ASHGATE

15 RESEARCH
COMPANION

Musical Persona: The Physical

Performance of Popular Musid
Philip Auslander

The visual aspects of musical performance, by which I mean its physical and
gestural dimensions, have not received the attention due them. Even"scholars who
are sympathetic to the idea that physical performance, not just the production of
sound, is important to music tend to treat it as something apart from the music
itself. Alan Durant, for example, argues on the one hand, 'to take as music in all
instances only what is heard is to abstract ... an acoustic dimension of practices
always and only realizable within definitions and limits of a given scenario' while
also saying, on the other, that 'the physical dimensions of music in performance'
only contextualize or position the sound.' Nicholas Cook argues that Jimi Hendrix's
performances can be seen as 'instance[ s1of multimedia' because 'while his physical
motions were inevitably linked to the music ... they went far beyond it. They
became an independent dimension of variance .... '3 Both authors thus imply that
the physical aspects of musical performance should be seen as separate from,
supplementary to, or providing context for the auditory aspects, not as an integral
part of the production of music.
Although I do not intend to pursue this direction here, I will note, by way of
a rejoinder, that a substantial amount of research in experimental psychology
focusing on musical perception has come to very different conclusions regarding the
relationship between the visual and the auditory aspects of performance. Scholars
in this field have shown that the visual dimensions of musical performance convey
musical information and shape the audience's perception of the musical event. The
musical information imparted by the visual aspects of performance is both formal
(that is, related to the perception of characteristics such as dissonance, phrasing and
intervals) and affective (that is, related to the performer's interpretive intentions

1 Parts of this chapter are redacted from Philip Auslander, 'Musical Personae', The
Drama Review 50/1 (2006): 100-119 and 'Performance Analysis and Popular Music:
A Manifesto', Contemporary Theatre Review 14/1 (2004): 1-13.
2 Maultsby, 'Funk', p. 683.
3 Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford, 1998), p. 263.
 THE ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO POPULAR MUSICOLOGY
and the emotions he or she wishes to convey through the music). A report on one
series of such experiments concludes:
To a surprising extent, facial expression and other bodily movements affect
mu.Slc expen~nce at a perceptual level and an emotional leveL Different
faczal expressIOns can cause the same musical events to sound more or less
dissonant, the same melodic interval to sound larger or smaller, and the
same music to sound more or less joyful. In short, listeners integrate visual
wIth aural aspects of performance to form an integrated audio-visual mental
representation of music, and this representation is not entirely predictable
from the aural input alone.'
This work provides an important empirical grounding for seeing physical
performance as an essential part of the production of music. My own approach
IS socIal and cultural in emphasis, and is informed by the disciplinary contexts of
theatre and performance studies. In a remarkable essay published in 1943, D.C.
Somervell, assessing the situation of musical performance in a world increasingly
domrnated by radIO, soughtto grasp just what the visual aspects of performance bring
to the expenence of music. He anticipated the psychologists' findings by declaring
that vIsual information causes the auditor to hear musical sound differently. In
the portion of the essay whose implications I wish to pursue, however, Somervell
d,scusses the significance of the use of sheet music in performance:
Why do chamber mu~ic players retain their often quite unnecessary copies?
It IS not wholly satIsfactory to say that they need the music in order to
cooperate with each other. The answer probably is a matter of visual effect.
The very name, chamber n:usic, implies a certain intimacy and informality.
The audIence has the przvllege of hearing them, but they are not addressing
It: they are playmg for theIr own and each other's satisfaction . ... [W]hy
must the orchestra have music? An experienced orchestra can hardly need
the musIc of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. ... The answer is, of course, that
the members of the orchestra are not 'performers' in the sense in which we
have used the term. Thcy have sunk their personalities and become a single
lnstrument, and the 'performer'is the conductor.5
As Somervell suggests, the visual aspects of musical performance are not merely
functional and do not convey only formal information. Musicians do not only play
mUSIC; they also play roles. Somervell describes musical performance in terms
of an impression the performers seek to create on the audience - an impression
4 William Forde Thompson, Phil Graham and FrankA. Russo, 'Seeing Music Performance:
Visual Influences on Perception and Experience', Semiotica 156/1-4 (2005): 203~27 at
220.
5 D.C. Somervell, 'The Visual Element in Music', Music & Letters 24/1 (1943): 42-47, at
47.
