Music Performance

Most of us can recall chuckling, or even laughing out loud, at a humorous musical passage and perhaps recalling how much that experience increased our enjoyment of the music. This study focuses on humour in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: composers who have been singled out by contemporary and modern scholars for their ingenuity and mastery of the Classical style. In the most general sense, musical humour arises when composers play with established conventions of musical discourse by writing something incongruous according to the stylistic context.
Chapter 1 demonstrates how historical critics understood the role of contrast in examples of musical humour and wit. It then surveys many recent music-theoretical discussions of musical humour, before briefly introducing how elements of contrast, “valence shifts,” and “opposition” are involved in musical humour from the Classical period. This study’s analytical and theoretical approach to musical humour draws on recent studies of musical humour, form, and communication in the Classical style, as well as concepts from recent linguistic theories of humour.   
Chapter 2 introduces the two primary strategies Classical instrumental composers employed to create musical humour: “opposition” and “excess.” Chapters 3 and 4 discuss a wide range of musical examples to explore how composers deployed formal functions and musical topics to produce humour. These discussions provide a sense of the wide range of effects that fall under the umbrellas of opposition and excess.
Chapter 5 concludes by briefly examining some performance applications of this study and suggesting some further potential sources of musical humour.

​ ​When first learning to play a wind instrument, beginner musicians are taught how to hold their instrument and correctly position their body. They are taught how to sit, where to put their hands and fingers on the keys, and how to hold their arms. This initial lesson on posture and hand positioning is often short, as one quickly moves on to learn the embouchure and breathing techniques that allow sound to be produced. As a musician progresses in skill, positioning is emphasized more, and they learn that it can affect their risk of strain or injury and improve their sound quality. Throughout a musician’s lifetime, one may often find themselves in pain in one area of their body or another. This can normally be prevented by modifying or correcting their body in an optimal position to play as well as to prevent strain and pain. Common points of pain for a musician include the neck, shoulders, lower back, and wrists, depending on the type of instrument and other variables. Musicians ha...

Many secondary music students graduate from school and stop being actively involved in making music in the community. This is frustrating for music educators who have watched their journey of musical development and then discover it came to a sudden end once they leave the school. One of the goals of a music teacher is to develop a love of music that will enable lifelong learning. Five students who have been taught by the researcher discuss issues and events that have led to their passion for music making lasting beyond the secondary school experience. Their musical experiences provided such a positive impact on them that not only did they pursue musical activities beyond school, but also discussed that they would not consider ceasing musical engagement until the end of their lives. Their relationship with music and their friends who share a similar passion has provided them all with a sense of musical identity. They are musicians and they hope they always will be. The formation of personal, musical identity and social musical identity is critical in the process of students seeing themselves as lifelong, active participants in music. Identity and the impact that this had on their decision to remain actively engaged with music will be explored. Implications for the research will include providing secondary music students with a variety of musical activities that includes collaboration with outside ensembles to support the development of personal and social, musical identity.

In Deutschland kann man an vierundzwanzig Musikhochschulen, sechs Kirchenmusikhochschulen, elf Akademien und Konservatorien sowie an etlichen Universitäten künstlerische musikalische Hauptfächer studieren. Die Lebenswege der angehenden Musiker_innen scheinen in vielen Fällen vorgezeichnet zu sein. Stattdessen erfolgt meist der Sprung in ein in höchstem Maße ungewisses Berufsleben. Unser Land produziert Musiker_innen der Spitzenklasse, aber nur die wenigsten von ihnen können ihren Lebensunterhalt durch das aktive Musizieren bestreiten. Was läuft da schief? Offenbar herrscht dringender Handlungsbedarf, aber was kann überhaupt verändert werden, und an welchen Punkten sollte das Umdenken beginnen? Wie können die Professionalisierung und Institutionalisierung der Musikausbildung zeitgemäß gestaltet werden? Dieser Artikel formuliert einige Denkansätze und Handlungsanregungen.

