Thirty years ago, new insights on performance coming out of the disciplines
of folklore and anthropology had a profound effect on the way
ethnomusicologists think about music.  Though not the sole influence,
performance theory in folklore helped generate scholarship about music that
emphasized the relationship between situational context and performed text.
For example, Herndon and McLeod's book Music as Culture drew heavily upon
the insights of folkloristic work and articulated a new way of thinking
about the discipline: that music is a cultural system and we need to
understand its relationship to other cultural systems.

This course will reexamine the relationship between folkloristic performance
studies and ethnomusicology and explore areas of conflict and compatibility.
We will not only look at recent influences, but also at early
ethnomusicological work which was concerned with the same issues that
performance studies articulated many years later.  Issues of bimusicality,
virtuosity, poetics, and transcription will all be examined in relation to
the nature of musical performance.