Georgia Volioti
University of Surrey, Music and Media, Faculty Member
- I am a lecturer in music at the University of Surrey. I was educated at Imperial College, London, where I gained a fi... moreI am a lecturer in music at the University of Surrey. I was educated at Imperial College, London, where I gained a first-class BSc Honours (Biology) and was awarded the Murray Prize in Physiology. Subsequently, I pursued postgraduate studies in Music and completed the MMus at Royal Holloway, University of London, with distinction. I specialised in Performance Studies and the Psychology of Music. I completed my PhD at the same university as an AHRC doctoral studentship holder at the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). My doctoral thesis combined empirical-analytical methods for the study of performance with performance historiography and criticism.
Prior to my appointment at the University of Surrey, I completed a postdoctoral visiting Fellowship at Humboldt University, Berlin, and undertook research at the Centre for Performance Science, Royal College of Music, London. I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK), and hold a Licentiate in piano performance from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London.
At the University of Surrey I convene and teach undergraduate and postgraduate modules with a special focus on the performance-oriented study of music. I teach Music History, Nineteenth-Century Music, Studying Music as Performance, Historical Performance Practice, Opera Studies, Research Methods at Masters level, and I supervise individual projects and dissertations.
My research interests crystallise at the intersection of historical and cultural musicology, music performance studies, and empirical musicology, with special interests in: the cultural reception, historiography, criticism, and analysis of musical performance; cultural responses to the legacy of recordings; the media and materiality of recording technology; nationalism, cultural memory, and identity in performance; landscape theory and music; visual culture and music; expressive gesture in performance; listening practices and musicians' self-regulated learning.edit
This Performance Studies Network research forum is the first of its kind complementing the biennial PSN International Conferences. This event seeks to renew and nurture dialogue among a range of different disciplines and artistic fields... more
This Performance Studies Network research forum is the first of its kind complementing the biennial PSN International Conferences. This event seeks to renew and nurture dialogue among a range of different disciplines and artistic fields within which practitioners and scholars continue to explore the identity, role, and function of recorded music through varied approaches in the digital age. This event aims to stimulate critical discussion on existing and new trends in research, especially the intersection between creative practice and technology, as well as artistic and scientific inquiry.
Programme Committee: Professor Amanda Bayley (Bath Spa University, UK), Dr Daniel Barolsky (Associate Professor, Beloit College, US), Dr Amy Blier-Carruthers (King’s College and Royal Academy of Music, UK), Dr Georgia Volioti (main organiser, University of Surrey, UK).
Programme Committee: Professor Amanda Bayley (Bath Spa University, UK), Dr Daniel Barolsky (Associate Professor, Beloit College, US), Dr Amy Blier-Carruthers (King’s College and Royal Academy of Music, UK), Dr Georgia Volioti (main organiser, University of Surrey, UK).
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Historical recordings embody the material traces of legendary performers from the past and can offer an inspirational resource for modern interpreters. Despite their limitations, early recordings can provide a rich and reliable source of... more
Historical recordings embody the material traces of legendary performers from the past and can offer an inspirational resource for modern interpreters. Despite their limitations, early recordings can provide a rich and reliable source of information for the performer-scholar. This article reports an empirical investigation of Edvard Grieg’s performance style via historical recordings of two of his Lyric Pieces: ‘Butterfly’, Op. 43 No. 1, and ‘To the Spring’, Op. 43 No. 6. First, taking a bottom-up approach and starting from the composer’s recordings, salient gestures in Grieg’s performance style are traced using empirical techniques of beat-tempo analysis. Second, exploratory Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is used to compare the composer’s timing profiles with those of other pianists in the sample. Results show that Grieg’s extreme flexibility in performance tempo distinguishes him from other interpreters. Specifically, the rhythmic pull of the principal motif in ‘Butterfly’, Op. 43 No. 1, and the rhetorical inflection of the melody in ‘To the Spring’, Op. 43 No. 6, appear to be idiomatic features of Grieg’s style.
