Introduction and Overview

Musical performance deals with the transformation of a (typically classical Western) score into a physical entity composed of acoustical events and the embodiment of the score’s symbols in the musicians’ bodies. This is already a strong restriction of musical activities, since it excludes musical utterances that are not generated by scores. For example, oral traditions from different ethnicities and the standard practice of jazz are excluded. Jazz, when based on lead sheet notation, uses strongly reduced information requiring a significant interpretational work in order to represent the concretely played sounds. This means that we conceive a score as containing exhaustive data concerning the sounds to be played.