Twentieth-century musicology frequently invoked the music of Beethoven to validate its work-centred, textualist and structuralist agenda. This article reorients Beethoven's music towards the performance studies paradigm, which places the music making body and material contexts of performing at the centre of its disciplinary epistemology, by weaving a novel discursive context around the composer's unusual dynamics markings. Through a historical case study of the premiere of his Op. 70 No. 2 piano trio, I explore the connections between the performance experience of Beethoven's dynamics and some of the philosophical and cultural discourses emerging in Europe during the early nineteenth century on the body and the self, and thereby construct novel meanings for his expressive performance practice. By bringing together interdisciplinary historical scholarship, phenomenological reflection, analytical thought and practice-based enquiry, I open up a neglected area of research that lies at the intersection of the performance experience of musical dynamics, sensory history and somatic musical archeology.

Interpersonal coordination within a dyadic musical performance requires that the two musicians share a similar mental model of the music's timing structure. In addition to non-fluctuating inter-onset-interval, matched mental models can be observed through corporeal articulations and apparent embodiment of musical features (i.e. synchronous body sway, mimicked or complementary gestures). Our aim was to examine the effect of tempo on interpersonal coordination within a musical dyad. Violin dyads performed three unfamiliar collaborative musical sequences in facing vs. non-facing conditions. Our hypotheses were that interpersonal coordination would be weakened in the non-facing conditions, and that synchronization would be affected by both very slow and very fast tempi. The current paper reports the project's initial and general findings. We present results relating to the dyads' ability to synchronize and have performed tests on the motion capture data to examine how movement patterns change between the front-and back-facing conditions.

Resumo: Após rever um projeto esboçado por Heinrich Schenker, Die Kunst des Vortrags, no qual são discutidas estratégias interpretativas designadas por " dissimulação " e " emolduração " , ambas com referência aos níveis hierárquicos da estrutura musical, oferecemos uma análise que abrange não apenas um ponto de vista composicional, mas procura resgatar o efeito instrumental. Esta abordagem analítica do primeiro movimento da sonata K 533-494 de W. A. Mozart visa demonstrar que análise e interpretação são, para Schenker, manifestações afins e complementares de uma concepção musical orgânica. Abstract: Following a review of Heinrich Schenker´s draft of a project entitled Die Kunst des Vortrags in which interpretive strategies known respectively as Dissembling and Rahmenanschlag refer to hierarquical levels of musical structure, we offer an analysis discussing not only the compositional features but also the instrumental effects in a particular work. This approach informs an analysis of W.A. Mozart´s Sonata K 533-494, first movement, in order to demonstrate that analysis and interpretation are mutually complementary and necessary manifestations of an organic musical conception.

This paper contends there are several causes of timbral homogeneity in contemporary electric guitar performance: 1) the acoustic origin of the instrument; 2) the traditional performance practice of timbral constancy, whereby “the player will have been schooled for many years to maintain timbre constancy in many musical situations” (Erickson 1975, p. 12); and 3) the monaural nature of the instrument, in terms of the single-feed audio output found in most electric guitar pickups. The second and third causes are arguably a direct result of the first. Such timbral homogeneity is problematic because it limits the electric guitar performers’ ability to utilise “timbre as a distinct, dynamic feature of music” (Fales 2005, p. 157). Instead, timbre is placed in the traditional role of nuance. As a form of remediation, this paper argues that modern polyphonic pickup technology provides an opportunity for timbral structure to
become a more central part of contemporary electric guitar music by encouraging a practice whereby the performer consciously investigates perceived relationships between common pitch structures and timbral and spatial parametric change in a reflective manner in real-time music performance. The proposed approach maintains the potential to facilitate a new performance practice in contemporary electric guitar music whereby the performer utilises musical stimuli which exploit their similarities to environmental
“regularities” (Bregman 1993, pp. 10-36).

