Quotes About Performance

In the educated class even social life is a series of aptitude tests; we all must perpetually perform in accordance with the shifting norms of propriety, ever advancing signals of cultivation.

On 2 October 2002, Bowie returned, triumphantly, to the Hammersmith Odeon (now known as the Carling Apollo), a venue whose place in Bowie lore had been guaranteed

If it was too windy sixty feet up, Bowie couldn't perform the song for fear of toppling off his mounting and becoming a rock'n'roll casualty. For the 1987 tour, as if in a fit

I tell you what completely took the biscuit for me – the song 'Tonight' with Tina Turner. Now she was really good, but I just thought, This record is so poppy.

I could only use the formula I knew. Which was, you call a song 'China Girl', it better sound Asian. You call a song 'Let's Dance', you damn well better make sure people dance to it.

And in all cases I have been pleasantly shocked to discover that by lowering my standards not only do I feel better about what I do but I tend to do it more effectively.

If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It's really only to be heard when everyone's out enjoying it.

I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

Performers try harder.

My favorite term for a new kind of performance is "security theater." In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It's a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge,off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.

I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.

The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two very different spaces: the live venue, and the device that could play a recording or receive a transmission. Socially and acoustically, these spaces were worlds apart. But the compositions were expected to be the same!

It was the best show I'd ever seen; it was so tight and choreographed that it seemed to be from another planet, a planet where everyone was incredible.

Around 1900, according to music writer Alex Ross, classical audiences were no longer allowed to shout, eat, and chat during a performance.2 One was expected to sit immobile and listen with rapt attention. Ross hints that this was a way of keeping the hoi polloi out of the new symphony halls and opera houses.

Watch me work! Watch me work! Watch me work!

with jazz and folk musicians, everything was expected to be thrown into the crucible of a gig to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew.

we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation.

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.

Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters.

Every outfit carries cultural baggage of some kind. It took me a while to get a handle on this aspect of performance.

The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying.

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.