"Use your imagination": Performance from troubadour lyric to the Arctic Monkeys

In "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past," Taruskin argues that the twentieth-century impulse towards "authenticity" arose from a modernist trend towards impersonal abstraction whereas what he terms "vitality" was largely left by the wayside. Taruskin discusses the "gaps" that scholarship into the history of music performance leaves, and suggests that the performer's subjectivity and musical curiosity can enter these gaps in a more interesting and aesthetically pleasing way than can attempts towards quantitave "streamlining" of the music. To draw attention to some of the more obvious "gaps" that exist in performing music, even in recent music, I present two performances of the Arctic Monkeys' 2013 song "Do I Wanna Know," one acoustic at a radio studio and one electric at Glastonbury music festival. The context of each performance dramatically alters the texture of the song: in the acoustic performance, not only are the instruments simplified, but the vocals are much clearer and the audience much quieter. The intimate setting of the studio makes the acoustic version much simpler in its smaller-scale audience and the amount of attention given to vocals as opposed to instruments. At Glastonbury, the band also picks up speed, possibly as a reaction to the energy of the crowd, and delivers the song with much more melodic drama and melisma. The ways in which the band members frame each performance is also very different -- for the acoustic performance, lead singer Alex Turner notes to guitarist Jamie Cook that the performance should be "pretty fast," before turning to the audience and suggesting, "Use your imagination." In contrast, at Glastonbury, the band does not speak, instead launching immediately into the building tension of the first measures of the song. Even Turner and Cook's body language differs noticeably from one performance to the other. These differences point out just a few of the "gaps" that Taruskin discusses. I'd like to think that Alex Turner's comment, "Use your imagination," expresses the philosophy that he and Taruskin share towards the interpretation of music as it differs from performance to performance with context, instruments, audience, and so on. Because each performance combines performer, instrument, and audience in a unique and unrepeatable way, perhaps the only way to perform a song is to imagine it in the present moment, reacting to the present atmosphere and audience. No doubt the Arctic Monkeys feel the effects of modernist and postmodernist criticism of the vitalist and positivist modes of performance. However, the flexibility of their performances fosters the theory that they play as an ongoing dialectic with the changes that take place in the present rather than aspiring towards a positivist abstraction of a song (although both modes probably influence their thinking.)