musical performance

musical performance, step in the musical process during which musical ideas are realized and transmitted to a listener. In Western music, performance is most commonly viewed as an interpretive art, though it is not always merely that. Performers to some degree determine aspects of any music they play. Issues of tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and, in some types of music, pitches and instrumentation are subject to a performer’s discretion.

Because the pleasure people derive from sounds has always been closely related to the pleasure they derive from making the sounds themselves, it is difficult to conceive of the origin of music as separate from an act of musical performance. Models for the establishment of rhythm may be found in heartbeat and breathing, and in the inflections of speech and cries of grief, pleasure, and desire are found the source of what became song.

The earliest visual manifestations of musical performance are found in rock paintings and excavated objects. While the interrelationship of music and ritual is clear, there is evidence that music was performed for dancing, in various work activities, and games as well. Flutelike instruments of many sizes, made from bones and wood, and elaborate percussion instruments figure prominently in all early cultures, in which these instruments often were assigned symbolic significance associated with forces of the supernatural.

Singing is most probably the oldest musical activity. Even in the most archaic cultures the singer had a special, defined position. In early singing there are three classes of sound: the first is called logogenic, in which words form the basis for the wavering musical incantation; the second, called pathogenic, consists of harsh, forceful, percussive, nonverbal sounds emitted to express strong feeling; in the third category, called melogenic, the sounds of the two previous categories combine to form a contour of pitches that pursue a course seemingly dictated by the weight of tensions inherent in the sequence of pitches and hence melodic in effect.

Early societies evolved several means to relieve the monotony of one person’s singing. A principle device is called antiphony, which involved two groups that sang in alternation or a leader who sang and was answered by a group of singers. In the latter may be seen the origin of responsorial singing, which continues today and which may be the point of origin for several types of musical phrase structures. Polyphony was also anticipated in early musical performance. It appeared through haphazard rather than intentional manifestations, such as the singing of the same melody with the parts starting on different pitches or at different times.

This article deals primarily with Western musical performance and its history but also deals briefly with non-Western traditions.

Aspects of Western musical performance

The performer as interpreter

Music as an interpretive art is a relatively recent phenomenon. In ancient societies, music plays a ritual role based on an oral tradition, and each performer in a sense interprets the tradition but, more importantly, renews it and transforms it through personal performance.

The development of the performer’s role as interpreter coincided with the development of musical notation. Because composers for so many centuries were in a position to supervise the performances of their music, certain aspects of performance were not notated. Notation has grown increasingly complex as the dissemination of printed music has become more widespread. Ultimately, the degree of judgment a performer may exercise is determined by the period in which the music was composed. For music of certain periods, even though their notational systems are incomplete and give few indications of how the music should sound beyond pitch and rhythm, musical scholarship has amassed much information concerning proper instrumentation, ornamentation, improvisation, and other traditional performing practices that determine to a large degree the sound and stylistic character of the music. Performers as interpreters operate within a range of limitations imposed upon them by their understanding of the printed page, whatever knowledge may be available concerning the tradition that surrounds the music at hand, and the extent to which their personal tastes coincide with this information. Certain aspects of the musical taste of the past sometimes cease to be expressive and gradually disappear from usage. Just as often, with the passage of time, performers tend to reassess the literature of previous ages and find renewed interest in practices that an earlier generation may have set aside. In any case, performers as interpreters speak to and with the tastes of their own time. And their task, no different from that of the earliest performers, is to renew, to refine, and to enrich the materials and traditions they inherit.

Mediums of performance

The mediums for musical performance are extraordinarily various. Western technology has had a tremendous impact on the development of musical instruments and has thereby greatly expanded the means whereby music is made. Performance may be vocal, instrumental, or electronic. Vocal performance is the oldest and the primary influence for the development of all subsequent musical gestures and materials. Instrumental music began with the development of percussion instruments and crude horns; stringed instruments came later. Electronic music was a 20th-century development involving the reproduction of traditional performance mediums through electronic means, while it also evolved composition and performance of its own. At first it reproduced natural sounds by electronic means; later, composers and technicians began to invent electronic sounds and to discover new sound relationships.

In all musical mediums the solo performance is the most spectacular. The power of music to compel attention and to stir emotions lends to the solo performer an especially fascinating aura. This is the domain of the virtuoso, that musical performing phenomenon of prodigious technical mastery, invention, and charisma. Most solo literature includes another instrument or group of instruments, and the literature varies from one medium to another according to the expressive range and technical capabilities of the solo instrument.

The largest solo literature for a single instrument is for keyboard instruments. Vocal solo literature is very important and extensive, and the stringed instruments also have a distinguished solo repertoire. The wind, brass, and percussion solo literature is more restricted.