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THE PHYSICAL PERFORMANCE OF POPULAR MUSIC
of who they are, their relationship to the music, the nature of the interrel~tions
among themselves, and the kind of interaction they are offerrng to the audIence.
Such impressions are created both aurally and Vlsually and unply a SOCIal narratzve.
They are also relative to genre: the same musician who disappears behmd the mUSIC
stand as the member of an orchestra plays a role that depends on visible insularity
when performing with a chamber group. It is these roles, and the means musicians
use to perform them in popular music, thafI wish to explore here.
Person, Persona, Character
We may not usually think of musical performance, apart fr~m opera and musical
theatre, as entailing role-playing in the conventzonal dramatzc sense. Nevert~eless,
we must be suspicious of any supposition that musicians are SImply . berng
themselves' on stage. Simon Frith helpfully identifies three different strata m pop
singers' performances, all of which may be present, simultaneously. He propos~s
that we hear pop singers as 'personally expreSSIve ~ that IS, as smgmg m thezr
own persons, from their own experience. But two other layers are Imposed on that
one because popular musicians are 'involved in a process of double enactment: they
enact both a star personality (their image) and a song personality, the role ;~at each
lyric requires, and the pop star's art is to keep both acts,:, play at once .. I shall
both systematize and expand on Frith's account. From thIS pomt on, I WIll refer
to the three layers of performance he identifies as the real person (the performer
as human being), the performance persona (the performer as social being) and the
character (Frith's song personality). .
All three layers may be active simultaneously in a given mU~ICal performance.
For example, when Kelly Clarkson, the winner of the 2002 Amerzcan Idol teleVISIOn
singing competition, sang a duet on television with country star Reba McIntyre,
they performed a song in which they played the roles of women competrng for
the affection of the same man. In addition to these characters, however, they also
portrayed musical personae of the experienced veteran singer .and her young
acolyte (and perhaps future competitor); these personae were delrneated through
the same performance as the characters in the song but were rndependent of
those characters ~ the singers could have performed theIr personae regardless of
what song they chose. The presence of the performers as real p~opl~ was implied
through Clarkson's televised announcement that she had always Idolzzed McIntyre
and had therefore chosen her as her duet partner when she was in the position to
do so by virtue of having won the competition. Whether true ?r not, this appeal t?
personal experience was layered into the performance alongSIde the two womens
performance personae as seasoned trouper and young up-and-comer and thezr
'
6 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA, 1996),
pp. 186, 212 (original emphasis).
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characters as romantic rivals; all three levels of personification framed the audience's
perception and interpretation of the music.
Although popular music fans frequently think - or would like to think -
otherwise, the real person is the dimension of performance to which the audience
has the least access, since the audience generally infers what performers are like
as real people from their performance personae and the characters they portray.
Public appearances off-stage do not give reliable access to the performer as a real
person, since it is quite likely that interviews and even casual public appearances
are manifestations of the performer's persona. Whereas a performer may take on
different characters, even in the course of a single performance, the persona remains
consistent (at least with respect to context) and is the point of identification between
performers and their audiences. For these reasons, persona is the most important of
the three roles musicians play.
Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum usefully define persona, glossing Marcel
Mauss:
Intermediate between the individual biography and the social institution lies
the persona: a cultural identity that simultaneously shapes the individual
in body and mind and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable
physiognomy. The bases for personae are diverse: a social role (e.g. the mother),
a profession (the physician), an anti-profession (the jliineur), a calling (the
priest) . ... Personae are creatures of historical circumstance; they emerge and
disappear within specific contexts. A nascent persona indicates the creation
of a new kind of individual, whose distinctive traits mark a recognized social
species,?
It is important to emphaSize the social, collective and historical nature of
personae: although individuals construct personae, they do so in ways that are
recognizable in relation to conventions external to themselves. Musical personae
are based in social perceptions of the musician as the follower of a profession or
calling, but also on other grounds, such as the social roles of venerated mentor and
young acolyte performed by McIntyre and Clarkson respectively. I trust it is clear
that a given musician may perform multiple personae in different contexts, just as
Clarkson performs the subordinate role when singing with McIntyre, but not when
performing solo.
