, circumstances and conventions of instrumental performance poses even thornier problems. The issue is not just that the world of medieval instrumental music belonged to a cultural domain – orality – that by definition left very few written traces. What complicates the historian’s task is also the localised nature of the documentary evidence, which in no way can do justice to the myriad of performing traditions and conventions that for centuries developed and interacted on the European scene and in counterpoint with non-European musical cultures (most prominently, Islam).

SARTRE AND MODERN IDEALISM

When Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980 his body lay in state and was viewed by more than fifty thousand people. It is safe to say that few of these were there because the deceased had authored a volume with the forbidding subtitle, “An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology,” or because he had helped to free modern thought from the spell of transcendental idealism. Sartre died a notorious public intellectual – “the hated conscience of his century” – and it was his pugnacious advocacy of unpopular causes, his commitment to resistance in all its forms, his well-known novels and plays, and, of course, his association with the legends of “existentialism,” that fascinated the crowd. Sartre dominated French intellectual life as no one had before and no one has since, but by 1980 the idea that his philosophy was worth critical consideration seemed quaint. Being and Nothingness? Old hat. Naïve. Pre-linguistic-turn. Metaphysical. Phenomenological. Sartre's idiom seemed irrevocably tied to the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and analytic philosophy had finally laid to rest. No matter that Sartre himself had deconstructed the metaphysical subject; the emphasis on consciousness in Being and Nothingness marked it as passé.

In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard summed up everything he had to say about the self in one dense description. Needless to say, the passage needs a lot of unpacking.

Modernism has released its icy grip. During the latter decades of the twentieth century composers seemed able again to breathe Stefan George's ‘Luft von anderem Planeten’ (‘Air of another planet’), the opening soprano line of the last movement of Schoenberg's Second Quartet (1908), an iconic phrase emblematic of a newly extended or saturated chromaticism. These revolutionary beginnings of atonality (a negative term not favoured by Schoenberg) were hastened by the need to broaden the compositional palette, expressing and exploring a newly liberated emotional inner life. As Schoenberg memorably writes in his first letter to Kandinsky, ‘art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but what is inborn, instinctive.’ Kandinsky's initial letter to Schoenberg, after hearing his music in 1911, which provoked the composer's enthusiastic response, in a sense clinches the movement towards expressionism: ‘In your works, you have realised what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.’ And so that particular strand of the complex story begins.

The neat but arbitrary use of 1900 as the starting point for many twentieth-century music histories no longer seems to obtain. Invoking Dahlhaus, the Romantic nineteenth century might be seen to end with the death of Wagner, and the twentieth to start with the earlymodern period in German and Austrian music: Mahler, Wolf, Zemlinsky, early Strauss and tonal Schoenberg straddling the two centuries up to the beginnings of atonality in 1908 and perhaps further to the end of the Great War. As Dahlhaus suggests, this periodmight even end as late as 1920 as the ‘revolution in musical technique around 1910 was succeeded by a profound transformation of aesthetic outlook around 1920’: here he is looking to Stravinsky and the twelve-tone Schoenberg. For the subject of this chapter, performance practice and instrumental exploitation, the twentieth century is not ‘long’ but, I would suggest, quite short, covering the mid-century from the 1950s to the late 1980s.

The seventeenth century could well be characterised as one in which singers and singing in general, and the figure of the individual solo singer in particular, were the driving forces in a range of major developments both in specific genres and in the broader institutional manifestations of music. The most obvious of these, perhaps, is the acceleration of what began as a fairly marginal form of music theatre – opera – from its near standing start in the elite space of the Florentine court in 1600 to its flourishing establishment in the public theatre culture of most of Western Europe by the early 1700s. Music historians rightly point to innovations in a whole variety of other genres of vocal music, including in the church: the sacred concerto, oratorio and grand motet; in chamber music: secular song in many different national styles, concerted madrigal and cantata; and the various different kinds of theatre music besides Italian opera, such as French ballet de cour and tragédie en musique, Spanish comedia and zarzuela. English masque and ‘semi-opera’, and so on. All of these largely depended for their realisation on the highly developed skills of virtuoso singers. Furthermore, the emergence of professional women singers from their barely visible sequestration in the north Italian courts onto the centre stage of public acclaim and accessibility, and an almost parallel trajectory for castrato singers, are two of the more obvious phenomena which, in different ways, both drove and resulted from these developments.

‘Without music, life would be a mistake, a hardship, an exile’, wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a claim that is fully endorsed by the integral role that music has always played in society. However, for all its well-recognised transcendent qualities, classical music of the Western art tradition has sometimes appeared marginalised alongside jazz, popular and other musics, and it has recently had to contend with a change from its privileged position in society to one in which it is repeatedly challenged by other forms of music and mass entertainment. One may welcome the disappearance of the old patrician assumptions that classical music is the only truly valuable part of our musical activity and yet feel alarmed at its ensuing undervaluing. Performers now have an important advocacy role in relation to the inherent value of music, along with its transformational powers in health, education and well-being.

The musical future is impossible to predict with any degree of assurance or accuracy, not least because of the volatility of the global economy, shifting musical tastes, and the speed with which technological developments are being achieved, bringing with them changes in music consumption and discovery. Yet the potential of classical music for elemental excitement is something to which every performer will want to aspire, whatever their working environment.

Please play

I am in the middle of the Roundhouse, North London. The only thing in the centre of the bare circular space, once used for reversing trains, is an old harmonium. On the floor in front, it says PLEASE PLAY. It looks like a normal harmonium, except that out of the back of the instrument, an array of wires and leads stretches away, up and around the building. So I sit down. I press the keys, but instead of familiar sounds from the instrument, the whole circular building comes alive. Some keys produce metallic clanks on the pillars, some produce motor noises far away in the ceiling, some produce wheezing notes of indeterminate pitch … There is no skill required, no score of instructions: whatever you do is the performance. During the time I am there children, backpackers, a virtuoso with a self-timing camera to record the incident all try. The sounds are varied, random, striking. This is David Byrne's Playing the Building.

HEIDEGGER'S ONTOLOGY IN BEING AND TIME

On page 67 of Being and Time Heidegger writes, “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.” This formula was the inspiration for Jean-Paul Sartre's better known thesis that “existence precedes essence.” What can it mean to say that our “essence” lies in our existence, and why does Heidegger put “essence” in quotation marks? We may assume that by the latter device Heidegger means to indicate that the sense in which Dasein has an essence is rather different from the sense in which non-human things have essences, or perhaps even that Dasein does not really have an essence at all. In the preceding paragraph he writes,

The phrase “to-be” is more gerundive than gerund; it expresses the idea that we have our being to be, as we may have tasks to do or miles to walk. Our essence, our “what-we-are” (or better, “who-we-are”), is determined by how we live, and how we live is structured by how we are called upon to live. Called upon by whom or what? By ourselves. (We shall explore this thought later.) In the paragraph in which Heidegger makes this statement he infers from it that Dasein is not an entity “present-at-hand.