In vocal and instrumental chamber ensemble performance, the performing groups are divided into duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, septets, and octets, which exist for every medium and combination. Of particular importance is a string quartet consisting of two violins, viola, and cello. Dating from the 18th century, this instrumental ensemble is analogous to the vocal ensemble consisting of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

Symphonic music dates from the 17th century. With the rise of the middle class and its aspirations for culture, music as an art required performing situations that would accommodate more people. Larger halls required ensembles acoustically suited to the expanded performing areas. The primary result of this development was the symphony orchestra with its multiple stringed, wind, brass, and percussion instruments.

Ensemble performance places a special responsibility on the concentration of the individual performers, who must attend not only to their own playing but also to that of all the others in the ensemble. All aspects of the performance depend on this mutual awareness. The leader of most small ensembles is one of the performers, the first violinist, a keyboard player, or one of the singers who indicates tempi, entrances, and musical character and supervises rehearsals. As ensembles grew in size and complexity and their problems of coordination increased, the leader set aside performance on an instrument and focused on the beating of time and the communication through clear hand signals of the appropriate moment for entrances, tempo changes, dynamic accents, and the shaping of phrases. This leader is called a conductor. The role of the conductor often is analogous to that of a soloist in the attention of an audience, though the conductor makes no musical sound. As they are chiefly responsible for the music orchestras play, both in terms of choice and execution, conductors have had considerable impact on the development of music.

Opera, the marriage of music and drama, is the most complex performance situation. It entails much more than a single performer or group of performers, their instruments, and a hall in which to play. Text, decor, costumes, histrionic projection, preparation time, as well as singers, instrumentalists, and a bevy of extramusical technicians, must all be brought together and coordinated into the final production.

Artistic temperament

Many forces interact in developing those traits that distinguish various performing traditions and individual performers. Personality and temperament fundamentally affect the manner in which a performer works, as does the cultural milieu. There are performers who use music as a vehicle for display and others for whom performance is only a means to illuminate the music. Nor does performance necessarily mean public performance. For some people musical performance is essentially private, requiring no confirmation in the form of audience approval. The musical pleasure of such people rests solely on performing, either alone or with other musicians. Much chamber music is played under these private circumstances, and much music has been written for such situations. This used to be the primary realm of the musical amateur, a skilled but nonprofessional music lover whose ranks are ever diminishing.

The type of performing situation at the opposite end of the spectrum is one directed to securing audience attention and affection. The need for audience approval has led to innovations as well as some decadence in its impact on the musical scene: innovation, if the performer is led to discover imaginative and fresh means of attracting public acclaim; decadence, if the devices for audience attraction become cheap and thinly spectacular, when the performer may distract the audience from more deserving work and debase its taste.

Intuition and intellect figure prominently in the temperament of a musical performer. Intuition is the capacity to do the musically “right” thing without instruction or special consideration of the alternatives. Intellect is the means whereby musicians enlarge the range of their instincts through the pursuit of new information, reflection, and analysis of the musical material at hand. Each element informs and completes the other.

Many musicians depend heavily on intuition in solving performance problems. Their solutions are often imaginative and fresh and their performances exciting. Others pursue a methodical path as they examine minutely relevant musical details. They analyze thoroughly the scores they perform, comparing manuscript facsimiles and various printed editions, and attempt to discover new musical relationships, new ways of delineating these relationships in performance, and, in short, new ideas as to how the music might best be played and how it should sound. Art, poetry, biography, cultural history, and any material relating to the period of the piece of music being studied for performance may be sources of musical insight for the performer.

National characteristics

At various times in history, national origin has been considered an important delineating characteristic in musical performance. This is partly the result of certain consistent emphases and features in the music written by composers of different nationalities. The Italians’ interest in the voice has evolved bel canto, a special quality derived from vocal music, which has carried over into their music for instruments (the stringed instruments especially), and into the general texture of Italian music, which has always given melody special prominence.

The English have had a highly developed and sophisticated musical performance tradition. Amateur improvisation figured importantly in its early history. While this has perhaps tended toward a conservative musical atmosphere, it has also produced a high standard for performance. The French have maintained a strong sense of national identity in their performing arts. In music their concerns for orderly design, delicate expressiveness, simplicity, naturalness, and beauty of sound extend back for centuries. Articulate philosophical and structural considerations have played important roles in developing nationalistic traits in the German tradition of musical performance.

The rich folklorist traditions of Spain, Hungary, and Russia have influenced rhythm, melody, and sonority in Western musical performing traditions. The Russian schools of string and piano technique have greatly advanced the performance resources of these instruments in the past 100 years. The United States, younger and more heterogeneous, has had a shorter musical history but an abundance of great symphony orchestras and solo artists, who are in demand because of their precise execution, versatility, and breadth of repertoire.

