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2011 | Buch

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Musical Performance

A Comprehensive Approach: Theory, Analytical Tools, and Case Studies

verfasst von: Guerino Mazzola

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Buchreihe : Computational Music Science

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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This book is a first sketch of what the overall field of performance could look like as a modern scientific field but not its stylistically differentiated practice, pedagogy, and history. Musical performance is the most complex field of music. It comprises the study of a composition’s expression in terms of analysis, emotion, and gesture, and then its transformation into embodied reality, turning formulaic facts into dramatic movements of human cognition. Combining these components in a creative way is a sophisticated mix of knowledge and mastery, which more resembles the cooking of a delicate recipe than a rational procedure.

This book is the first one aiming at such comprehensive coverage of the topic, and it does so also as a university text book. We include musicological and philosophical aspects as well as empirical performance research. Presenting analytical tools and case studies turns this project into a demanding enterprise in construction and experimental setups of performances, especially those generated by the music software Rubato.

We are happy that this book was written following a course for performance students at the School of Music of the University of Minnesota. Their education should not be restricted to the canonical practice. They must know the rationale for their performance. It is not sufficient to learn performance with the old-fashioned imitation model of the teacher's antetype, this cannot be an exclusive tool since it dramatically lacks the poetical precision asked for by Adorno's and Benjamin's micrologic. Without such alternatives to intuitive imitation, performance risks being disconnected from the audience.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Erratum to: Oniontology

Guerino Mazzola

Introduction

Frontmatter

1. Introduction and Overview

Abstract

Musical performance deals with the transformation of a (typically classical Western) score into a physical entity composed of acoustical events and the embodiment of the score’s symbols in the musicians’ bodies. This is already a strong restriction of musical activities, since it excludes musical utterances that are not generated by scores. For example, oral traditions from different ethnicities and the standard practice of jazz are excluded. Jazz, when based on lead sheet notation, uses strongly reduced information requiring a significant interpretational work in order to represent the concretely played sounds. This means that we conceive a score as containing exhaustive data concerning the sounds to be played.

Guerino Mazzola

2. List of Symbols

Abstract

Transformation from symbolic reality of a score to physical reality of sounds

Guerino Mazzola

3. Short History of Performance Theory

Abstract

A first look at the history of performance research seems to confirm Reinhard Kopiez’s thesis [62] that there are two unrelated threads: on the one hand the empirical research as typically represented by Carl Seashore’s measurements of agogics [62], and on the other the philosophical research as typically represented by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s writings [2]. It is true that these threads can be recognized, and we shall give their short history below, but it is erroneous to consider them as being in any contradictory position.

Guerino Mazzola

4. Oniontology

Abstract

The previous, however sketchy, discussion of the history of performance theory has exhibited a split development between philosophical and empirical perspectives. Uniting such categorically different aspects not only is a question of finding a common language, but also requires a unifying epistemological approach. The present state of the art lacks unity on a deeper ontological level. It is, in fact, not even clear which dimensions of musical ontology are involved when dealing with the totality of performance. Evidently, we cannot neglect its deeper semantics, neither can we reduce the topic to purely quantitative, positivistic positions. It turns out that performance is above all complex through its ramified ontological richness.

Guerino Mazzola

Structure Theory

Frontmatter

5. What Is Structure Theory?

Abstract

The oniontological topography developed in the last chapter specifies a communication from the poietic to the neutral position, yielding the performed music as a sounding expression. The delicate point is the technical way of connecting the score information and the surrounding CSI to the sounding output. The solution we have chosen is historically justified in that the score has evolved from the neumatic notation, meaning that the score is a “dance floor of gestures” and therefore relates to real physical events in an abstracted way. This implies that the score coordinates of onset and pitch are an abstraction from real physical coordinates.

Guerino Mazzola

6. Tempo Curves

Abstract

Tempo deals with the performance of time. There is a symbolic time, as used in the score notation, and the physical time of acoustical sounds, into which the symbolic time is transformed; for example, quarter note time units are transformed into seconds.

