Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Challenging Performance offers a new approach to western classical music, encouraging and enabling performers to be more individual and creative. It shows how and why creativity is normally discouraged, why it should not be, and how it can become part of everyday performance. The linked website, challengingperformance.com, features podcasts, a free online book, and many new and highly imaginative performances. The project is aimed at young professional performers, musicians in the making, and open-minded lovers of classical music. We showcase recordings by contemporary performers who use a range of historical, modern and experimental approaches to revitalise the performance of classical repertoire. Visit https://challengingperformance.com for more information.

  1. 2024/12/31

    Challenging Performance, Chapter 23.2 : How many Ave Marias?

    Wondering how many different performances a classical musician could give of the same score, I asked friends and colleagues what they thought might be possible...

    29 分钟

  2. 2024/12/31

    Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.2 : How we made ‘Dido & Belinda’

    Ella Marchment (Helios Collective, director), Leo Geyer (conductor, composer) and I (as dramaturg) developed a reading of Purcell's 'Dido & Aeneas' score which made new, coherent sense of the text and the music, addressing themes of our time. Watch THE VIDEO at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h38DMVBi9IM&t=475s

    4 分钟

  3. 2024/12/31

    Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.3 : ‘Dido & Belinda’ -- what the performers thought

    The results of a questionnaire among the performers of 'Dido & Belinda' finds most happy with both the process and the outcome, some to their great surprise.

    11 分钟

  4. 2024/12/31

    Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.4 : ‘Dido & Belinda’ -- what the audiences thought

    The 'Dido & Belinda' audiences' questionnaire suggests that the audiences we can already see emerging with new venues and new forms of presentation are likely to be sympathetic to much more creative interactions with texts from the past. There are real possibilities here for generating new work and new audiences for adventurous young musicians.

    10 分钟

  5. 2024/12/31

    Challenging Performance, Chapter 27 : Finally, the right to be different

    The UN Human Rights Council advocates ‘the right ... to freely ... contribute to artistic expressions and creations'. This the classical music business does not currently permit. There’s no excuse for such a high-profile, high-status embodiment of Western cultural values not to be in conformity with its (now) foundational statement of ethical and political values. And no need either.

    6 分钟

  6. 2024/12/23

    Challenging Performance, Chapter 13 : Musicians' lack of agency

    Accepting that, as a classical musician, one has little agency (freedom to choose and the authority to act) makes the job less dispiriting. But that lack of agency is still (and quite rightly) felt as oppressive by many musicians, including many of those quoted here.

    18 分钟

  7. 2024/12/23

    Challenging Performance, Chapter 18.1 : Recap on creativity

    Most of the skills required for greater creativity in classical performance are in use already (albeit to a smaller degree) in normative performance. What creativity requires is simply that one takes, and—crucially—feels empowered to take them further.

    4 分钟

  8. 2024/12/23

    Challenging Performance, Chapter 18.2 : Comparison with theatre practice

    We have only to imagine how dreary theatre would be if every performance of ‘Hamlet’ used the same gestures and the same intonations—all enforced by an ideologically-contrained community of actors and gatekeepers claiming to be faithful—to see how disastrously classical music has backed itself into a corner.

    12 分钟
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Challenging Performance offers a new approach to western classical music, encouraging and enabling performers to be more individual and creative. It shows how and why creativity is normally discouraged, why it should not be, and how it can become part of everyday performance. The linked website, challengingperformance.com, features podcasts, a free online book, and many new and highly imaginative performances. The project is aimed at young professional performers, musicians in the making, and open-minded lovers of classical music. We showcase recordings by contemporary performers who use a range of historical, modern and experimental approaches to revitalise the performance of classical repertoire. Visit https://challengingperformance.com for more information.

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