In Concert: Philip Auslander with José Alberto Ferreira

Abstract

Philip Auslander writes about the concept of performance in relation to art, technology, media, and music. Through his books, which include Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music, Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation, and Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance, Auslander has helped shape the evolution of the field of Performance Studies. These books address the tensions surrounding performance within the conditions of postmodern culture. In his most recent book, In Concert: Performing Musical Persona, Auslander engages questions he has been working on since 2004 that bridge performance studies and musicology in innovative and challenging ways. How are musicians to be perceived as performers within the variety of musical idioms that make up the contemporary cultural landscape? And how do these performers present their personae, either in live concerts or in more complex mediatizations? In our dialogue, we explored some of the issues about musical performance that Auslander addresses.