Christopher Wiley

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?

In 2015 James Eggleston, Head of Publishing at Boosey & Hawkes, came upon an old, collapsed box numbered 518 while moving the London publisher’s archives from Holborn to Croydon. Opening the box, he discovered the lost autograph of the full orchestral score of The Seal-Woman (1917–24), primarily known as a two-act opera composed by Granville Bantock (Fig. 1). But he also lifted the lid on the significance of Bantock’s lesser-known collaborator, Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, the Edinburgh-based musician, teacher, lecturer, collector of Scottish folksong, and co-creator of the work they described as a “Celtic Folk Opera.” First produced in 1924 and revived (subsequent to a radio broadcast) in 1928 and 1936, the score had been missing for some 40 years, following its last full-scale performance in Fulham Town Hall in May 1975. Mr. Eggleston recognized immediately the musical treasure he had just unearthed, which, in addition to The Seal-Woman, included a lost score by Arthur Somervell contained in the same anonymous box.

This article draws attention to Kennedy-Fraser’s pivotal contribution to The Seal-Woman, not only as the librettist and the performer who originated the role of The Cailleach, but also as the collector who notated and arranged the Hebridean folksongs essential to the opera’s composition. The score drew substantially on these folk songs, and the opera contributed to keeping this repertory from vanishing from historical memory. The Seal-Woman was part of the wider contexts of the Celtic Revival and folksong collecting, of which Kennedy-Fraser was an important part, and of the rich lineage of artistic representations of the Selkie legend on which the opera was based. The rediscovery of the autograph score made possible the first recording of The Seal-Woman with its original orchestration, which was produced by Retrospect Opera in Glasgow on March 4–7, 2024 with The Orchestra of Scottish Opera conducted by John Andrews and a cast of predominantly Scottish artists. In addition to the premiere professional recording, the Scots Opera Project has staged multiple productions of The Seal-Woman in recent years, played to full houses.

This article discusses the widespread implications to the field of performance studies of attempting modern realizations of previously forgotten artwork for which any traditions of interpretation as might once have existed cannot now be recovered, mindful of the broad range of recent endeavours to expand and diversify artistic canons through rediscovery of the outputs of creators who have historically been marginalized on such grounds as gender or nationality. It takes as its case study the unfinished piano miniature ‘Aus der Jugendzeit!! E. v. H.’ (From the Time of Youth!! E. v. H.) by Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), composed in c.1878–80 but essentially unknown thereafter until it was recorded by the pianist Liana Gavrila-Șerbescu and published in a modern edition at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Comparative analysis focused on tempo and rubato reveals widely divergent interpretations in three recordings of this piece: Șerbescu’s commercial release (1995), and those available on standard Internet streaming platforms by Heloise Ph. Palmer (2017) and Carolyn Enger (2020). These findings suggest that Șerbescu’s inaugural version has done little to inaugurate fresh interpretive traditions for the work, particularly in the differing approaches taken to its inconclusive ending, and given that the absence of tempo, dynamic and expression markings in the original source material does little to promote consistency of performance.

In seeking to mediate between these interpretations through a hypothetical reading (supplied as prose description supplemented by audio realization), I propose that the reimagination of rediscovered artwork across the arts disciplines might be informed not just by conventional sources such as original manuscripts, but by more unconventional ones as well. In this instance, these include relevant passages of Smyth’s much later published memoirs, in which she offers a detailed prose description of the dedicatee, E[lisabeth] v[on] H[erzogenberg], Smyth’s close friend and the wife of her composition teacher, whose character the music seeks to portray.

This article discusses the unveiling of the life-size-plus statue of Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) in Dukes Plaza, Dukes Court, Woking on 8 March 2022. Smyth achieved fame primarily as a composer of music, including six operas, but she was also briefly active as a suffragette, as well as becoming a prolific author of memoirs and other prose writings towards the end of her career. She was resident in Surrey for much of her long life, Woking being her home town for over three decades. The article considers the current dearth of statues of women and women composers, provides an overview of Smyth's life and works as well as her connections to Woking (including local individuals who have recently championed her), and reports back on the unveiling ceremony itself. In later sections, it outlines the process of creating the statue and announces the project to install a duplicate maquette at the University of Surrey, Guildford.

This study seeks to investigate aspects of the relationship between the core academic activities of teaching and research in higher education, through a theoretically enriched discussion of the design of an innovative popular music module on Adele's 25 album and its delivery to first-year undergraduates on a general-purpose music degree during the academic years 2015–21. Drawing on autoethnographic approaches, it contemplates the challenges associated with the execution of a module on genuinely contemporary topics, outlining the case for the importance of ensuring that university curricula remain up-to-the-minute as well as exploring strategies by which to realise this aspiration in the absence of a body of academic literature that might ordinarily have provided strong foundations for the content of such teaching. These lines of inquiry lead to consideration of broader questions concerning the evolving relationship between teaching and research in light of the substantial changes that have taken place within the UK higher education sector in recent years, as well as the possibilities for teaching-led research, developed exclusively for and in the academic classroom, as an alternative to the more traditional research-led teaching.

In the county of Surrey, England, Dame Ethel Smyth has something of the status of a local hero. Blue plaques adorn all three of the buildings in which she lived. She was the face of a recent #WeAreWoking campaign, her likeness appearing on many a poster in the area. Less than a year ago, Woking Community Play Association wrote and performed a charming play about her life. But just how did an army general’s daughter from an obscure Surrey village rise to attain international success as one of the greatest British composers of her generation—and, moreover, during a period in which the notion of a woman writing large-scale works such as operas was all but unheard of?

Constructed broadly according to the principles of musical fugue, this piece of creative writing is presented as a performance autoethnography, enacted through a multi-voiced ethnodrama between a fictionalized version of the author and two imaginary doctoral students. In successive episodes, it discusses the difference between autoethnography and autobiography, the value and limitations of single-subject ethnographic study, and the types of materials that constitute valid documentation for the purposes of autoethnography, including creative writing based on music-theoretical devices as well as musical works themselves, in addition to more conventional modes of discourse. These dialogic interludes are articulated by periodic returns to the principal subject of the conversation: the working definition of autoethnography and its potential application to Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) with specific respect to music studies.

Standardised module evaluation surveys have recently been implemented or extensively redesigned at many different HEIs across the UK in response to an evolving national context, notwithstanding a body of scholarship that has called student evaluation of teaching (SET) into question. Through a focussed single-institution study, this mixed-methods research fills a notable gap in the current literature in establishing students’ perspectives on standardised module evaluation by means of a paper-based questionnaire. Its participants (N=40) recognised some general advantages of a university-wide system, such as facilitating comparison between different modules; but they also acknowledged several shortcomings relating to its lack of sensitivity to individual module contexts and schedules, yielding the overall view that standardised surveys are only partially effective as a means of teaching evaluation. The conclusion considers the wider implications of these distinctive findings, and suggests that the perceived limitations of SET point to the need to triangulate its results with data obtained through alternative evaluation mechanisms.