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Representations of the Norwegian landscape in nineteenth-century visual culture (including paintings, photography, and optical illusion devices) were not only part of an emerging lexicon of nationalist iconography, they also subverted the... more
Representations of the Norwegian landscape in nineteenth-century visual culture (including paintings, photography, and optical illusion devices) were not only part of an emerging lexicon of nationalist iconography, they also subverted the boundaries of realism. They enfolded the perceiver in a sensory journey through the abstract fabric of space and time. Depictions of the rural, pre-modern landscape often confronted the subjectivity of the gaze by deflecting an apparent reality and obliquely revealing an absence. Using a hermeneutic lens, this article examines the performativity of landscape in Grieg’s 19 Norwegian Folksongs, Op. 66. These piano miniatures exemplify a curious dreamlike musical discourse, presenting the landscape as an object of desire hidden from the immediate field of vision, and as a distant sound world amenable to imaginative contemplation. By tracing connections between Grieg’s music and its contemporary context, this article places Op. 66 within a performative visual culture.
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This article examines how musicians use recordings as learning resources in preparing for performance. While previous research has partially acknowledged the contribution of external factors to self-regulated learning, the specific impact... more
This article examines how musicians use recordings as learning resources in preparing for performance. While previous research has partially acknowledged the contribution of external factors to self-regulated learning, the specific impact of recordings on performers’ approaches to practising remains largely uncharted. A survey was designed to assess the use and importance of recordings on musicians’ listening and practising behaviours, their preferences when choosing recordings, and the type of influence exerted by recordings over self-regulatory processes. Respondents (N = 204) completed an online survey, and the data were analysed according to level of expertise: advanced music students (n = 147) and professional musicians (n = 57). The results show clear differences between students and professionals in the frequency of use and level of reliance on recordings, with students consistently exhibiting a greater preference for these resources. Students were more likely to listen to recordings and, consequently, change aspects of their interpretations in the early stages of practising. Additionally, students were influenced by other people’s recommendations, especially their teachers’, and by other performers’ reputations when choosing recordings. The need to develop a distinct style had a positive influence on students’ practising and performing habits. The study shows that listening to recordings forms an integral part of self-regulated learning activities and contributes to musicians’ development by increasing musical knowledge and stylistic awareness.
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In May 1903, at the Paris branch of the Gramophone and Typewriter Limited, Edvard Grieg made nine 10-inch wax master discs, each containing a single piece of no more than a couple of minutes playing. With the exception of the cylinder... more
In May 1903, at the Paris branch of the Gramophone and Typewriter Limited, Edvard Grieg made nine 10-inch wax master discs, each containing a single piece of no more than a couple of minutes playing. With the exception of the cylinder numbers of the originals, and the surviving master copies subsequently pressed, virtually nothing else is known about this historic occasion. It was not until these recordings were all brought together and reissued by the Norwegian record label Simax in 1993 that they resurfaced as a complete set. Despite digital restoration techniques, the remastered Simax copies still bear the signs of early recording technologies and exhibit various pitch/speed distortions and a low signal-to-noise ratio. In an attempt to capture the full richness of Grieg's sound and the intricacies of his playing, Tony Harrison and the Norwegian concert pianist Sigurd Slåttebrekk recently rerecorded Grieg's historical performances. The two collaborators firmly contextualize their work within historically informed performance practice. This restorative undertaking, however, performs a great deal more cultural work than merely an allegiance to the authenticity movement. Seen against the background of Grieg reception—the rarity and sparse circulation of his recordings and the relegated status of his music throughout much of the twentieth century—this reconstruction, I argue, marks a potent act of cultural memory revival seeking to preserve and promulgate not only the historical image of the composer and his performance style but also a more substantial fund of living memory linked to personal and collective identity. By focusing on one of the restored performances, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, Op. 65, No. 6, I offer a cultural analysis, with a range of critical readings, of the role of memory and nostalgia in the reproduction of social meaning. The recent reconstruction of Grieg's historical recordings offers a pertinent case study for engaging critically with the topics of memory and nostalgia, and also for bringing the score-based hermeneutic and cultural-performative sides of musical meaning closer together through an interdisciplinary investigation
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Performance traditions are constantly evolving entities. Some musical traditions purposefully look to the past to reinvent and consolidate a sense of national-cultural identity in the present, a compelling case for which is provided by... more
Performance traditions are constantly evolving entities. Some musical traditions purposefully look to the past to reinvent and consolidate a sense of national-cultural identity in the present, a compelling case for which is provided by the performance practice of Grieg’s Slåtter, Op. 72, No. 2. An investigation of this practice in piano and Hardanger fiddle recordings of this repertoire, by means of new empirical techniques for the comparative analysis of beat tempo and dynamics, traces the mechanisms of stylistic recombination in the performance of this music. Cultural-historical and ethnographic contextual evidence reveals tension between discourse and actual performance practice in (re)constructions of Norwegian cultural identity, with broader implications of reinventing the performance practice of this repertoire on contemporary Norwegian cultural memory.
