Music Performance Studies and ‘Ethnomusicology at Home’: Creating an interdisciplinary ‘site of care’

Aims/Purpose
Using a series of case studies from my research, this article reflects upon the emergence of a particular mode of enquiry into music performance, developed from ethnographic method in music and performance, informed both by performance studies and by a variety of musicological approaches. It will elucidate connection between performance studies and a line of scholarship that begins with ethnomusicology, then applied to Western Institutions and forms (Born, 1995; Stock, 1998; DeNora, 2000; Cottrell, 2004) and incorporating interdisciplinary and multi-functional performance models (i.e. in the theatre and in education). Such methodology holds natural but often overlooked overlaps with the ethos and methods of performance studies, as scholars in different fields have historically missed one another. In both fields (performance studies and ethnomusicology) the researcher identifies, acknowledges and incorporates their own position. Both fields incorporate the study of behaviour as performance, i.e. ‘what people do in the activity of their doing it’ (Schechner, 2020: 1). Most importantly, and central to this article, in both cases the very act of enquiry participates in and is effectual upon the object of enquiry. This article aims therefore to assess ways in which research into music performance might bring scholars of these disciplines closer in a more thoroughly humanistic and socially impactful form of enquiry.

Content Outline
In 2010, Georgina Born called for a ‘relational musicology’ (2010a), contextually informed within an understanding of the social means and processes of production. She envisioned that scholarship might ‘intervene in those processes to potentially creative effect’ (2010b: 199), thus inform the field it interrogates.

Pam Burnard argues for new ‘post-qualitative’ methods in the study of social music interventions, and advocates for the importance of ‘paying attention’; suspending judgement, listening, holding space for the values and needs of those participating, and thus co-creating research. In this context, she asserts, ‘as a concept, affect helps us to understand’ (Burnard, 2023: 290).

My own research in relational musicology, or music performance studies, includes of the following three cases studies, to be synthesised and discussed in terms of methodology, ethos and outcome:

1. assessing the company Opera North, and the operation of its access agenda, acting as a democratic force in promoting and producing ‘high culture’ for the north of England (Daniel, 2010; Daniel, 2016);

2. observing, in creative musical theatre-making by university students, tension with standardised assessment models, and suggestions for the future of creative learning, teaching and assessing (Daniel, 2024, submitted, in process);

3. post-qualitative ethnographic enquiry into singing as educational and social intervention in a secondary school, assessed as a musical site of care (Daniel and Daniel, 2024, in process).

Impact and Conclusion
This article ultimately summarises and synthesises methodology and output in three case studies, tying this research into the ethos and method of performance studies and simultaneously of ‘ethnomusicology at home’. In all case studies the act of enquiry is ‘actively involved in social practices and advocacies’ (Schechner, 2020: 2). In all cases it aims to ‘intervene [...] to potentially creative affect’ (Born, 2010b: 199). And in all cases the act of enquiry itself functions as a site of care (Burnard, 2023: 282). The article advocates for care as a central consideration in ethnographic and participatory enquiry into music performance, drawing in practice by Born, Burnard and others in relevance to the three home-grown case study examples.