21st-Century Pianism: Retrospection, New Directions, and Interpretative Communities

Image credit: Unsplash, Spencer Imbrock

With ever-greater frequency, dedicated listeners, artists, pedagogues, and scholars tend to remark that contemporary performances of the core classical repertory sound remarkably alike in both live and recorded contexts. Considering the possibility that piano culture has entered an age of contemporary, back-and-forth reproduction, this panel considers the following: 1. To borrow from literary theorist Stanley Fish, how might a pianist navigate various “interpretative communities” of the core repertory when dealing with varying politics of taste? 2. How might a pianist listen to and theorize about past recordings to reinvigorate today’s performance approaches? 3. What are ways a pianist might introduce direct compositional changes to existing works to reboot the core performing repertory? 4. What does it mean to evaluate a performance?

Panelists: Luca Chiantore (Universidade de Aveiro INET-md), Mine Doğantan-Dack (Ensemble Luce), Pheaross Graham (UCLA), John Rink (University of Cambridge), William Kinderman (UCLA)

Presented by the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities and the UCLA Music Library, in collaboration with co-organizers Pheaross Graham (UCLA) and Farrah O’Shea (UCLA).

For more information and the full schedule, or for tickets, please see Music Performance Studies Today. 

Series events:

Performing Capitalism and Neoliberalism

Anti-Blackness in Western Classical Music

On Beethoven, Blackness, and Belonging: Debating Classical Music in the Black Atlantic

The Ephemerality of Musical Hearing

Methods in Music Performance Studies

Performance, Gestures, Electronics