Guerino Mazzola

7. Tuning, Intonation, and Dynamics

Abstract

Tuning and intonation deal with the transformation of pitch symbols to frequency, while dynamics does so with the symbols of loudness that are transformed to sound pressure. Mathematically speaking, both transformations behave similarly to the situation with tempo. However, the conditions for tuning and intonation are much more complex than for tempo with regard to the semantics of pitch symbols. The dynamical situation is by far more simple, and we therefore have included this topic in the present chapter.

Guerino Mazzola

8. Combining Tempo, Tuning, and Dynamics

Abstract

After having introduced the three basic performance maps for onset, pitch, and loudness, we have to put these components together and ask for a better understanding of the combined situation. This means that we have to look for the simultaneous performance of all these parameters.

Guerino Mazzola

9. Articulation

Abstract

Articulation adds a completely different phenomenon to performance. While we had seen that a priori onset, pitch, and dynamics can be performed independently from each other, articulation introduces performance of duration as a situation where this new parameter is intrinsically connected to the other time parameter, namely onset.

Guerino Mazzola

10. General Performance Fields

Abstract

Let us now look at the general procedure for defining performance. We write P: for a sequence P1P2 … P _n.

Guerino Mazzola

11. The Category of Performance Cells and Hierarchies

Abstract

This chapter completes our study of the structure of performance. Recall from chapter 5 that we had four local-global dichotomies for performance theory: instrumental, parts, dimensions, and evolution. We are not going to discuss the first two, but dimensions and evolution will be dealt with. Dimensions are what we want to discuss now, and evolution will be discussed in chapter 21.

Guerino Mazzola

Expressive Theory

Frontmatter

12. What Is Expressive Theory?

Abstract

Expressive theory has been sketched in sections 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 of chapter 4 dealing with (oni)ontology of performance. We have seen that expression splits into semantics and rhetorics: What is expressed, and how this is performed. Performance theory as it stands now partitions this complex of expressivity into three big themes: emotion, gesture, and analysis. These refer not to the rhetoric aspect, but to the variety of contents that are transferred to the audience, i.e. to the two axes of realities and embodiments on which these contents are distributed.

Guerino Mazzola

13. Emotional Expression

Abstract

Before we discuss prominent approaches to emotional expressivity in performance, we should introduce the very concept of emotion as it is understood in psychology, together with some remarks on neurological correlates to emotion.

Guerino Mazzola

14. Gestural Expression

Abstract

Gestural expression is a diffcult topic, not because the concept of a gesture is so diffcult, but because it looks so obvious that everybody believes to know what it means. This first impression is, however, misleading and it is there that the diffculty arises. The word “gesture” is like “time”: If your are not asked, what it means, you know, but if you are asked you cannot tell.

Guerino Mazzola

15. Analytical Expression

Abstract

This last chapter dealing with expressive performance focuses on analytical rationales of performance, which means that the shaping of performance is grounded in analytical facts, as opposed to gestural or emotional ones. This means that we have to analyze the given score’s structure and then define performance by use of such facts.

Guerino Mazzola

16. Analytical Weights

Abstract

Analytical weights did not come up from empty space. In fact, our idea was taken from Hugo Riemann’s definition of metrical weights: Meter relates to weights. So it was decided to generate an output in the form of numerical weights for any analytical engine.

Guerino Mazzola

17. Shaping Operators

Abstract

Performance operators are those instances of our theory that shape a performance transformation. We have defined the relevant structures, namely performance cells, in chapter 10.

Guerino Mazzola

18. Two Generic Models and the Challenge of Improvisation

Abstract

Besides partial models with emotional, gestural, or analytical rationales, there are two models that comprise all these approaches. We want to briefly present them for completeness, and less because they offer a deeper insight into the complex of problems related to expressive performance.