Historical stylistic developments

In antiquity the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans evolved the first aesthetic theories and musical systems relevant to the music of the modern Western world. Unfortunately, few actual musical examples survive because of early notational practices and the gradual erosion of oral traditions. What is known is derived from the writings of the period and iconography—depictions of performing musicians, instruments, and musical events in sculpture and in wall and vase paintings.

In the Middle Ages traditions of musical performance were kept alive by the church and in the music sung and played by wandering minstrels.

In the Renaissance, polyphony (combining several simultaneous voice parts) and the early precursors of modern tonality (organization of music around a focal tone) were developed. The smooth flow of Renaissance liturgical counterpoint (polyphony) and the perky rhythms of secular Renaissance dance music remained as models of taste and musical technique even into the 21st century.

The performer emerged as a central figure in the focus of musical attention and purpose during the Baroque period. The heightening of the role of the individual performing artist and the invention of increasingly dramatic gestures to demonstrate performers’ skills combined with a steady refinement in the construction of musical instruments. The reduction of musical materials to two modes (scale and melody patterns), in this case the major and minor scales, and the initial efforts to compose with large musical forms (opera, oratorio, sonata, and concerto) took place in this period. It is notable that in the Baroque era the equal-temperament system for tuning the strings or pipes of keyboard instruments evolved—a development that has had profound effect on the nature of musical language.

In the Rococo or Classical period that followed, the elaborate contrapuntal texture of Baroque music gave way to music of subtle dynamic differentiation, often based on simple folk materials (rhythms and melodies). The relationships between tonal materials and large musical forms achieved their highest state in the sonata and in opera.

The Romantic age was a period of refinement and intensification of Rococo principles with heavy literary overtones. It was the true age of the star virtuoso; that is, the age in which the role, person, and effect of the virtuoso was most dramatized and glamourized. The symphony orchestra in this period achieved its maximum development. Italian opera under Giuseppe Verdi found its noblest expression and German opera with Richard Wagner expanded into the Gesamtkunstwerk (“complete art work”).

Modern music dates from an era beginning roughly around World War I. Concert life, however, has remained more or less what the 19th century established; the virtuoso conductor and performer dominate the musical establishment. By contrast, an ever-broadening spectrum of performance techniques and styles has been employed by small combos—jazz, rock, improvisational, experimental, live electronic, and multimedia—that have sprung up since the mid-20th century.

The development of Western musical performance


The civilizations of antiquity expanded the role assigned to music in earlier cultures. The Sumerians established the foundations for the tradition of liturgical music. Some of the prayers that they sang have survived. From various artifacts of this civilization something is known about Sumerian musical instruments and some of the situations in which music was played. Such instruments as lyres, harps, sistra, pipes, timbrels, and various drums figured importantly. Particular instruments were identified as accompaniment with specific types of religious poetry, and indeed the development of different poetic genres seems to have been considerably influenced by the nature of these instruments. While its primary purpose was religious, music also had something of a secular role in Sumerian culture and was played in processions, at banquets, and during sporting events. Music as a profession first developed in Sumerian culture. Both men and women participated as singers and instrumentalists and held priestlike positions with specific functions and ranks of authority.

The musical culture of ancient Egypt, which apparently emerged from the same sources as Sumer, resembles that earlier culture in many aspects: the close relationship between music and religion, the presence of a musical profession, some secular musical activity, and similar musical instruments. Of special interest in Egyptian music is the development of chironomy, the use of hand signals to indicate to instrumentalists what they should play. The singer in this manner guided instrumentalists through melodies with which the singer was seemingly more familiar than the players.

In these ancient cultures there was no notational system or codified theory of musical practice. Different musical traditions were exchanged in the process of trade, migration, military conquest, and intermarriage to form that common body of practices that is the basis of Western music.

Of the early civilizations, Greece provided the musical culture of greatest significance for the development of Western music. The system of scales and modes, as well as a large part of the general philosophy concerning the nature and effect of musical sounds, has been inherited from the Greeks. It was also the Greeks who developed the theory of ethos, which defines the character of psychological and emotional response to different musical stimuli. Building on the ancient religions and magical accoutrements of music, the Greeks assigned specific mental and emotional states to specific pitch arrangements and instrumental combinations. Music infused with this motivating power stood at the centre of the social order.

Though a major part of Western musical terminology, basic music theory and philosophy, basic notational practices, and the foundations of acoustical physics derive from the ancient Greeks, very little of their music has survived. The great ethical significance of music in Greek society caused performing mastery to be an essential aspect of education. Everyone was taught to sing and to play instruments. For a major part of the period all music was a setting of words with instrumental accompaniment, for the most part doubling the voice at the interval of octaves, fourths, or fifths. It was only in the later part of the period, after the age of Pericles (late 5th century bce), that instruments began to be played independently of singers.

