Tradition, Agency and the Limits of Empiricism

What is tradition? Does it have a role in the performance of Western art music? Do musical recordings speak of tradition? And how can we use them to trace stylistic transmission and change in different cultural-historical contexts of performance? These are the main questions that concern this book. Using Grieg’s piano music as a case study, the author examines how tradition affords agency and how performers actively reinterpret the musical past. By employing a range of empirical methods, including both quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches, this book investigates the tension between tradition as objective reality and tradition as subjective experience. Viewed through the limits of empiricism, tradition emerges as a social context where human agents and material culture interact to sustain a fluid dialogue between the present and the past. In its epistemological impulse this book pursues research on musical performance at the intersection of science and art.