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In recent years, the increased availability of recorded music in the instrumental teaching studio as part of performers’ routine for familiarising themselves with musical works they will then go on to perform, has meant that performers are increasingly exposed to existing performances during, or even before, developing an interpretation of a score in the traditional sense.
This has become an area for research activity in the social psychology of music (for example, the current project undertaken by Ginsborg, Gaunt and Prior, ‘First encounters of the musical kind’) and has implications for the way instrumental and vocal teaching develops over the next few years, and the way ‘creativity’ is characterised in the context of performance preparation and one-to-one teaching.

The subject of the present study is the processes by which a performer develops a relationship with, and understanding of, a score. Self-report and eye-tracking are used to interrogate this process, with a particular concentration on the process as creative in the standard definition of whether the understanding developed by the performer can be classified as ‘original’ and ‘effective’ (Runco and Jaeger, 2012). These two criteria for creativity are problematic in music and particularly in music performance: what does it mean to be ‘original’ and produce an ‘original’ interpretation of a score through performance? What does it mean to be effective – how does one ‘find’ the purpose of the performance and judge how well the performer has achieved that end?
The goal of the current paper is to explore questions about creativity in the process of preparing a score for performance. More specifically, whether, using the kinds of theories about creativity which are visible in current music research, listening to existing recordings of a piece one is preparing for performance can be seen as limiting potential for creativity, or increasing potential for creativity. In addition, the use of eye-tracking technology allows questions about the conscious (self-report) and subconscious (eye-movement) to be explored, with a view to discussing the relationship of these two stages of score study with an overall notion of creativity within the process.

The context for this research draws on studies by Ginsborg, Chaffin and Demos about the preparation of music for performance, with particular reference to musical features and performance cues (2014), and on earlier work on performance cues in singing (Ginsborg and Chaffin, 2011a) and preparation and spontaneity while singing Schoenberg songs (Ginsborg and Chaffin, 2011b). Comparing this work with other work on musical features encouraging a dynamic and expression-driven attitude towards musical structure (e.g., Rink, Spiro and Gold, 2009), a viewpoint is developed on the relative importance (according to performers) of different musical features when making judgements about score preparation. In particular, do the features that would fall into Ginsborg and Chaffin’s ‘expressive’ feature category map directly on to the set of features judged to be ‘more hearable’ by participants, and are these the features that represent the potential for creativity in score preparation? This is then recontextualised in the notion of creativity in a model of ecological perception (Clarke, Doffman and Lim, 2013).

Music students (n=50) were asked to silently study a score of a Schoenberg song, ‘Saget Mir’, Song V from Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (1909), for two minutes, thinking about preparing it for performance while their eyes were tracked. They then filled in a questionnaire about the important of various musical features when making decisions about the form and structure of the song, as well as about perceived climaxes. The process was then repeated while the participants listened while looking at the same time.
Musical features were categorised according to participants’ judgements of their relative important in the looking and the listening phases of the experiment. The length and position of gaze was then compared to these judgements. Using trends from the literature and from the pilot study (n=26), the effects of learning and familiarity between the two phases were accounted for as much as possible.

The results suggest that there is indeed a marked difference between features judged to be important when just looking at a score, and those judged to be important when listening. That these ‘more hearable’ features are those that are more closely linked to an ‘expressive’ performance (Rink, 2001), this may suggest that listening as part of score preparation increases the potential for creativity simply by dint of drawing attention to those malleable features early on in the preparation process, rather than that the interpretation presented in the actual recording used is something that the performer will seek to emulate and therefore limit their potential for originality and therefore creativity.

This research presents tentative conclusions which ask more questions than they answer, and suggests further development of the results, including studying the effect of experience and type of expertise on the judgement of features.