Music, in the later stages of the Hellenic period, became an increasingly important part of public spectacles. As musical performance became increasingly secularized and became the property of the masses, the upper classes withdrew to esoteric considerations of the art and reflections on its past. It was perhaps at this point that music was divided into two fairly artificial categories: the contemplation of music’s nature and history and practical musical performance.

Assuming the artistic mantle of ancient Greece, the Romans disseminated Greek music throughout the known world. The essential role of music in the Roman Empire remained unchanged. Rome’s principal contribution consisted in serving as a catalyst for the mixing of Hebraic and Hellenic traditions of musical performance, which, preserved by the Christian Church for a thousand years, emerged again in the Renaissance into the first flowering of modern musical practices in the West.

Although not in the mainstream of Western musical performance, Islamic (North African and Middle Eastern) classical music closely approaches the orchestral tradition of European music in one respect: large choruses and orchestras—consisting of tambourines, pot drums, recorder-flutes, ʿūds (plucked lutes), bowed lutes, and dulcimers—are assembled to perform “suites” consisting of a series of instrumental solos and orchestral selections interspersed with unison choral songs or solo recitatives based on classical poetry. But while these suites are perfectly suited to performance in formal concert halls, they may also be heard in much less regulated settings, such as cafés. Here the listener is free either to concentrate intellectually on the progress and development of the musical ideas or to converse and eat, relaxing in the beauty of the general musical design. The more “oriental” side of Islamic musical performance is more improvisatory, either in solo performance on a recorder-flute, fiddle, ʿūd, or dulcimer or by any of these in combination with the voice—the instrumentalist then elaborating on the singer’s improvisation. Here, too, the relationship of audience to performer is much less formal than in the performance of European music.

The Middle Ages

The tradition of sung prayers and psalms extends into the shadows of early civilization. Such sacred singing was often accompanied by instruments, and its rhythmic character was marked. In the synagogue, however, the sung prayers were often unaccompanied. Ritual dance was excluded from the synagogue as the rhythmic character of sacred music surrendered its more sensual aspects. Even in the prayers themselves, rhythmic verse gave way to prose. The exclusion of women, the elevation of unison singing, and the exclusion of instruments served to establish a clear differentiation between musical performance in the synagogue and that of the street.

The musical performance tradition of the Christian Church grew out of the liturgical tradition of Judaism. The melodic formulas for the singing of psalms and the sung recitation of other scriptural passages are clearly based on Hebraic models.

Music in the Roman Catholic liturgy was performed mainly for the mass. Originally, the music was performed by the priest and the congregation, until, in time, there emerged from the congregation a special group of singers, called the choir, who assumed the musical role of answering and contrasting the solo singing of the priest. Women participated actively in musical performances in the ancient Christian Church until 578, when older Hebraic practices excluding them were restored. From that time until the 20th century, Roman Catholic Church choirs were composed solely of men and boys.

The first codification of early church music was reputedly made by Pope Gregory I during his reign (590–604). Gregory’s collection was selected from chants already in use. His codification assigned these chants to particular services in the liturgical calendar. In general it reinforced the simple, spiritual, aesthetic quality of liturgical music. The music in this collection serves as a model of melodic design even in the 21st century and is regarded as one of the monuments of Western musical literature. This school of unison liturgical singing is called plainchant, plainsong, or Gregorian chant. Specific details concerning the manner in which chant was performed have been lost. There are speculations that the quality of sound the singers employed was somewhat thinner and more nasal than that used by contemporary singers. The authentic rhythmic style of chant cannot be ascertained. There is a theory, however, that the basic rhythmic units had the same durational value and were grouped in irregularly alternating groups of twos and threes. Pitch levels and tempos apparently varied somewhat according to the occasion. There are preserved manuscript notations reminding singers to be careful and modest in their work, indicating that temptations of inattention and excessive vocal display existed for even the earliest liturgical musicians.

While modern musical traditions in the West are based to a large extent on the principles of antiquity preserved in the notated music of the early church, a secular musical practice did exist; but because of the pervasive influence of the church, the dividing line between sacred and secular aspects was thin throughout a good part of the medieval period.

Several types of later secular song have survived. The musical notations are for the most part inadequate to give an accurate impression of the music, but it is known that it retained the essential monophonic character of liturgical music. One curious type of secular song, conductus, originated in the church itself. This song did not use traditional liturgical melodies or texts but was composed to be sung in the liturgical dramas or for processions. For this reason it dealt occasionally with subjects not religious in character. The goliard songs dating from the 11th century are among the oldest examples of secular music. They were the often bawdy Latin songs of itinerant theological students who roamed rather disreputably from school to school in the period preceding the founding of the great university centres in the 13th century.

Several other groups of medieval performers developed literary and musical genres based on vernacular texts: the jongleurs, a group of travelling entertainers in western Europe who sang, did tricks, and danced to earn their living; the troubadours in the south of France and the trouvères in the north; and the minnesingers, a class of artist-knights who wrote and sang love songs tinged with religious fervour.