There are several sets of constraints on the construction of musical performance
personae, the most immediate of which are genre constraints. This much is obvious:
rock musicians simply do not look and act like classical musicians who, in turn,
do not look and act like jazz musicians and so on. Even within genres there are
distinctions: psychedelic rockers do not look and act like glam rockers who do not
look and act like punk rockers and so on. New genres involve the development of
new personae. The ease with which these facts can be stated belies their importance
7 Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibuffi, 1ntroduction: Scientific Personae and Their
Histories', Science in Context 16/1-2 (2003): 2-3.
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within musical cultures: musical genres and subgenres define the most basic and
important sets of conventions and expectations within which musicians and their
audiences function. Genres can and do overlap, and musicians can draw on genres
other than their own in their performances (rocker Mick Jagger, for instance, is said
to have derived much of his movement style from Tina Turner, a soul music artis!').
Genre conventions also change over time and never have the force of absolute
dicta, although they are crucially important to performers in constructing their
performance personae and to audiences in interpreting and responding to them.
Another, broader, set of constraints on persona are the sociocultural conventions
of the societies in which they appear - conventions that popular music both reflects
and contests. The gender ambiguities of glam rockers' personae, for example,
challenged the gender norms of American and European societies in the early
1970s. The performance of glam was a safe cultural space in which to experiment
with versions of masculinity that clearly flouted those norms. Glam rock was, in this
respect, a liminal phenomenon in Victor Turner's sense of that term, a performance
practice through which alternative realities could be enacted and tested 9 Inasmuch
as glam rock was almost completely dominated by men and took the performance of
masculinity as its terrain, however, it was also entirely in line with the conventions
of rock as a traditionally male-dominated cultural form that evolved from male-
dominated cultural and social contexts. Popular music is not entirely constrained
by dominant ideologies, but neither is it entirely free of their influence.
A very brief example, which I can only sketch here but have elaborated
elsewhere,lO will suggest how these frames and signifiers interrelate in a single
performance. In a 1973 television performance of her hit song 'Can the Can', Suzi
Quatro presented her persona as a black leather-clad, tough rocker woman - a
persona that intentionally challenged both social conventions of femininity and
the more vulnerable or ethereal feminine images created by earlier women rock
musicians, even such powerful performers as Janis Joplin and Grace Slick. (This
persona, which Quatro developed with her British management team, was quite
different from her first performance persona in the rnid-1960s as a mini-skirted,
braless member of an all-girl Detroit-based bar band called Suzi Soul and the
Pleasure Seekers.)
Like her costume, Quatro's voice, an aggressive scream, was not stereotypically
feminine. Unlike most female rock performers of the time, Quatro was an
instrumentalist as well as a singer - she played bass guitar with all the showy
panache of a lead guitarist, wearing the instrument low, down around her hips in
a masculine position and sometimes holding it away from herself to showcase her
8 Sheila Whiteley, 'Little Red Rooster v. The Hanky Tonk Woman: Mick Jagger, Sexuality,
Style and Image' in Sheila Whiteley (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender
(London, 1997), pp. 67-99, at pp. 76, 97.
9 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982),
p.85.
10 Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann
Arbor, MI, 2006), pp. 193-226.
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playing. Her movements were not dance movements but the characteristic bob and
stomp associated with male rock musicians. Her facial expressions communicated
the pleasure that musicians take in the urgency and hard work of playing rock - they
were the expressions of her rocker persona, not of the character evoked in the song.
Although the fast tempo and boogie rhythm of 'Can the Can' was consistent with
her masculine rocker persona, the character depicted in the song placed Quatro in a
more conventional role for a female pop artist, since the protagonist is advising an
implicitly female listener - albeit in very aggressive terms - to safeguard her male
love interest against the blandishments of other women.
This fragment of analysis suggests that Quatro's performance can be read in
relation to two sets of conventions for female comportment - social conventions
and those of her musical genre - and that the performance persona she created
through such means as costume, movement, facial expression and the on-stage
manipulation of a musical instrument can be defined explicitly as an entity distinct
from the characters she portrayed in the song's narrative. Although Quatro's persona
was decidedly more aggressive than the norms for feminine behaviour of her time,
the inversion of gender roles it implied was consistent with the gender play that
is a defining characteristic of the glam rock genre frame. The tension between the
social and musical unconventionality of her persona and the conventional views
expressed by the character she portrayed reflects the complexity of performances
carried out within multiple frames.
