Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

This eBook, freely available at https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/, is addressed to performers of western classical music. It’s about freeing performance from unnecessary rules and constraints and from much of the anxiety that comes with classical training and practice. The aim is to encourage performers to find many more ways (old and new) in which classical scores can make musical sense. The eBook, with supporting podcasts and website, looks critically at the many ways in which performers are prevented---by training, employment and policing---from exercising creativity or inventiveness in performing classical scores. It examines and challenges the beliefs that underlie these limitations. And it offers new ways of thinking about, and new approaches to performing, well-known scores. There are chapters on concepts and beliefs, teaching, criticism, obligations to composers, performer ill-health, legal constraints, ethics, creativity, techniques, historical performance, persuasive performance, freedom of expression; and there are links to many examples of performances that refuse norms in artistically productive ways. Readers are encouraged to comment and contribute.