Instruments, such as the vielle, harp, psaltery, flute, shawm, bagpipe, and drums were all used during the Middle Ages to accompany dances and singing. Trumpets and horns were used by nobility, and organs, both portative (movable) and positive (stationary), appeared in the larger churches. In general, little is known of secular instrumental music before the 13th century. It is doubtful that it had a role of any importance apart from accompaniment. Yet the possibility of accompanied liturgical music has not been eliminated by modern scholars.

The medieval musical development with the furthest-reaching consequences for musical performance was that of polyphony, a development directly related, as indicated above, to the experience of performing liturgical chant. For performers and performance, perhaps the most important developments in the wake of polyphony were refinements of rhythmic notation necessary to keep independent melodic lines synchronous. At first the obvious visual method of vertical alignment was used; later, as upper voices became more elaborate in comparison with the (chant-derived) lower ones, and writing in score thus wasted space, more symbolic methods of notating rhythm developed, most importantly in and around the new cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.

In the 14th century, partly because of the declining political strength of the church, the setting for new developments in music shifted from the sacred field to the secular, from the church to the court. This shift led in turn to a new emphasis on instrumental music and performance. Already the lower voices began to be performed on instruments—both because their long notes made them difficult to sing and because their texts (of only a few syllables) became senseless outside their original liturgical positions. Now, as secular princes became increasingly important patrons of composers and performers—a situation that would continue well into the 18th century—secular and instrumental music flourished. The polyphonic music of the church merged with the poetic art of the troubadours, and the two most important composers of the age were the blind Florentine organist Francesco Landini and the French poet Guillaume de Machaut, canon of Reims.

Most of the music of these composers seems to have been intended for combined vocal-instrumental performance, although this is seldom expressly indicated in the manuscripts. Medieval composers probably had no rigid expectations about performance media. Until the 17th century, and even through the 19th in the case of domestic performance, choice of instruments was likely to be dependent as much on available performers as on anything else. Many sources do, however, indicate that medieval musicians tended to separate instruments into two groups, loud and soft (haut and bas, or, very generally, wind and string), and to prefer contrasting sonorities within those groups for maximum differentiation of the individual parts. Outdoor or ceremonial music would be performed with loud instruments (shawm, bombard, trombone, organ); room music, with soft ones (lute, viol, recorder, harp). Paintings and manuscript illuminations of the period show that much secular performance included both a wide variety of bells, drums, and other percussion instruments and instruments with drones—bagpipes, fiddles, double recorders, hurdy-gurdies. The parts for these instruments are never found in the musical sources and must be reconstructed for modern performance.

The notation of medieval music often is misleading for the modern performer. Accidentals (sharps and flats, called then musica ficta) were often omitted as being understood. Further, it seems likely that variation, embellishment, and improvisation were very important elements of medieval performance. It is known that sections of some 15th-century two-part vocal music were enhanced by an extempore third part, in a technique called fauxbourdon; the notation of the 15th-century basse danse consisted of only a single line of unmeasured long notes, evidently used by the performing group of three instrumentalists for improvisation, much as a modern jazz combo’s chart.

The Renaissance

The very concept of improvisation as a mere subcategory within performance practice could arise only after the invention of music printing, which had at first little discernible effect on performance. Extemporized ornamentation of polyphonic music continued and increased during the 16th century in instrumental, vocal, and combined performance, both secular and sacred. Later in the century, liturgical music again became less extravagant in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–63), which ordered that masses be sung “clearly and at the right speed” and that singing “be constituted not to give empty pleasure to the ear, but in such a way that the words may be clearly understood by all.” Music printing was at first too expensive to alter seriously the social structure of musical performance; the traditions of ostentation and exclusiveness embodied in music written by Guillaume Dufay for the early 15th-century Burgundian court were continued in the magnificent musical establishments of the Italian Renaissance princes and popes. Detailed records exist of the elaborate musical festivities arranged for weddings and baptisms of the powerful Florentine family, the Medici. Printing increased the dissemination as well as the survival of these works; but, like the earlier Burgundian chanson and unlike the contemporary Parisian chanson, which was cast in a more popular mould, they were nonetheless primarily intended for a select group of discriminating performers.

Printing, both of music and of books, does document the ever increasing development and sophistication of instrumental music during the 16th century. Printed descriptions of instruments date from the 16th century. Their discussions of tuning and technique supplied the needs of professional and nonprofessional musicians alike. There was a growing tendency to construct instruments in families (whole consorts of homogeneous timbre, high, middle, and low), a tendency perhaps related to recent expansion at both ends of the musical scale: with more space available, contrapuntal parts no longer crossed so frequently and no longer needed the differentiation provided by the markedly contrasting timbres of the medieval “broken consort.”