Popular musicians do not perform their personae exclusively in live and recorded
performances; they also perform them through the visual images used in the
packaging of recordings, publicity materials, interviews and press coverage, toys
and collectibles, and other venues and media, including music video. The ability
to perform the persona across a multitude of platforms has become particularly
important now that the traditional profit centre of the music industry, the sound
recording, is becoming increasingly less viable. It is generally the case, of course,
that performers are not the sole authors of the personae they perform in these
many contexts: producers, managers, agents, publicists and the entire machinery
of the music industry collaborate with artists, and sometimes coerce them, in the
construction and performance of their personae. It does not follow from this for
me, as it does for some commentators, that these aspects of pop music performance
have everything to do with marketing and commodification and nothing to do with
artistry and musical aesthetics. Although the commodity critique of popular music
is important, it implicitly de-emphasizes the importance of attending to the details
of particular performances since all popular musical personae and performances
are equivalent commodities. Part of the audience's pleasure in pop music comes
from experiencing and consuming the personae of favourite artists in all their
many forms, and this experience is inseparable from the experience of the music
itself and of the artists as musicians.
I will qualify this developing schema for popular music performance by
indicating that character is an optional element that comes in primarily when
the musician is a singer performing a song that defines a character textually. In
other cases, the performance may be perceived as a direct performance of persona
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unmediated by character. This is particularly true for non-singing musicians who
do not develop characters through voice and lyrics, but whose personae may play
roles in other kinds of staged narratives. Jazz musicians, for example, often have
very distinctive personae as instrumentalists and bandleaders, expressed not only
in the way they play, but also in their appearance, the way they move, the way they
address the audience and the way they deal with their fellow musicians.
During a visit to New York City jazz clubs in 2001, I saw performances by
two tenor saxophonists and bandleaders a musical generation apart: Pharaoh
Sanders, a veteran of the jazz experimentalism of the 1960s and Joe Lovano, who
came to prominence in the late 1980s. Sanders, dressed in a light-coloured Nehru
suit, presented himself as a beatific elder statesman who drifted in and out of the
performance, seemingly picking up its flow when the mood seemed right. At the
end of the set, he invited the audience to participate in a sing-along on a spiritual
theme; holding out the microphone for responses, he seemed completely unfazed
when no one in the audience replied - he was absorbed in the moment and nothing
else mattered. Lovano, like the rest of his group, dressed in a jacket and tie, conversed
and joked with his band mates and the audience, establishing a generally upbeat,
informal atmosphere that was quite different from the reverential tone of Sanders'
performance and that also belied the rigours of the hard bop Lovano and his band
were playing. Lovano also seemed to be more a working member of an ensemble
than the relatively aloof Sanders, who remained to the side or off-stage during
substantial portions of the set. The personae these musicians performed may have
some relationship to their off-stage personalities and values; audiences may in fact
be eager to believe that they do. But this does not mean, once again, that Sanders and
Lovano were simply 'being themselves' on stage. Other jazz musicians, notably the
members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra's Arkestra, have performed
obviously constructed and artificial personae to demonstrate that jazz performance
personae need not be identical with the musicians' identities as human beings.
Persona as Social Front: Setting, Appearance and Manner
Because 1 am treating the musical persona as a species of self-presentation, 1 turn
now to Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life for a taxonomy of
the means performers use to define and project personae. Goffman calls the means
a performer uses to foster an impression the Lfront', which consists of 'expressive
equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the
individual during his performance' n (It is worth emphasizing that performance,
in Goffman's sense, may be undertaken either consciously or unconsciously.
When asked to describe blues guitarist B.B. King's gestures in a video recording,
a musicologist responded, 'I don't know where it comes from, but as a guitarist
you just do it. Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, all these guys, they bend notes and
11 Erving Gofiman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959), p. 22.
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they lean back. It's a physical thing' P That a guitarist does this because it is what
guitarists have always done, and gives no conscious thought to the impression
she thus creates, does not negate the fact that the physical routine functions as
expressive equipment and contributes willy-nilly to the impression she makes on
the audience.) Goffman divides front into two aspects: 'setting' (the physical context
of the performance) and 'personal front' in which are included the performer's
lUappearance" and "manner/II.13 The 'front' is a point at which performances
intersect with larger social contexts and conventions, as all aspects of a front must
be legible to a specific audience.
