Abstract
When we embarked on this issue of Performance Research, broadly titled ‘On Music’, we unrolled ineluctably a ball of thread in search of the ‘twists and turns of its unfolding’ by asking: what is music performance studies (MPS) and its relation to other disciplines in the twenty-first century?Footnote1 Two further questions guided our curiosities: What does doing, creating and encountering performance – of any musical genre or style, and in any context – entail? What forms do (re)searching, discoursing about and documenting, in the broadest transmedia sense of the word, music performance take? As we curated this issue and sought to tackle these overarching questions we combined not only our distinct (scholarly) identities, musical imaginations and inquisitiveness but also the diverse voices of our contributors who entrusted to us their precious, at times intimate and personal, artistic work. It was essential to our mission to embrace fully and to nurture with mutual respect, humility, care, empathy as well as editorial diligence these unique researcher-practitioner identities and the many varied creative works and research contexts that are now reflected by the breadth of articles contained in this issue. As we now trace in this editorial the ‘rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread’ to point us to early beginnings and a plausible (un)ending for music performance studies, with all the fortuitous twists and turns in between, we probe the where, how, what of the field in twenty-first century contexts: Where and how is MPS already happening? Where else is it reasonable to consider it possible or necessary? Where, when and how might we encounter, benefit from and foster new modes of (cross-)disciplinary enquiry?