The  Brazilian  composer Heitor  Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)  is  one  of  the  most  prominent names  in Twentieth  century  music.  His  compositional  scope  encompasses  languages  that  often combine national elements of Brazilian music with traditions of European music. Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras is one of the most representative works that reflect the dialogue of those distinct  worlds.  With  this  series  of  distinct  pieces,  Villa-Lobos  aimed  to  achieve  musical universality through incorporating elements of Bach’s music with  that  of  his  own,  which  was already permeated by Brazilian popular traditions. This research focuses on the four movements of the “reduced” version of the Bachianas Brasileiras no.2, of which three are for cello and piano, and one is for solo piano. Along with many other works by Villa-Lobos, this version of Bachianas no.2 merits editing as many performers still play these works using copies of manuscripts that are not so easily available. The editorial work conducted  in  this  paper is a  critical  approach  and  includes: historical  research  where  the chronological  question  of  these  movements  was  thoroughly  examined;  a  description  of  the processes of locating, collecting, inspecting and describing the primary sources (autographs and apographs); and the processes of establishing and presenting the musical text. This research intends to show that the movements of the Bachianas no.2 for cello and piano and that for solo piano do not fail to fully communicate all the musical ideas explored by Villa-Lobos in the orchestral version.  Moreover, the main objective of this paper is to bring out obscure aspects of these “reduced” movements, while facilitating the access to the scores and contributing to their propagation among performer

Music is a powerful cultural medium. The volume explores the varied roles that music plays in human culture and society, and its unique symbolic and communicative properties. Contributors discuss Richard Wagner, Bob Dylan, John Cage, Eric Burdon, and Igor Stravinsky. From electronic and inner-city DIY to world music and rock concerts, the book looks at music’s part in creating the human sense of place, space, transcendence and identity. Philosophers, cultural thinkers, and sociologists collaborate to explain the exhilaration and fascination that human beings experience when they listen to music.

Table of Contents

Volume Foreword vii
Chapter One Introduction: Philosophical and Cultural Theories
of Music
Eduardo De La Fuente and Peter Murphy

Chapter Two Modern Hermeneutics and the Presentation
of Opera
Agnes Heller

Chapter Three Algo-Rhythm and Mello-dy: A Consideration of
the Relationship Between Technology and the Embodied
Performance of Music
Daniel Black

Chapter Four Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic
Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism
Peter Murphy

Chapter Five Music and Religion: Reflections on Cultural
Secularization
David Roberts

Chapter Six Prophet and Priest, Ascetic and Mystic: Towards
a Cultural Sociology of the Twentieth Century Composer
Eduardo De La Fuente

Chapter Seven Collective Effervescence, Numinous Experience or
Proto-Religious Phenomena? Moshing with Durkheim,
Schleiermacher and Otto
Mark Jennings

Chapter Eight Music as a Space of Possibilities 129
John Rundell

Chapter Nine Some Suggestions for a Phenomenology
of Rhythm
Stuart Grant

Chapter Ten The Paradox of “Do-it-Yourself” in
Unpopular Music
Joseph Borlagdan

Chapter Eleven Musical Culturespeak and Cosmopolitan
Identities in Australian Multiculturalism
Graeme Smith

Chapter Twelve The Piano and Cultural Modernity in
East Asia
Alison Tokita

Chapter Thirteen Popular Music, Cultural Memory and
Everyday Aesthetics
Andy Bennett

Chapter Fourteen Everything is Dirt: Reevaluating the Place
of Cultural Status in Producing Aesthetic Attachment
Claudio E. Benzecry

Chapter Fifteen Musical Listening and Boundary-Work
Michael Walsh

This article aims to shed light on the complex relationship between music analysis and performance practice, taking hypermetric analysis, in particular hypermetric ambiguity, as a case in point. In many studies dealing with metre above the bar level, one encounters a prescriptive approach to performance where analytical insights are considered to determine the range of possibilities for the musician. Even in cases of hypermetric ambiguity, analysts tend to advise the musician to decide in favour of one preferred analytical reading and, thus, to resolve ambiguity. The present essay is organized into three parts: based on an essentially cognitive theory of metre presented in part one, the second part examines hypermetric ambiguity in the final movement of Beethoven's »Tempest Sonata« op. 31,2. Conflicting readings of this movement and hence ambiguity largely result from fundamental differences regarding both the underlying theoretical notion of metrical accent and the importance ascribed to various factors for metric analysis. Part three deals with various problems that go hand in hand with the prescriptive approach to performance. It is argued that analytical suggestions about how to perform a composition adequately are of relatively little value, so long as it remains unclear what a metric accent is and to what extent a metrical structure can be influenced by other types of accents (e.g., dynamic, agogic or tonal). A further difficulty is that analysts either rarely specify the means for realizing a proposed analytical reading or simply advise the performer that certain points in time should be played louder in order to make them heard as metrically accented, thus suggesting that dynamic accents automatically coincide with metrical ones.

