What is the current state of music performance studies, how did it reach this point and where is it headed? In this special issue, we offer a comprehensive overview of the field, showcasing how its exponents engage imaginatively and critically with music performance across myriad different artistic contexts and asking how it can address some of the challenges, complexities and uncertainties we face in the twenty-first century. We re-evaluate music’s present place within the wider field of performance studies and explore how it might speak to other constituent arts to enhance and advance future transdisciplinary inquiry.

In an age of durational and perpetual crises, where corpses – human and more-than-human – pile around us, the boundaries are thin between ghosts and those they might be haunting. This issue of Performance Research revisits ghosts from the perspective of capitalist ruins, corpses of extinct animals and poisoned habitats, phantom narratives, digital selves and expiring planets. Rather than focusing on Derridean hauntology and the historical discourses of vanishing, we revisit ghosts and ghosting from the expanded scope of more-than-human performance and amid the troubled age of the Anthropocene to consider who or what is haunting, especially by going beyond the ghosts of ‘grievable’ humans.

In ‘On Exits and Endings’ contributors explore how rituals, performances and other creative acts negotiate, represent and frame exits and endings, especially when emotional attachment and responsibility are involved. They question what it might mean to exit – from a career, a life, a scene, a situation – to cut ties and move on. To walk away. As well as how exits are understood performatively, how they are analysed, responded to or interpreted. Additionally, they reflect on endings. What happens when something ceases to be, what remains and how might those left behind behave in the wake of this changed situation.