Guerino Mazzola

19. String Quartet Theory

Abstract

Why are we including this topic in a book on performance theory? Couldn’t one include any other topic relating to a specific musical genre as well? Solo piano music, operas, what not? The reason for the special role of the string quartet is that this genre has a theory, a re ection about why these four instruments—the two violins, the viola and the violoncello—merge to such a perfect harmony or collaborative music, a theory that is not only relevant sociologically, but also with respect to the intrinsic messaging of musical contents.

Guerino Mazzola

Rubato:Model and Software

20. Performance Scores

Abstract

We have described the Rubato concept in section 15.3. The software Rubato was first implemented in Objevtice C on NEXTSTEP from 1992 to 1996 by Oliver Zahorka and the author. Later, the software was ported in 2001 to Mac OSX by Jörg Garbers in a research project at the TU Berlin. This version is available from [118].

Guerino Mazzola

21. Stemma Theory

Abstract

The Rubato methodology was opened towards a variation of performance rules and their rationales, and although only the analytical rationale has so far been implemented, there is no obstruction against enrichments with emotional or gestural expressivity. This is due to the modularity of the Rubato architecture. Performance rules are by no means encoded in the analytical components.

Guerino Mazzola

22. Case Studies

Abstract

Our first longer performance was constructed in 1995 with Robert Schumann’s famous Träumerei, the seventh Kinderszene in his collection op.15. It was an experiment conducted in the context of a performance conference at the KTH, where different approaches to performance were compared [82], and from where we take the following presentation. The performance was played on a MIDI Boesendorfer Imperial grand piano at the School of Music in Karlsruhe.

Guerino Mazzola

23. Statistics

Abstract

This chapter deals with a special type of experiment in performance theory, since experiments are necessary to test the relevance of a theoretical approach to real performance. How can we know that such an approach is explaining what we are experiencing in performance? The question is quite hard, because it is dificult in music to distinguish the creative subjective aspect from the scientific objective one.

Guerino Mazzola

Inverse Performance

Frontmatter

24. What Is Inverse Performance Theory?

Abstract

Inverse Performance Theory is the study of the reconstruction of the performance process from a given performance. This is a completely natural situation, since we usually perceive music as listeners and have to imagine what the performance could express, what it conveys in its complex signification process.

Guerino Mazzola

25. The Technical Setup

Abstract

In this chapter, we want to make the idea explained in chapter 24 more precise in an explicit technical sense. Of course, this must rely on a concrete model of performance, one which is much more explicit than the generic setup for statistics, although statistics are a very strong argument for the construction of analytical rationales built upon weights and operators. We refer to figure 25.1 for the following discussion.

Guerino Mazzola

26. Schumann’s Träumerei: Argerich vs. Horowitz

Abstract

We want to apply the inverse theory described in chapter 25 to a concrete case: The agogical tempo fields as measured by Bruno Repp [111] from recordings by Marta Argerich (ARG in Repp’s List, example ♫ 25) and Vladimir Horowitz (HO1 in Repp’s List, example ♫ 26) of Schumann’s Träumerei.

Guerino Mazzola

27. Rethinking Music Critique

Abstract

We have learned in previous chapters that performance conveys a doubly infinite message: the infinity of interpretative perspectives as they are realized in music analysis, gesturality, and emotive expressivity, and the variety of performative shaping expressed in the infinitesimal vocabulary of performance fields.

Guerino Mazzola

Epilogue

Frontmatter

28. Summary of Performance Theory

Abstract

Performance theory is a part of music theory in its larger understanding. It is not classical music theory, which unfortunately and implicitly focuses on harmony, a miniature part of theoretical topics in music (comprising theory of motives, of rhythms, of tunings, of physical modeling of sound, orchestration, composition, algorithmic composition, representation, etc.).

Guerino Mazzola

29. Future Developments

Abstract

The prospects of future developments in performance theory are many. They are mainly split into two main threads: theory and experiment. Perhaps one should rename performance theory and call it Performance Science, splitting into theory and experiments.

Guerino Mazzola

Backmatter

Titel: Musical Performance
verfasst von: Guerino Mazzola
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-642-11838-8
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11837-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11838-8