Far from abandoning performance-enhancing drugs, they say, some players have switched from steroids to drugs like human growth hormone.
Mr. Acconci, who abandoned performance art in the 1980s for sculpture and installations, said in an interview that he believes performance art to be, by definition, ephemeral, that he questions whether it should be done again at all, and that he wonders if building an institute to celebrate the medium even makes sense.
Edwards played violin and trumpet through grammar school and high school but abandoned performance for conducting.
Yet it's true that Tristano issued scathing judgments of other musicians, and that he maintained a compulsive control over his music, gradually abandoning live performance for the studio, where he could overdub parts — as on his pioneering, self-titled 1956 Atlantic album — and stamp the output with metronomic precision, often using an actual metronome.
An Australian singer and songwriter now based in Los Angeles, Sia has helped create some of the biggest, brightest pop tunes of the last few years, including Rihanna's "Diamonds," Flo Rida's "Wild Ones" and "Titanium" by the French DJ David Guetta, who used Sia's demo vocals on the final track after abandoning a performance he'd solicited from Mary J. Blige.
For both Moon and Gould, the performer's life was short: Gould abandoned concert performance at the age of thirty-one; Moon was dead by the age of thirty-two, and had not played well for a long time.
As a result, organizations are hesitant to abandon their performance appraisal systems and "leave it up to" managers to effectively manage the performance and development of their direct reports.
A few months ago, the Ford Motor Company decided to abandon a performance evaluation system that had been the subject of a lawsuit by a group of white male employees.
Mr. Saunders said that before he hooked up with Ms. Hennebach, he had all but abandoned live performance for nearly 10 years.
Glenn Gould was a devotee of McLuhan, and to be a McLuhanite meant that you could abandon live performance without any shame, any talk of fright.
