Performance: Music in Motion

Performance as Existence and Development of Music

Abstract

Music is an activity; a human activity. Despite theoretical abstractions, it is not simply conceptual, but thought in action. Music only comes from the movement of people imbued in the process of doing, performing. The aim of the present paper is to address the origin of Western idealist thinking in music and how it influenced all musical development generating a hierarchy between theory and praxis, valuing one over the other, resulting in reductionism in the meaning of making music, before to think about the meaning of the music itself, but the music for us. The concept of Musical Work attached only to musical notation and its author without considering the performer and his active, not just reactive, contribution is restricted and idealized. We contrast the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Boethius, among others, with that of Sextus Empiricus, as precursor thinkers in the West; Neoplatonism of the Christian era, and even modern musicologists who confronted the aesthetic issues of music. We understand that making-music is at the core of her existence, music.