Table Of ContentTaking It to the Bridge
Taking It to the Bridge
Music as Performance
Nicholas Cook and
Richard Pettengill,
Editors
The University of Michigan Press • Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2013
All rights reserved
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in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the
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Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Taking it to the bridge : music as performance / Nicholas Cook and Richard
Pettengill, editors.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978- 0- 472- 07177- 7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 472- 05177- 9
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 472- 02930- 3 (e- book)
1. Music— Performance. I. Cook, Nicholas, 1950– , editor. II. Pettengill,
Richard, editor.
ML457.T35 2013
781.4'3— dc23 2013006635
Contents
Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill
Editors’ Preface vii
Elisabeth Le Guin
A Backward- Looking Foreword xi
Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill
Introduction 1
Susan Fast
U2 3D: Concert Films and/as Live Performance 20
Richard Pettengill
Performing Collective Improvisation:
The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” 37
Philip Auslander
Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement 52
Nicholas Cook
Bridging the Unbridgeable? Empirical Musicology
and Interdisciplinary Performance Studies 70
Philip Gossett
The Written and the Sung:
Ornamenting Il barbiere di Siviglia 86
Dana Gooley
Enacting the Revolution: Thalberg in 1848 102
Joseph Roach
Cutting Loose: Burying “The First Man of Jazz” 125
Aida Mbowa
Abbey Lincoln’s Screaming Singing and the
Sonic Liberatory Potential Thereafter 135
Margaret F. Savilonis
Got to Get Over the Hump: The Politics of Glam
in the Work of Labelle and Parliament 155
Daphne a. Brooks
“Bring the Pain”: Post- Soul Memory, Neo- Soul Affect,
and Lauryn Hill in the Black Public Sphere 180
Jason King
Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough: Presence, Spectacle,
and Good Feeling in Michael Jackson’s This Is It 204
Maria M. Delgado
Carles Santos: “Music in the Theatre” 237
Ingrid Monson
Tchekisse: Neba Solo’s Senufo Counterpoint in Action 262
Roger Moseley
Playing Games with Music (and Vice Versa):
Ludomusicological Perspectives on Guitar Hero
and Rock Band 279
David Borgo
Beyond Performance:
Transmusicking in Cyberspace 319
Philip Auslander
Afterword: Music as Performance:
The Disciplinary Dilemma Revisited 349
Contributors 359
Index 365
Editors’ Preface
James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” was famously adept at “taking it to
the bridge.” The term bridge, of course, has various meanings in addition
to “a structure carrying a pathway or roadway over a depression or ob-
stacle.” In musical terms, a bridge is “a musical passage linking two sections
of a composition” or “a short section which links together— perhaps by a
key change— two important sections of a large- scale symphony or similar
work.”1 James Brown took it to the bridge every time he performed “Sex
Machine,” a funk groove in a single key with a few lyrics that he repeated
again and again with spectacularly energetic and inventive variation:
Get on up, get on up
Stay on the scene
Like a sex machine
Brown would perform his trademark high- energy dance moves and emit
steady streams of sweat until he was ready to pop the question: “Hey, can I
take it to the bridge? Should I take it to the bridge?” He would ask several
times, at first seemingly not satisfied or convinced by the overwhelmingly
positive response from the ensemble players that he held in a legendarily
authoritative iron grip. Ready at last, he would turn to signal the band,
kicking them into the bridge section. After a few bars, Brown would signal
a return to the lead groove, continuing his improvisatory gyrations all the
while.
Taking a cue from James Brown, the fields of musicology and per-
formance studies have lately been “taking it to the bridge” in a different
sense: moving into a new key with the benefit of an alternative perspective,
thereby building bridges between the disciplines. Performance studies is a
relatively new academic field that trains an analytical eye on staged perfor-
mances as well as those that occur in everyday life, while musicology has
viii • Editors’ Preface
traditionally focused on musical texts rather their performance. But for
some years now, scholars in both fields, which previously have had little or
no contact, have been examining the performance behavior of musicians.
They have also begun to take note of and pay attention to one another’s
work, and to incorporate each other’s views.
