Lisa McCormick. Music as Social Performance

Abstract

Lisa McCormick pays attention to the fact that music is a matter of research primarily in two disciplines: musicology and sociology of music. While musicologists focus on the analysis of the elements of musical text, sociologists generally concentrate on the structures of production and consumption of music. However neither musicology nor sociology considers music as a performing art. McCormick proposes to put in a centre the idea of musical performance understood as a social performance. Within this research framework performance of music is an activity which looks like ritual that is social interaction connected with collective representations and at the same time with standard patterns of behaviour. As the most relevant source of inspiration McCormick studies the theory of cultural (social) performance proposed by Jeffrey Alexander.