Repository | Book | Chapter

This article aims to discuss the multiple meanings that music performers generate through their art and other forms of communication. The focus here is the figure of the classical music performer, the pianist in particular, as a significant part of social and cultural life. It seems obvious that the "job" of a performer does not consist in music playing alone, but calls into question a number of variables of private and public, musical, extra-musical, and para-musical articulation. Each of these variables produces several different discourses that make "performance" and "performer" particularly complex and dynamic concepts whose understanding inevitably requires a broadened idea of musicology. In this article, the author makes an attempt to demonstrate some recurrent clichés concerning popular thought on the performer's activity, as well as the potential of novel discourses around the art of musical performance that may broaden our understanding on what kind of variables constitute the communication, reception, and consumption of the performer's art. Three keywords are proposed that may allow us to cover some of the essential aspects of the phenomenon: mediation, or interpretation; recognition, or stardom; and (self)representation, or promotion.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-66914-4_11

Full citation: