Performativity

Performativity is a neologism used to describe how speech, gesture, and other social actions create identity by means of their performance. This identity is not a fixed reality occurring only within oneself, but is also created and made real by means of the social gesture. Performativity asserts that identity is not the source of secondary actions and gestures, but rather actions and gestures are the source of identity. Similarly, musicologists interested in performativity challenge the notion that the locus of musical meaning is in the work. The “meaning” of a musical event is found in this social interaction, and all aspects of the music-making process (e.g., composition, performance, and listening) are performative acts.

Before the advent of performance studies as a field of research, the issue of performance was secondary (or nonexistent) for historical musicologists. The focus of study was the autonomous artwork, represented not in performance, but rather by a score as “text.” A single performance of a work might be noteworthy because of its historical significance (e.g., a premiere), but typically performance was not the focus of the study. The performance practice movement of the 1970s and 1980s emphasized even more specifically how to interpret this repertoire with historical accuracy, but the focus remained firmly on the music as text.

Since the 1980s, some ethnomusicologists and musicologists have turned to an analytical approach informed by their colleagues in performance studies that eschews the score/performance dyad in favor of a view that the production and consumption of music are both performative acts. These scholars hope to discover how music functions in society, as opposed to viewing music as autonomous from its social context. As the term [Page 853]performative gained cachet in the 1990s, some scholars used the term loosely to describe almost any aspect of their work that considered performance, but failed to understand that the field of performance studies assumes a radically different analytical philosophy.