Settings contribute to the impressions created by musical performances by
drawing upon existing cultural connotations. The Rose Theater, for example, part
of the Frederick P. Rose Hall, is a new complex built to house the Jazz at Lincoln
Center programme in New York City. Opened in 2004, it is described in publicity
materials on the programme's website both as part of 'the first facility ever created
specifically for jazz' and as a 'symphony in the round' .14 Both this description and
the design of the theatre, whose layout recalls that of a symphony hall, suggest the
venue is intended to attach the cultural prestige of the symphony orchestra (and
perhaps its access to wealth and power) to jazz, as is its Lincoln Center affiliation.
The theatre itself, as a piece of expressive equipment, thus communicates to the
audience that it is to understand and respond to jazz as 'America's classical music',
not as a form of popular music, an implicitly less 'serious' and more 'vulgar'
category. IS The performance space thus provides a definition of the musical and
cultural situation.
Individual musicians can use the cultural associations of a particular venue
or kind of venue to assert their personae, either by invoking them or subverting
them. Cellist Matt Haimovitz, for example, supported his persona as a youthful,
experimental, somewhat iconoclastic classical musician by doing on his 2002 tour
'what no classical musician of his stature had done in living memory, navigating
the country not by way of its acoustically precise concert halls but instead by its
coffeehouses and clubrooms. Most radical was his performance at CBGB's, the
12 Quoted in Thompson, Graham and Russo, 'Seeing Music Performance', p. 209.
13 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, pp. 22-24.
14 Jazz at Lincoln Center, 'The Architecture', <http://www.ja1c.org/fprh/architecture.html>
(accessed 23 September 2005).
15 The phrase 'America's classical music' is not used in the Jazz at Lincoln Center
materials, but it is one way in which jazz is often described by its advocates. See, for
example, the website of the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City (<http://vvww.
americanjazzmuseum.com». The Rose Theater institutionalizes both an analogy
between jazz and classical music and the practice of staging jazz concerts at halls
devoted to classical music that began in the 1930s with Benny Goodman's Carnegie
Hall concerts (of course, Goodman also performed classical music on occasion) and
continued in the 1940s with Norman Grantz's Jazz at the Philharmonic series. Since the
1960s it has been fairly common for regional classical music venues in the United States
to programme at least some jazz artists, often those like Dave Brubeck whose music has
affinities with classical or contemporary 'serious' music.
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legendary punk room in Manhattan' .16 If the Rose Theater seems intended to frame
jazz as classical music, Haimovitz seemed to frame classical music as popular music
through his choice of venues. Whereas Haimovitz depended on the existing cultural
connotations of CBGB's for his performance of persona, I recall, by contrast, the
Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans encouraging the patrons of Boston's
staid classical music venues to dance in the aisles, thus subverting the performance
space's usual cultural significance and transforming it into a setting appropriate to
their performance.
In his description of personal front, Coffman includes both' relatively fixed'
signs, like those denoting race and sex, and 'relatively mobile' signs' such as facial
expression' Y Although I shall focus here primarily on the more mobile signs, fixed
signs are clearly of critical importance, given the way so many musical genres
are stratified in relation to social identities (for example, the problematic status
of white jazz musicians, black classical musicians, female conductors, women in
rock and jazz, among others). Coffman proposes that routines tend to draw on an
existing vocabulary of personal fronts with established social meanings; the rather
quaint examples he provides are of chimney sweeps and perfume clerks who 'wear
white lab coats ... to provide the client with an understanding that delicate tasks
performed by these persons will be performed in what has become a standardized,
clinical, confidential manner'.ls The white lab coat garnered such meanings in its
primary scientific and medical uses - meanings that are then generalized to the
other contexts in which it appears. In the 1950s male jazz musicians (both black
and white) frequently opted for Ivy League-style suits as their stage wear (Miles
Davis was one of the more prominent musicians to dress this way). This fashion,
exemplified by Brooks Brothers, carried with it culturally encoded connotations
of conservative sophistication as well as upward mobility.19 Jazz musicians thus
presented themselves not as members of a disreputable subculture, as they were
often thought to be, but as respectable, middle-class men (regardless of what their
actual class status may have been).20 In this case, the existing connotations of the
Brooks Brothers suit were generalized to a specific musical persona when adopted
as part of the front.
Some genres of popular music clearly permit more individual variation of
personal front than others. Doo-wop groups of the 1950s usually dressed in
identical suits, a practice that persisted in rock and pop music throughout the 1960s.
