Temporality and performing style in Luciano Berio's Sequenza XI for guitar

Luciano Berio's Sequenza XI stands as a major work in the 20th-century guitar repertoire. Although it has been extensively analysed in previous scholarship, its performance practice has not been addressed. In this paper, I set out to fill this gap by analysing fifteen commercial recordings of the work, and furthermore seek to demonstrate how different categories of musical time-experience (after UTZ, 2017) can be used as a frame for discussing performers' interpretative decisions. I propose a formal analysis of the work and provide time-based measurements of the score, which I then compare to the performed sound structures. The results allow me to map the main trends in the performance practice of Sequenza XI in commercial recordings produced between 1993 and 2016, as well as to relate these trends to the discourses of the performers involved

body, mimesis and image : a gesture based approach to interpretation in contemporary guitar performing practice

This thesis addresses interpretative issues arising from notated music, particularly recent guitar music typifying progressive notational and aesthetic trends, from a perspective based on the concepts of mimesis and gesture. Drawing on Adorno’s theory of musical reproduction, scholarship on musical gesture and recent models of performers’ relationship to notation, I propose interpretative strategies aiming at the vindication of the role of the body in the discussion of musical works, while also examining the performing conventions challenged by recent developments in guitar notation. Artistic practice is fundamental to this thesis as it accounts for the exploration of various interpretative strategies and choices derived from the application of the aforementioned concepts. An accompanying folio of videos and recordings documents the impact of these theoretical concepts upon my performing practice. The starting point is a discussion of the performing issues of Brian Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II, a peak of complexity in the guitar literature, and the relationship between musical gesture and the metaphorical domains to which this work alludes. Subsequently, the interpretative strategies proposed here are applied to aesthetic models differing from that of Ferneyhough as well as to music appealing to multi-parametric notation – here considered as a strand deriving from Ferneyhough’s aesthetics – requiring a paradigm shift in its interpretative approach