Performer

“For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic

and moving materializations of his emotions: he is called upon to

make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in

accordance with his own consciousness. In this way he, like the

composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those

passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life. You see,

playing the piano is a combination of Brain, Heart and Means.

And all three should be even. If one falls short of the others, the

music suffers. Without Brains, you are a fiasco. Without Means

you are an amateur. Without Heart, you are a machine. It has its

dangers, this occupation...”

Vladimir Horowitz.

One may be accustomed to think that the composer is the one who is

ultimately responsible for the structure of music and has the final

word on which notes, dynamics, tempo and articulation will be used in

the piece. Unless one is dealing with the practice of improvisation or

ornamentation, or contemporary instances where the performer is

instructed to create the music from scratch, it seems that very little

change regarding the structure of the composition could occur at the

hands of the performer.

But musical structure also relies heavily on the performer’s decisions,

almost to the same extent that it relies on the composer’s original

ones.

Beethoven’s cry of joy, if played too slowly, will become a funeral

march. Each performer creates her own structure for a piece, by

making specific choices regarding the tempi, colors, articulations and

phrasing, which are (hopefully) ones based on clues left by the

composer. There is no ultimate performance or perfect rendition of a

piece of music. Any discussion of a piece of music must take into

consideration the involvement of an equal and volatile decision maker,

the performer.

The performer and a composer

An artist of a plastic art form, whether a painter, a sculptor, or an

architect, is the sole creator of the material object. There is no need

for an intermediary or interpreter between the author and the

spectator. The situation in music is entirely different. The composer

needs an intermediary-performer, a creative interpreter of his

composition. The word "performer" does in fact express the essence of

the artistically significant and intensely creative process of musical

interpretation. The more perfect, complete and brilliant the

performance of an artist, the more exposed is his artistic persona. He

is not an "executor" of another's will; rather the mind of the composer

should become the performer's own, and blend with the individual

traits of his talent, with his own artistic touches. The performer gains

strength and courage in this unity, which is necessary for the concrete

realization in sound of the ideas and images contained in the work

(Samuil,)

Uncovering the composer’s specific emotional intention in music is

not a simple task, yet it is not an impossible one either. At times the

answer is clear and is inherent in the musical line or is specified by

words such as ‘Furioso’ and ‘Melancholic’. But even when this is not

the case, one can usually uncover the emotional content by carefully

examining the score. The intention behind the music does not always

have to be clearly specified, and still a sensitive performer will be able

to uncover it.

If one chooses to follow the writings of Meyer in her “Emotion and Meaning

in Music”, one would realize that it is quite possible for any

knowledgeable and sensitive musician to uncover the composer’s

emotional intention behind a piece by examining its structure and

investigating probable interpretations based on the music’s

connotations.

One realizes that the performer could learn how to use the collective

memory to assist him/her in uncovering the composer’s emotional

intention:

(1) By realizing the connections between the specific piece and

another piece which is set to a text by the same composer;

(2) By looking at the motion in the piece and its resemblance to

human emotions; and/or

(3) By identifying the emotional implications of the melodic lines in it.

By using the same tools, the performer will also be able to uncover

the causal relationship between the different sections in the piece,

and as a result fully express the emotional content which is at the root

of the composition.

The performer must realize that it is his/her responsibility to decipher

Beethoven’s emotional intention behind the music, whether it be a cry

of joy or a cry of agony, and that it is also his/her responsibility to

express these emotions to the audience by adding her own unique

experience of them to the performance.

A musician-interpreter, at one and the same time, realizes his

connection to the composer's intentions, and realizes himself as an

artistic personality and not a robot or machine that follows signals

and codes: acknowledging both the enormous importance of the

author of the composition – and at the same time his own role in the

realization of the composer’s ideas and adding of better colors to the

ideas.

EXPRESSION

Millions of people are regularly attending live music events or

listening to recordings of music performances. What drives them to do

so is hard to pin down with certainty, and the reasons for it might be

manifold. But while enjoying the music, they are all listening to

(mostly) human-made music that contains a specific human

expression, whatever kind it might be — what they hear makes sense

to them. Without this expressivity the music would not attract people;

it is an integral part of the music (Werner Goebl) In the domain of

music, much research has focused on the act of expressive music

performance, as it is commonly and most typically found in classical

music: the deliberate shaping of the music by the performer, the

imposing of expressive qualities onto an otherwise ‘dead’ musical

score via controlled variation of parameters such as intensity, tempo,

timing, articulation, etc

Expression as structural communication

On the contrary, there is one aspect of the musical experience that

seems intrinsicaly connected to emotion: its expressive dimension,

through which we perceive expressive qualities in the music: as sad,

nostalgic, indignant, rebellious, loving,... This is intrinsic in the sense

that the expressiveness cannot be detached from the music itself –just

as we hear meaningful speech, not acoustic waves from which we

infer its meaning. The analogy with language is useful also in making

clear that this ability for expressive perception is something to be

acquired, and that is made possible by subpersonal processes that

work automatically and quickly. However, from a phenomenic point of

view, the experience of expression, as that of meaning, is perceptively

direct, not inferential, not relying on imaginative elaboration or

projection

Expression as structural communication

Structural communication began in research into learning that

involved understanding rather than knowing. It is the kind of learning

that includes the ability to interpret new situations in terms of

principles, or to design solutions to complex problems. It is the kind of

learning drawn into play when people enter into mastery of a subject.