The 17th and 18th centuries

After printing, the next significant influence on music performance was the gradual emergence of the audience, for the relationship between participants in the musical experience—between performer and listener—became polarized. The first evidence for this shift was the rise of the professional vocal virtuoso about the last quarter of the 16th century, and this development soon had a profound influence on musical style. Italian composer-singers, such as Giulio Caccini and Jacopo Peri, reacted quickly to their audiences’ desire for more expressive and passionate vocalism, and the music they wrote for themselves eventually was imitated and refined by other composers, such as the Italian Claudio Monteverdi, whose nine successive books of madrigals document the changes in style from music composed for four to six essentially equal voices to music in which the interest lay primarily at the extremes of the texture. The technical underpinning for this new monodic style was the basso continuo, or thorough bass, played by one or more polyphonic solo instruments “realizing” a “figured bass”: that is to say, improvising chords above a single line of music provided with numbers and other symbols to indicate the other notes of the chords. In the 17th century a wide variety of continuo instruments was used, including lute, theorbo, harp, harpsichord, and organ. By the 18th century the practice was more standardized: the bass line would be realized on a keyboard instrument and reinforced by a monophonic bass instrument, such as a lute, viola da gamba, cello, or bassoon. The continuo player not only completed the harmony but could also control rhythm and tempo to suit the particular conditions of a performance.

The development of monody was itself a necessary precondition for that most expensive of all performance institutions, opera. Beginning in Florence at the very end of the 16th century, opera soon spread over Italy: through Rome, where its initially pastoral nature matured into full-blown spectacle, to Venice, where the first public opera theatre opened in 1637. There, although audiences were still aristocratic, opera was dependent upon the sale of admissions rather than royal patronage, and musical performance began to find an entirely new method of economic support.

In the realm of purely instrumental music, the new economy of performance was slower to emerge, but there were many other new developments. By far the most popular Renaissance instrument had been the versatile lute; it served all levels from the merchant’s daughter learning the simplest dance melody to the virtuoso. In the 17th century the lute began to yield to keyboard instruments, but the intimate music of the French clavecinistes (harpsichordists) was still a clear outgrowth of the precious and evanescent performance style of the 17th-century lutenist Denis Gaultier. Later, keyboard ornamentation began to be codified in tables of agrément-symbols published with each new collection of music. In Italy composers also were attempting to provide performers with more explicit directions. Contemporary keyboard fingering systems, which used the thumb much less than modern ones, also served contemporary preference for subtlety and unevenness of rhythm. As the century progressed and national styles drew further apart, there evolved a specifically French tradition of inégalité: performing certain evenly written notes unequally, with alternately longer and shorter values.

A more lasting French development was the first instance of instrumental music consistently performed by more than one player to a part. In 1656, Jean-Baptiste Lully made his orchestra, the Petits Violons (“Little Violins”), abandon the old tradition of free embellishment and drilled them in a disciplined and rhythmically pointed precision that was widely imitated. Simultaneously, the violin and its family, because of their passionate brilliance and versatility, replaced viols as the standard ensemble instruments—especially quickly in Italy, where performance was less sophisticated, less mannered, and less restrained than in France.

In the 18th century, national performance styles tended again to merge, except in the case of opera. French opera, which had reached its first height under Lully and had counted among its star performers Louis XIV himself, continued to emphasize ballet and correct declamation more than pure vocalism. In other areas, standardization and codification were the trend. The place of improvised embellishment and variation was further circumscribed, limited in general to such recognized spots as repeated sections in binary and da capo forms, slow movements of sonatas and concertos, and cadences. Instrumental tutors by famous performers were important and widespread.

The foundation of public concerts increased, and orchestras all over Europe followed the pattern set by the famous ensemble maintained by the elector of the Palatine at Mannheim, with its standard size (about 25) and new style of performance with dramatic dynamic effects and orchestral devices (e.g., crescendos, tremolos, grand pauses). The Mannheim composers also hastened the decline of the improvised thorough bass by writing out harmonic filler parts for the violas; conducting from the keyboard nevertheless remained standard practice into the 19th century. Meanwhile, entrepreneurial speculation was finally supplanting aristocratic patronage as the economic base for concert activity. Joseph Haydn, who had already spent one full career in Austria, in the service of the House of Esterházy, in 1791 began another and more lucrative one in association with the concert manager Johann Peter Salomon—conducting his London symphonies from the piano.

