Idea-Text-Performance. Can this triad still be considered a valid foundation for music?

Abstract

The question whether the triad of the title can still be considered a valid foundation of a discourse on music implies as broad a concept of music as possible, pertaining to musicology in the most comprehensive sense of the term. I am not a scholar of ethnomusicology, of popular music, nor of music theory; my standpoint is bound to be that of a historian who studies European art music, using first and foremost the tools of philology, and hence within a written tradition. I am aware that this heritage and these tools by no means cover the whole gamut of music; indeed they account for a minimal part, the tip of the iceberg or an island floating in the ocean, to use an image dear to the heart of my professor Nino Pirrotta, who devoted much of his time and energy to what he once called the “absent muse”, unwritten music [Pirrotta 1992: 717-724]. I have devoted my own philological endeavours above all to opera, and this has heightened my awareness, for in combining the two supreme performing arts, music and drama, which occur mainly as Event, the difficulties of conceptualising them in terms of Work and Text are made all the greater.