16 Daniel Oppenheimer, 'Gladiator: Matt Haimovitz Fights the War on Terror with an
Unlikely Weapon', Valley Advocate, 25 March 2004. Available at: <http://www.valley
advocate.com/gbase/Arts/content.html?oid~oid:59415> (accessed 10 January 2005).
17 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, p. 24.
18 Ibid., p. 26.
19 Paul Gorman, The Look: Adventures in Pop and Rock Fashion (London, 2001), p. 29.
20 It mayor may not be coincidental that modern jazz musicians started dressing in
this very respectable way just around the time that American sociologists began
to characterize their professional milieu as a deviant subculture. See, for example,
Howard Becker's classic ethnographic study, 'The Professional Dance Musician and his
Audience', American Journal of Sociology 57/2 (1951): 146-54.
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Psychedelic rock musicians of the mid- to late 1960s had a much broader range
of possibilities available to them, but their choices were governed nevertheless
by a basic definition of the social situation. If one of the reasons for the sartorial
choices of doo-wop groups was to identify the singers clearly as entertainers and
thus to distinguish them from their audiences, psychedelic rock musicians sought,
for ideological reasons, to convey the opposite impression. By wearing clothing
that partook of the same fashions as their audiences, and presenting themselves
in a way that seemed to allow for dialogue between performers and audience,
they presented themselves as continuous with their audience and implied that, in
principle (if not in fact), any member of the audience could become a musician.
The vocabulary Coffman uses to describe 'manner' as an aspect of personal
front might be taken to suggest that he has in mind something like personality:
he contrasts 'a haughty, aggressive manner' with a 'meek, apologetic manner'.
But Coffman's formal definition indicates that manner is not an expression of the
performer's personality but, rather, a set of 'stimuli which function at the time
to warn us of the interaction role the performer expects to play in the oncoming
situation' ,21 In other words, the performer's manner is specific to a particular,
situated performance of persona rather than an expression of an ongoing set of
personality traits.
One key aspect of jazz musicians' manner are the means they use to distinguish
moments in their performances meant to be perceived as improvisational from
moments when they are playing composed music. I will briefly analyse a portion
of a specific performance of 'So What' by Miles Davis, with John Coltrane in his
group, from a CBS television programme entitled The Sound of Miles Davis that was
aired in April 1959. 22 The musicians in this clip distinguish improvisation from
composition in several ways. For example, Davis underlines the transition from
playing the theme to improvising a solo by lowering his trumpet, then bringing
it back up to his lips, moistening them and checking his mouthpiece. Apart from
this one instance, he never moves the instrument away from his lips, even between
phrases when he might have time to do so. Moving the trumpet down, and then
back up, clearly reads as a way of segmenting the performance, of emphasizing the
transition from playing composed music to improvising.
When playing the theme, Davis looks off to his right, as if he does not need
to give this task his full attention. When he solos, however, he gazes ahead and
somewhat downward, his eyes either closed or fixed in a stare that is not focused
on anything, suggesting concentration and inward attention. He leans backward,
arching his back and bending his knees in the pose that became an iconic sign for
Miles Davis as seen, for example, in the cover image for the 1970 album A Tribute to
21 Coffman, The Presentation of Self, p. 24.
22 The line-up for this performance included: Miles Davis (trumpet); john Coltrane (tenor
sax); Wynton Kelly (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); jimmy Cobb (drums); and members
of the Cil Evans Orchestra, including Frank Rehak, jimmy Cleveland and Bill Elton
(trombones).
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Jack Johnson. Both his facial expressions and physical demeanour thus differentiate
playing composed passages from improvising.
When Davis is finished, he steps aside, allowing Coltrane to take his place on stage.
This suggests that stage position contributes to the impression of improvisation.
The actions of other musicians also reinforce the status of the soloist as improviser.
Before Coltrane steps forward, he respectfully focuses his attention on Davis,
though not necessarily by looking at him. Coltrane's head and body movements,
even his turning away from Davis, denote that he is giving Davis's solo his full,
appreciative attention by following its unfolding. When soloing, Coltrane behaves
very similarly to Davis. Although he mostly keeps his eyes closed in an expression
of deep concentration, he too arches his back away from the microphone as he plays
in a conventional gesture similar to the one guitarists make when bending notes,
as mentioned earlier. As he completes his solo, he bends forward, as if bowing, and
starts to move backward, out of the soloist's space, thus relinquishing that status
and passing it on to the pianist. It is worth mentioning that, when performing with
his own groups around the same time, Coltrane would often stand completely still
when playing the theme, with only his shoulders rising and falling in time with his
breaths. VVhen improvising, however, he became much more animated, bending
backward and far forward, his facial expressions depicting profound effort and
immersion in the moment.
