Vous constatez une erreur ?
NaN:NaN
00:00
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.
From 2004 to 2015 two research centres funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council – which represented successive stages of the same project – provided a focus for research in musical performance. Whereas the first (the AHRC Res
10 octobre 2015 55 min
The French literary criticism movement, critique génétique, is an attractive interdisciplinary model for the study of music sketches because of its staggering amount of varied scholarship published during its forty-year history, its conce
10 octobre 2015 32 min
This paper will present the core role of improvisation groups in the late Sixties / beginning of the Seventies in the process of building the new status of music material in the post-serial context. Analysing some “Gruppo di Improvvisazione
10 octobre 2015 33 min
In previous conference presentations and writings I have discussed Henry Brant’s process of “prose-report composition,” which became his primary working method in 1945. The process, which is heavily documented in his sketch manuscripts at t
10 octobre 2015 27 min
My paper centers on the compositional manuscripts of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), the Soviet Union’s leading composer of art music. Opening a window onto the composer’s creativity, fragmentary passages, rejected movements, revised manuscr
10 octobre 2015 29 min
The paper is an attempt for reconstruction of coding (creative) and decoding (reading) process, both dependent on temporary collective imaginative patterns, which funded the historic-ontological status of two significant works of the Czech
10 octobre 2015 26 min
When Adorno characterized the introductory measures of “Entrueckung” in Schoenberg’s Second String Quarter as something “never yet heard,” he pointed to a caesura that was both a breakthrough and also a rupture in the history of music. A de
10 octobre 2015 28 min
The present conference aims to study the creative trajectory of the Brazilian contemporary opera confection and also how the creation networks of opera work, within a communicational and semiotical approach. It also aims to explore the ind
10 octobre 2015 26 min
This paper theorizes and investigates the role of new music festivals, currently among the leading institutional impulses for the creation of contemporary art music. During the last few decades those festivals have gained increasing promine
10 octobre 2015 30 min
Charles Ives began formulating literary and musical ideas that would evolve into Concord Sonata as early as 1902. The piece was first published in 1921, and significantly revised to the point of being “re-written” in 1947. Throughout those
10 octobre 2015 30 min
In his book The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty (2014), the distinguished sociologist Pierre-Michel Menger offers an analysis of artistic creativity that seeks a middle path between two equally unsatisfactory
10 octobre 2015 01 h 13 min
In my presentation I will elucidate the interplay of several forms of knowledge in composing process in art music. As a general term, “knowledge” includes forms of explicit, propositional knowledge as well as several forms of implicit, embo
10 octobre 2015 23 min
Faced to a more and more digitalized world the interest in artists manuscripts is still growing. Sometimes it is the mystic rising of an idea and its often unexpected development, sometimes it is a surprising simple reason that can be seen
10 octobre 2015 26 min
New things are made with old things. In this sense, all creation is basically a combinatorial process – though not just that. It also implies novelty; but novelty comes into play in a dynamic space between random indeterminacy and routine r
10 octobre 2015 36 min
The concept of "mistake" is antithetical to jazz's spirit of uninhibited creativity. But jazz, like any musical style, conforms to a system of rules and conventions; indeed, this is what defines the style—what makes it sound like jazz and n
10 octobre 2015 26 min
In jazz research and performance practice, emphasis has long been awarded to musicians who exhibit virtuosity or mastery of solo improvisation. Whether Louis Armstrong’s assertive solo cadenza on West End Blues or John Coltrane’s blazing ac
10 octobre 2015 24 min
Since sociology has been historically concerned with the question of how social order is possible, its main focus has been on exploring (the imposition of) conventions, rules, norms, every day routines, etc. As a result, the study of creati
10 octobre 2015 29 min
This paper presents the results of a genetic study of Antagonisme, a chamber work composed by Xavier Darasse on a text by the philosopher Alain Badiou for the 1965 concours de composition at the Conservatoire de Paris. Darasse and Badiou be
10 octobre 2015 26 min
Vers le milieu des années 1980 à l’IRCAM, le compositeur français Marc-André Dalbavie a pris conscience de l’importance de l’espace dans l’existence du son, notamment à travers son contact avec l’acousticien Jean-Marie Adrien. À parti
10 octobre 2015 32 min
From 2004 to 2015 two research centres funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council – which represented successive stages of the same project – provided a focus for research in musical performance. Whereas the first (the AHRC Res
10 octobre 2015 55 min
From their compositional and philosophical perspectives, the works of Elliott Carter and Luigi Nono share very little in common. Carter, a true American modernist, strongly opposed the method of twelve-tone music, which was becoming prevale
10 octobre 2015 27 min
The question of whether Henri Dutilleux was a pro- or anti-serialist can be difficult to answer. However, in the 1960s, the composer evidently participated in the serial movement when he composed his two seminal works called Métaboles and
10 octobre 2015 26 min
Vous constatez une erreur ?
1, place Igor-Stravinsky
75004 Paris
+33 1 44 78 48 43
Du lundi au vendredi de 9h30 à 19h
Fermé le samedi et le dimanche
Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau, Châtelet, Les Halles
Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique
Copyright © 2022 Ircam. All rights reserved.