It is the synthesis of theory and practice, being able to see the wood

for the trees and making complex judgments.

Expressively powerful performances

may be created by the use of unexpected

or unconventional devices by the performer.

This phenomenon has been investigated by asking

professional pianists to record their chosen interpretations

of a single Chopin Prelude (no. 4 in E minor)

onto a MIDI piano, which allowed extraction of note-bynote

timing and intensity information35

Expression as communication of character

It is a long-established finding that, within a musical culture, listeners

show considerable agreement concerning the adjectives that best

describe a particular passage of music. (Hevner, K. (1936)

Experimental studies of the elements of expressionin music. Am. J.

Psychol. 48, 248–268)

Individual differences between music performers and performances

are complex and multidimensional. The psychological

mechanisms underlying these differences are,

therefore, equally complex and multiple

It has been argued convincingly

that the emotional ‘code’ used by performers and listeners

is closely related to the prosodic code, which communicates

emotion in human vocal expression, and thus

may have at least some innate components (P.N. Juslin,

unpublished). However, performers and listeners do vary

in the efficiency with which they can use the emotional

code, and Juslin has provided some data that suggests that

the application of ‘universal’ emotional codes to the specific

structures of music requires specific, targeted learning

experiences. Thus, at least part of the differences in

levels of expressive skill between performers may reflect

the different learning environments in which they

acquired their skill

During a performance, musical structures and units are retrieved

from memory according to the performer’s conceptual interpretation,

and are then prepared for production and transformed into

appropriate movements. The following sections of the review-

Interpretation, Planning, and Movement—focus on these components

of performance.

Interpretation

Performers to some degree determine aspects of any music they play.

Issues of tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and, in some types of music,

pitches and instrumentation are subject to a performer’s discretion.

Music as an interpretive art is a relatively recent phenomenon. In

ancient societies, music plays a ritual role based on an oral tradition,

and each performer in a sense interprets the tradition but, more

importantly, renews it and transforms it through personal

performance.

Music performance is often viewed as part of a system of

communication in which composers code musical ideas in notation,

performers recode from the notation to acoustical signal, and listeners

recode from the acoustical signal to ideas (Kendall & Carterette

1990). Each performer has intentions to convey; the communicative

content in music performance includes the performers’ conceptual

interpretation of the musical composition. Western tonal music has

developed a notation that represents pitch and duration information

fairly explicitly but intensity and tone quality only approximately.

Other relationships, such as group boundaries, metrical levels higher

than the measure, and patterns of motion, tension, and relaxation are

unspecified or only implicitly specified in notation. Thus, ambiguities

in musical notation allow a performer considerable freedom in

deciding how to interpret the music’s content. Interpretation refers to

performers’ individualistic modeling of a piece according to their own

ideas or musical intentions (Caroline Palmer, 1997). Differences in

interpretation can account for why the same musical score is

performed differently by different performers or why the same

performer may perform a piece differently on separate occasions.

As in other art forms, there is no single ideal interpretation for a given

musical piece; every performance involves some kind of interpretation

or analysis (Cone 1968, Levy 1995, Meyer 1973). The field of music

analysis offers various explanations for the content of a given

composition. One goal of interpretation is to convey the meaning of

the music. The function of interpretation includes;

To highlight particular structural content, and

To highlight particular emotional content of the music

PLANNING

MOVEMENT

After musical structures and units are retrieved from memory

according to performer’s conceptual interpretation, they must be

transformed into appropriate body movements. Movement plays many

roles in theories of music and its performance; for example, musical

rhythm is often defined relative to body movement (Fraisse 1982,

Gabrielsson 1982). Different views exist on the causal relationships

between musical rhythm and movement in performance.

For instance, movement can generate rhythm and timing, or rhythm

and timing can generate movement (Clarke 1997). These two views

are considered below

TIMEKEEPER MODEL

Movement generating timing is the motor control view: Structural

information (such as a sequence’s rhythm) may be the input to a

motor system, which then produces some kind of temporally

structured behavior, perhaps with the use of internal clocks or

timekeepers. Internal clocks account for behaviors such as the

anticipation and coordination of gestures or acts, e.g. accompanying

musical sounds with tapping, swelling of the shoulders, nodding. In

music performance, motor systems are thought to construct the

information for upcoming movements on the basis of internal clocks,

which act as timekeepers by controlling the time scale of movement

trajectories (Shaffer 1981).

Performers’ movements are a powerful communication channel of

expression to the audience, sometimes even overriding the acoustic

information (Behne, 1990; Davidson, 1994)

Eckman has investigated facial expression for four emotions: fear,

anger, sadness and enjoyment, and concluded that these faces and

their respective emotional connotations are recognized by people

around the world. (Paul Eckman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing

Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and

Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company,

2003).)