The 19th century

The heyday of the concert artist began before Haydn’s first journey to London, and it still shows few signs of ending. It reached its zenith and was the primary factor in all music performance in the 19th century. Mozart and Beethoven were famous concert pianists before they were famous composers, and succeeding generations saw a large number of piano virtuosos traveling throughout Europe and, later, North and South America. Some were composers of works for themselves; others were more important as interpreters of other composers’ works. The tradition of the star singer was of course much older, and it continued; one new development was that of the claquer, paid by the star for his applause. The independent conductors, as distinct from first violinists or continuo players, emerged from the body of the orchestra during the first half of the 19th century, and the development of conductors as lionized figures of the 20th and 21st centuries was swift. Parallel with this rise came the establishment of many of today’s major orchestras: New York Philharmonic (1842), Vienna Philharmonic (1842), Boston Symphony (1881), Berlin Philharmonic (1882), Amsterdam Concertgebouw (1883), Chicago Symphony (1891), and London Symphony (1904).

The result of the enormous widening of concert activity and of the increasingly international reputations of performers was an even further standardization of performance practice. Eighteenth-century concern with appropriateness and taste in embellishment yielded to emphasis on clarity and evenness of touch, purity of intonation, and accuracy of execution. As composers’ scores became increasingly precise, the performers’ interpretative decisions were increasingly limited to matters of technique, tempo, rhythmic and dynamic nuance and personality—a subjectivism justified by the cult of Romantic genius prevalent in 19th-century artistic life. Real improvisation in music would not re-emerge until the 20th century—in jazz. The addition of such mechanical aids and improvements as chin rests and end pins to stringed instruments (which permitted a wider and more constant vibrato without tiring); valves and extra keys to brass and woodwind instruments (making scales more even and intonation more secure); and double-escapement action, iron frames, and cross-stringing to the piano (which facilitated crisper and surer attack and made both tone and tuning last longer) all had profound influence not only on performance techniques but also on the very sound of the instruments. The most successful new instrumental and vocal teaching methods emphasized virtuosity, brilliance, evenness, and wide range, reflecting a desire to make music more effective for large audiences.

The rise of the concert artist was seconded by the appearance of the professional music critic, whose influence on performance has been, and is, difficult to assess. At first critics tended to be primarily practicing musicians; later this was less the case. A more tangible residue of 19th-century music performance and one that illustrates how little its basic social structures have changed since then is the large number of concert halls and opera theatres that were built and are still used today.

One final development, the import of which would not be fully realized until the 20th century, was that of historicism: the active revival of old music. This incipient recognition of the validity of other styles of composition and performance is dated conventionally from the German composer Felix Mendelssohn’s 1829 performance of parts of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but it was preceded in a sense by the Concerts of Antient Music (1776–1848) in London. The stated policy of this musical group was not to perform music less than 20 years old (but they often updated the compositions with added brass parts). The revival of interest in the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Bach, while at first expressed only in terms of 19th-century Romanticism, would pave the way for 20th-century advances and retrenchments in both style and performance.

The 20th century and beyond

The major performing institutions of the 19th century have continued into the 21st century with only minimum structural change, except for a rather belated movement toward unionization of personnel; this development has of course improved the performers’ lot greatly, while increasing the costs of performance. Unquestionably, the major new influence on 20th-century music performance was electronics. Broadcasting and recording widened even further the potential audience for concert artists, at the same time as they tended to decrease the physical necessity for large new public performance arenas. Electronic instruments appeared, both amplified versions of older ones (guitar, piano, and even some woodwinds) and instruments with fundamentally electronic means of tone production (electronic pianos and organs, the theremin and Ondes Martenot, sound synthesizers, and still later developments). Other new compositional and performance possibilities also emerged—for example, film, tape, stereophonism, and computers. Even before the phonograph (invented c. 1875) had begun to be regarded as more than a toy, serious research into the authentic performance of older music had produced an awareness of possibilities that pointed the way out of late Romantic gigantism and subjectivism. From the very beginning of the 20th century, the chamber concerts given by Arnold Dolmetsch and his family, on reconstructions of old gambas and recorders, attracted attention to small ensembles and different sonorities and encouraged the activities of other artists.

The true end of the Romantic era and the beginning of the modern era can be dated from the second decade of the 20th century, the time of the composition of two masterpieces that more than any others mark the departure from 19th-century performance ideas: the German composer Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat (1918; The Soldier’s Tale). These are chamber works, but their instrumental makeup is a unique mixture of instruments that do not necessarily blend and that seem further to repudiate the orchestra as a performing medium. Pierrot is a series of songs that repudiate the 19th-century lied: the voice does not sing but produces a kind of pitched speech (Sprechstimme). Histoire repudiates both orchestra and opera as previously understood: it is specifically (and inexpensively) designed for performance on a portable stage by three dancers, a narrator, and seven instrumentalists. For these works a new kind of performer was required, and these works in turn helped to train the new performer—who might be called the group-virtuoso. Teams or groups of such performers subsequently sprang up everywhere. Often centred on a living composer or the university where he or she taught, they essentially functioned as partners in the compositional process, realizing the work rather than interpreting it. Such performers were very much involved in the creative act, the product of which reflected their particular skills and personalities, and the dynamics of the working situation. Among the most influential composers of the 21st century has been John Adams, known for blending diverse musical genres—including jazz, pop, and electronic music—in his works as well as assembling vocal texts from popular media, government documents, personal interviews, and other sources.

