Performative Analysis: Reimagining Music Theory for Performance. By Jeffrey Swinkin.

Over the past several decades, the relationship between music analysis and music performance has been scrutinized and debated among musicologists. Questions have arisen about the purpose of analysis in the context of performance, its value for performers, and the kinds of analytical activity that might otherwise arise in the act of performance or its preparation. Different approaches have been identified according to the way in which the relationship is upheld, such as to consider whether or not the act of analysis occurs prior to, during, or after performance, and whether the performance serves as an end, means, or starting point for the analysis. A comprehensive account of these issues is provided in John Rink’s authoritative review (‘Review of Wallace Berry’s Musical Structure and Performance’, Music Analysis, 9 (1990), 319–39), while the publication of two seminal texts in 1995, namely The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (Cambridge University Press) edited by Rink, and Jonathan Dunsby’s Performing Music: Shared Concerns (Oxford University Press) provide further critical perspectives. Debates on the relationship have since been relatively dormant, while a body of research in ‘performance analysis’, which uses objective, technological, and/or critical subjective methodologies to explore how sounding music coheres in live or recorded performances, has emerged (see, for example, outputs from the Centre for History and Analysis of Recorded Music (www.charm.kcl.ac.uk) and the Centre for Music Performance as Creative Practice (www.cmpcp.ac.uk/, accessed January 2017). Jeffrey Swinkin’s book is a welcome opportunity to revisit earlier perspectives on the relationship between analysis and performance whereby the former is used in the context of preparation for the latter. Throughout, the terms ‘music theory’ and ‘music analysis’ are used interchangeably and often in the formal sense, while analysis is fundamentally Schenkerian and structural in orientation.