This is brief, but I use these words specifically enough that I think it’s worth making a space to clearly define them. The most concise simplification is to say that performance is execution and composition is design.
The two ideas are easy to see as counterparts to each other. What’s supposed to happen and what actually happens. In music, there are many modes of expectation for how what’s supposed to happen should compare to what actually happens. In the modern interpretation of classical performance, performance should deviate from composition very little, only in relatively minor bits of musicality, not in rhythm or pitch. In jazz, in improv, (in an exaggerated sense) what’s supposed to happen is defined by what happens- performance leads design rather than the other way around (no such thing as a mistake in improv, right?). Both of those examples are types of live performances, though. In recorded, produced music (the music I’m listening to and ranking), the performance, the execution, of a sound can be done over and over again until it’s exactly how the artist wants it for that piece. We’re not working with sheet music and its necessarily imperfect interpretations. When an artist releases a work now, assuming it’s released as sound, we are given an incredibly precise, specific interpretation, The Interpretation, of that work.
Because of this, performance as an independent idea often becomes, for me, irrelevant. In truth, it’s a subsidy of composition. How an artist executes their music is still important to me, I just believe that it’s more a measure of songwriting than of anything else. And it is part of songwriting, as much as harmony or rhythm. There are a lot of different definitions on what constitutes music, those immeasurable fundamental elements. Perhaps the most subscribed to are harmony, melody, and rhythm. Other commonIy argued elements include timbre, intensity, sound, texture, and other increasingly pedantic and granular terms. I don’t know if I’d try to argue that timbre and texture are vitally distinct elements of music, but I would argue in favor of theater as a core element of music. That human quality of delivery, the way we use language and body language to affect music. You can hear a smile, and it colors a song. That’s performance, execution, theater, and that can be manipulated and coerced into a particular composition.
Performance is execution, composition is design. In produced music, music that’s published primarily as recorded audio, performance is a part of composition. Performance, execution. Composition, design. Choosing a particular execution is a design choice.
That’s all. Just making sure we’re on the same page.
tunafruitsandwitch 