An example of such bridging that helped to spur the present volume is
the opening paragraphs of the essay “Musical Personae” by performance
studies scholar Philip Auslander, in which he engages with the performance-
oriented work of musicologist Nicholas Cook. Auslander writes:
Traditional musicology, often characterized as worshipful of the
musical work and disdainful of performance, has been undergoing a
“performative turn” in recent years, a development well-d ocumented
by Nicholas Cook in “Between Process and Product: Music and/
as Performance” (2001). As someone committed to finding ways of
discussing musicians as performers, whose primary discipline is per-
formance studies, I am cheered by this development and grateful
to Cook both for his careful mapping of disputed territory and his
advocacy for the “music as performance” approach.2
Our purpose in this volume is to further such interdisciplinary collabora-
tion and engagement by presenting current “music as performance” work
by scholars in both fields.
The idea for this volume came about through a meeting of the Associa-
tion for Theatre in Higher Education in 2008, at which Philip Auslander
convened a panel of papers devoted to the various ways musicians behave
on stage, the personae they construct for the purpose of stage performance,
and the song characters they take on when they enact lyrics. The panel
featured speakers from both performance studies and musicology, and the
suggestion arose that it might be developed into a book of essays sampling
this new, cross- disciplinary field. The coeditors (one from musicology and
one from theater and performance studies) have aimed at a balanced repre-
sentation of both fields, in the hope that this will stimulate further produc-
tive interaction between them.
The book begins at the musicological end of the spectrum, with Elisa-
beth Le Guin’s Foreword and Susan Fast’s essay on U2 3D, the 3D film
of a 2008 concert by the Irish band, in which she explores the difference
between mediatized and live performance. The opera historian Philip Gos-
sett offers an essay on vocal ornamentation in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Sivi-
glia, while Dana Gooley writes about the political significance of a piano
recital in nineteenth- century Vienna. Ingrid Monson explores the social
and visual elements of a performance by Neba Solo, a musician from Mali,
Editors’ Preface • ix
while Roger Moseley writes about ways in which, during their brief heyday,
the games Guitar Hero and Rock Band represented and reconfigured aspects
of real- world performance within the domain of the virtual. David Borgo
develops Christopher Small’s idea of “musicking” into the virtual realm,
while Nicholas Cook subjects performance data captured from recordings
to computational analysis and relates this work to the field of performance
studies.
On the performance studies side, Joseph Roach investigates the idea
of “cutting the body loose” in the traditional jazz funerals of New Or-
leans, while Daphne Brooks shows how Lauryn Hill’s 2005 performance
of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly (With His Song)” encapsulates and
affirms her pivotal role as the iconic voice of post–C ivil Rights cultural in-
surgency. Margaret Savilonis shows how two 1960s-e ra African- American
bands, Labelle and Parliament, moved from the traditional, restricting
dress and choreography of the 1950s toward the more liberating style of
1970s glam rock. Richard Pettengill offers a close reading of a few minutes
of the Grateful Dead transitioning from an extended improvisation into
a song: a moment of seeming confusion resolving in collective concord
exemplifies the band’s improvisational aesthetic, philosophy, and practices.
Aida Mbowa argues that jazz singer Abbey Lincoln uses such techniques
as screaming to inspire her audience into a listening that is “bone deep,”
bringing to life specters from the collective unconscious of the African-
American past, while Jason King show how the film This Is It evidences
Michael Jackson’s extraordinary skill as a performer and so calls into ques-
tion widespread misconceptions about Jackson as an artist. Maria Delgado
describes the avant- garde performance techniques of opera company di-
rector/composer/performer Carles Santos, while Philip Auslander views
improvisation as a social contract between musicians and listeners; Aus-
lander has also provided an Afterword for the volume.
We wish to thank Philip Auslander, Elizabeth Patterson, and LeAnn
Fields for their encouragement and collaboration throughout the process
of assembling this volume.
Nicholas Cook
Richard Pettengill
Notes
1. The first two of these definitions come from Miriam Webster Online, and the
third from the Oxford Dictionary of Music.
2. Philip Auslander, “Musical Personae,” TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 1
(2006): 100.