“What is the role of the performer in musical communication? Discuss by reference to the following two quotes, stating whether you agree with them or not: 1) 'the performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print." (Schoenberg, in D. Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938-76), New York: Pendragon Press, 1980, p. 164). 2) "The conductor must be humble before the composer; he [must] never interpose himself between the music and the
audience; all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, [must] be made in the service of the composer's meaning." (Leonard Bernstein, in The Joy of Music, London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1959, p. 56).”

Winner of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) 2023 Practice Research Prize:

If there is one trope that has become the lynchpin of the origin narratives of the young discipline of music performance studies, it is the idea that musical performance represents the "other" of the musical score. Many of the recent debates that effected a paradigm shift in music scholarship highlight the ontological and epistemological divergences between the score and musical performance, and also debunk the various myths and prejudices that have been woven around music performances and performers through the textualist paradigm, which essentialised and naturalised the musical score as the holder of "the music" and "the" source of disciplinary knowledge. Following the disciplinary "performative turn" during the twenty-first century, the effects of textualist habits of thought on scholarly discourses have been steadily on the wane. Nevertheless, the myth of a direct and immediate route between the score and performance - between the page and the stage - appears especially obstinate and continues to lurk around, particularly in the context of the analysis and performance literature. In this article, I discuss some of the complex embodied-affective processes that connect the page and the stage from a performer's perspective, through case studies involving my performance experiences of a Corrente by J. S. Bach, a keyboard sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, and an excerpt from Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini".

In this article, I aim to open up and explore the meaning making processes, from a performer’s perspective, that unfold in the creative space between the page and the stage that textualist approaches eliminated through their disembodied, ahistorical, essentialising and naturalizing discourses, and show the thoroughly contingent nature of these processes. One of the most significant arguments that will emerge from my discussion is that between the page and the stage are a large number of factors, including the uniquely embodied senses, artistic sensibilities, experiences and expert practical knowledge of each performer, that together constitute her artistic intentions, in the absence of which there would be no artistic musical performance. My discussion proceeds by drawing together critical evaluation of relevant scholarly literature, analytical thought, phenomenological enquiry and, most significantly, artistic research: the latter mobilizes the artistic processes of performance making as research tools and opens up novel lines of enquiry motivated by a performer’s expert knowledge about, as well as situated experiences of, performing music. I further argue that eradicating the deleterious effects of the textualist urge to discipline the performer's body and emotions, to assimilate their individuality into an enforced utopia and homogenise performance expression requires introducing, into scholarly thinking and discourses, all the deep level contingencies that I emphasise in this article as essential elements connecting musical texts and performances. It also requires analysts to give up the modernist de-historicising fantasy that allows them to regard themselves as privileged and exemplary listeners standing in for all auditors, and in the case of the analysis and performance literature, standing in for all performers. However much textualist habits might sideline the drastic qualities of musical performance in scholarly discourses, performers continue to be fleshly, willful, creative individual affectively committed to the unruly and dynamic realm of performance making, and invest their performances with aesthetic qualities that grow out of their lived experiences and intentions as they continually move between the page and the stage.
Winner of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) 2023 Practice Research Prize:


In this article, I aim to open up and explore the meaning making processes, from a performer’s perspective, that unfold in the creative space between the page and the stage that textualist approaches eliminated through their disembodied, ahistorical, essentialising and naturalizing discourses, and show the thoroughly contingent nature of these processes. One of the most significant arguments that will emerge from my discussion is that between the page and the stage are a large number of factors, including the uniquely embodied senses, artistic sensibilities, experiences and expert practical knowledge of each performer, that together constitute her artistic intentions, in the absence of which there would be no artistic musical performance. My discussion proceeds by drawing together critical evaluation of relevant scholarly literature, analytical thought, phenomenological enquiry and, most significantly, artistic research: the latter mobilizes the artistic processes of performance making as research tools and opens up novel lines of enquiry motivated by a performer’s expert knowledge about, as well as situated experiences of, performing music.