Research

This project aims to re-evaluate, complement and revise contemporary views about musical experience and performance in musicology and music performance studies, as well as qualitative psychology and the philosophy of music, drawing on insights from the underexplored protodisciplinary music scholarship and performers’ discourses between the 1880s and 1930s. It will be shown how present-day approaches in the above disciplines can already be found in a germinal stage in this period, promising to reveal intuitions that have been either forgotten, or overlooked. The project will offer perspectives that can complement traditional epistemological frameworks and will serve to provoke contemporary research to re-evaluate its premises and presumptions from the vantage point of this hitherto underexplored, but prodigious intellectual legacy. Ultimately, the project will offer a framework that expands our ability to understand and study music as a transformative, embodied, and participatory phenomenon. Methodologically, the project employs close reading of primary sources, archival research, comparative literature reviews, and hermeneutical analysis. Key deliverables include a symposium, a co-authored publication with the two supervisors of the project, and a monograph to disseminate findings and foster crossdisciplinary dialogue.