The area of the stage where the musicians stand when not playing is a region of
the kind Coffman calls 'backstage', even though it is in full view.23 The behaviour of
the musicians in this area is noteworthy, since it combines the respectful attention to
the soloist apparently expected of a musician waiting to play with such seemingly
opposite behaviours as smoking and chatting. This combination of engagement
and detachment may be at least somewhat specific to the subgenre of jazz being
played, since 'cool' jazz musicians were sometimes thought to be 'emotionally
detached from their creation' while simultaneously recognized as virtuosic.24 The
behaviours I have described are both individuated and conventional. They mark
certain passages of music as improvised and thus communicate to both musicians
and audience that those passages should be heard differently from those marked
as composed.
Conclusion
I have outlined a schema for understanding popular music performance in terms
of frames and signifieds. The frames are the most important contexts to be borne
in mind: the general context of sociocultural norms and conventions within which
performed musical behaviour must be understood and the more immediately
23 Coffman, The Presentation of Self, p. 1l.
24 Mark C. Gridley, 'Cool Jazz', Grove Music Online, at: <http://www.grovemusic.com/
shared/views/article.html?section=jazz.100900> (accessed 15 March 2008).
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THE ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO POPULAR MUSICOLOGY THE PHYSICAL PERFORMANCE OF POPULAR MUSIC

framing context of musical genre conventions that govern the expectations of participating in fan clubs and online chatrooms, and incorporating the music into
audience and performer and the ways they communicate with one another. The everyday life. Audiences avail themselves of most of the same means of expression
performer combines three signifieds: the real person, the performance persona as popular musicians themselves in their responses to them, including playing
and the character. I present these entities in what I take to be the order of their music. Perhaps the ultimate response to popular music performance is when a
development. The process begins with a real person who has some desire to young person aspires to become a musician herself and to join the performers she
perform as a popular musician; this may include the desire to participate in a has seen on-stage.
certain musical genre or the desire to express certain aesthetic or sociopolitical
ideas through popular music. In order to enter into the musical arena, the person
must develop an appropriate performance persona.
This persona, which is usually based on existing models and conventions and
may reflect the influence of such music industry types as managers or producers,
becomes the basis for subsequent performances. The performer may use all of the
available means to define and perform this persona, including movement, dance,
costume, make-up, facial expression and gesture (including the manipulation
of musical instruments). I have borrowed Goffman's vocabulary of front, which
consists of setting, appearance and manner, to categorize these means. In some
performances, the persona enacts a third entity, a character portrayed in the text
of a song. This character may be the implied narrator of the song or a subject
described in the song; it is also possible for the performer to embody more than
one of the characters in a particular song. While the performer embodies different
characters for each song, the performance persona remains constant, at least within
a specific performance context. As I noted earlier, not all musical performances
involve character - a singer or instrumentalist may well perform a persona without
portraying other characters, and performed narratives may be constructed directly
around personae rather than characters.
I place the performance persona at the centre of the schema outlined here and
nominate it as the single most important aspect of the performer'S part in that process.
The persona is of key importance because it is the signified to which the audience
has the most direct and sustained access not only through audio recordings, videos
and live performances, but also through the various other circumstances an media
in which popular musicians present themselves publicly. The persona is therefore
the signified that mediates between the other two: the audience gains access to both
the performer as a real person and the characters the performer portrays through
his or her elaboration of a persona.
Audiences for popular music do not receive the performers' representations
passively, but respond to them actively. Audiences, too, take on personae.
Conventions for audience behaviour, like those of musical performance itself, are
genre-specific (sometimes even performer-specific - think of the Deadheads or
Jimmy Buffett's Parrothead fans). The audience responds to the performers, and this
feedback is crucial to the cultures of popular music. In live performances, audiences
may respond directly to performers in ways that are not limited to applause and
cheering, but may include singing along, direct address to the performers, choice of
costume and make-up, dancing and so on. Outside the context of live performance,
audience response comes in a wide variety of forms, including such physical
responses as dancing and playing air guitar, collecting audio and video recordings,

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