Since the mid-20th century the established performance situation has moved from the formal, ritualized event of the past to a more informal and spontaneous type of gathering. The interaction of various media has led to new art forms and circumstances. Many artists have attempted to create performance situations that actively involve as participants all those in attendance. In such compositions, the roles of composer, performer, and listener are consolidated in a single participant, who in interaction with others arrives at an art work, which all have invented, realized, and perceived, and which can never take place in exactly the same way again. On the other hand, the ever-increasing use of technology has intensified the problem of evaluating the meaning and effect of electronically produced and assembled performances that, in their totality, never took place at all and possibly never could.

The electronic media continue to improve so that anyone may be able to select chamber, concert, opera, and other new types of performance from anywhere in the world, experiencing them through nearly lifelike reproduction facilities. Vast numbers of people may study performance skills via two-way transmission with great artists. The number of actual public performing events may decrease as private musical performance increases. Already there is the phenomenon of the widespread dissemination of great performers’ recordings, which has forced the standards of quality for a live performance to almost inhuman heights and has increased interest in the performance of older as well as contemporary music.

Non-Western musical performance traditions

South Asia

Although classical South Asian or Indian musicians usually perform in a concert situation quite analogous to that of Western artists, their audiences respond to them quite differently: they are judged not on how faithfully they reproduce the music the composer imagined but on how well they create their own music within certain wide bounds set by the composer and by the general practice of Indian music. Since Indian musical performance is based on improvisation, Indian musical pedagogy is therefore a more personal procedure, in which aspiring musicians will “apprentice” themselves to a guru, with whom they are thereafter identified; in the West this kind of organization is reflected in the rise of the group-virtuoso discussed above. Similarly, Western development away from large performing groups such as the full orchestra reflects—or at least parallels—the more intimate character of Indian music, the basic texture of which usually involves a quite small group of performers: one player to provide rhythm on a drum such as the double-headed, pitched tabla; one to provide a basic drone, often on the lute-like tambura; and a central performer on the sitar (technically also a plucked lute but one with melodic capability, unlike the tambura). The players often engage in a kind of competition not unlike that of Western jazz groups. If there is singing, the style of performance is low and soft, in contrast to that of Indonesian classical vocalism.

Southeast Asia

The gamelan is at the centre of the art-music tradition of Indonesia. It may range in size from a few to more than 75 instruments. The basic melodic instrument is the saron (bronze xylophone), accompanied by various gongs, a kind of bowed lute, a recorder-flute and/or a zither; the group is led by a drummer. As in medieval Western music, there are two kinds of gamelan playing, one emphasizing the bronze instruments (comparable to medieval haut, or loud, consorts) and the other the wind and stringed instruments (bas, or soft, groups). A similar differentiation exists in Indochinese music in the contrast between the percussion-dominated pi phat band of Thailand and the string-dominated mahori bands of Thailand and Cambodia. Gamelan playing, particularly of the softer type, often accompanies solo and unison choral singing of classical poetry (music is connected with most of Indonesian literature). Southeast Asian vocal performance—like that of a great deal of non-Western art music—is characterized by tense, high, often nasal voice production; this is one of many alternatives explored by the more experimental 20th-century Western composers and performers.

China and Japan

The most extensively developed and most important Chinese and Japanese traditions of musical performance are closely tied to theatrical styles and traditions. Perhaps the most spectacular of non-Western performance traditions is Chinese opera, in which singers, acrobats, costumes, scenery, and instruments are combined in the creation of a highly varied work of art. Jingxi (Peking opera) uses two basic kinds of instrumentation: wuchang, for military scenes a battery of drums, gongs, and cymbals with a kind of oboe (suona) playing the melody; wenchang, for the more frequent domestic scenes a wider variety based on a drum (bangu) with a peculiarly sharp, cracking sound for keeping time, and a number of two-stringed bowed lutes (huqin, notably the jinghu) played with the bow passing between the strings. Plucked lutes (notably, the yueqin) and flutes (typically, the di) also appear at times. All of the melody instruments play heterophonically with the singers, whose vocal style, as in the West, is highly artificial. Heroines are usually portrayed (sometimes by female impersonators) in a high, thin voice; heroes use a raucous rasping tone quite foreign to traditionally oriented Western ears—but, again, not unlike some of the vocal techniques required by 20th-century Western avant-garde composers. A performance tradition peculiarly Japanese is the emphasis on the visual aspects of making music: custom directs that gagaku (court orchestra) instruments must be played as gracefully as possible.