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This paper seeks to interrogate some of the common uses and assumptions surrounding the musicological concept of tradition and its empirical study from recordings. In particular, I take issue with certain style-analytical approaches for... more
This paper seeks to interrogate some of the common uses and assumptions surrounding the musicological concept of tradition and its empirical study from recordings. In particular, I take issue with certain style-analytical approaches for investigating performance traditions from recordings. From a theoretical perspective, I consider how the operation of tradition resides beyond the substantive content of performance style, and how such an understanding of tradition fares against quantitative measurements of style and the historical periodization of performance practice. Through a series of empirical case studies based on two of Grieg's Lyric Pieces I investigate the relevance of tradition as an analytical category for studying the transmission of performance practices from recordings. Using beat tempo data extracted from these recordings as an empirical marker of transmission processes, the case studies illustrate how stylistic kinship between performers captures the operation of tradition in different contexts. Findings suggest that stylistic relationships function best as heuristic tools for tracing the presence of tradition in this repertoire: the data do not support the more conventional understanding of tradition as collective style or historically patterned trend, nor do stylistic similarities between performers always verify the operation of tradition. Finally, in seeking to understand tradition beyond the dimension of performance style, I turn to ethnographic data which reveal the operation of tradition as a subjective feeling of connection and ultimately as ontological potential.
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In his keynote address, ‘Hearing the Nations in Chopin’, Jim Samson reflected on the three key ingredients of musical nationalism: agendas, musical materials, and appropriations. These three areas do not only bear relevance for Chopin... more
In his keynote address, ‘Hearing the Nations in Chopin’, Jim Samson reflected on the three key ingredients of musical nationalism: agendas, musical materials, and appropriations. These three areas do not only bear relevance for Chopin reception and nineteenth-century European nationalism, but also in the context of the conference as a whole effectively frame the broader themes of nationalism in music which emerged from this three-day international gathering. My paper is more closely allied to the categories of ‘musical materials’ and their ‘appropriation’ in relation to the expression of Norwegian national cultural identity in the performance of Edvard Grieg’s later piano music. Focusing predominantly on the Slåtter, op. 72, I examine the interplay between the two aforementioned categories in recent (re)constructions of cultural identity through an empirical performance-analytical study of two pieces. This paper develops and extends my research on the performance practice of this repertoire. Building on both existing and new empirical findings, I investigate experiential and phenomenological aspects of rhythmic gesture in the musical performance of this repertoire, and the effect these have for the cultural performance of an alleged authentic Norwegian folk identity. I conclude by reflecting on the performativity of rhythmic gesture as a material of national-cultural identity.
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Objects come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and forms. The notion of musical works as objects, represented by their written scores, has proved to be effete and limiting to the study of music as diverse social-cultural practice and... more
Objects come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and forms. The notion of musical works as objects, represented by their written scores, has proved to be effete and limiting to the study of music as diverse social-cultural practice and performed craft. The past two decades have witnessed considerable efforts to renew conceptual and methodological tools, and Neumann's study makes a valuable contribution to this effect. This commentary responds to some issues raised by Neumann's article in relation to the notion of musical "object". Specifically, I retrace the shift from a score-based to a process-oriented musicology geared towards performances, placing the concerns of contemporary opera studies within this broader disciplinary change. I consider some implications of technology in mediating new operatic objects for discourse. Finally, I reflect on some of the inherent dangers of objectifying performance in empirical analyses.