Music Research Seminar: Eric Clarke (University of Oxford)

Event abstract

“It is different each time I play”, the pianist Emil Gilels has said. Musical performance is unavoidably ‘creative’ in the default sense that if the analysis is sufficiently fine-grained, any performance is bound to differ from every other performance in some way. But such a statement collapses together significantly different ways in which the term ‘creative’ can be used: residually, simply to indicate that there are features not found in any other performance; combinatorially, to indicate that while none of the elements of a performance belong to a new category, they appear in an arrangement not previously encountered; or more radically, to identify a performance that seems really to be striking, exciting, transformative. In this lecture I consider some of the questions about creativity in performance that are raised by a musical tradition (Western Art Music) that is dominated by the repeated performance of notionally fixed works; the ways in which that creativity is distributed around minds, bodies and instruments – and the networks of influence and performance practice in which they are embedded; and particularly the specific circumstances of contemporary music, in which the creativity of performers engages directly with the creative agency of living composers.

About Eric Clarke

Eric Clarke is Heather Professor of Music at Oxford, and Fellow of Wadham College. He has published widely on various issues in the psychology of music, musical meaning, and the analysis of pop music, including Empirical Musicology (OUP 2004, co-edited with Nicholas Cook), Ways of Listening (OUP 2005), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (CUP 2009, co-edited with Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink), Music and Mind in Everyday Life (OUP 2010, co-authored with Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts), and Music and Consciousness (OUP 2011, co-edited with David Clarke), and is currently working on a monograph entitled Musical Subjectivities, also for OUP.  He was an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) and is an Associate Director of the successor AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP; 2009-14). He is on a number of editorial boards including Music Perception, Musicae Scientiae, Empirical Musicology Review, and Radical Musicology, and was elected a member of Academia Europaea in 2009 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2010.