1.3 Teorías relacionadas al tema
1.3.1 Teoría Científica de decisiones de financiamiento
In public performance, rather few opportunities exist for performers to obtain detailed feedback from audiences concerning the reception of their expressive intentions. Applause, enthusiastic or otherwise, is not very specific. It doesn’t tell a performer whether the audience was able to hear that carefully planned transition from tension to calm in the second movement. For reasons we have al-ready suggested, performers may not be in the best position to evaluate their own performances. They may hear what they want to hear, rather than what is really there. In other cases, they may introduce intended expression with insufficient magnitude so that listeners are unable to pick it up. One of the frequent observa-tions made by teachers is that their students intend an expressive gesture, which they believe they have executed, but that the gesture is simply too small to be clearly detectable by a listener. Finally, it is quite difficult to set clear criteria for success, and a musician may be unable to assess a performance validly or re-liably because little or no agreement exists about what constitutes a “good” per-formance (beyond the obvious criterion of being able to play the correct notes).
Contrast this with competitive sports (such as tennis) or competitive games (such as chess). Performers get immediate and objective feedback—they either win or lose—and can work to increase the proportion of times they win.
Performance development thus depends crucially on the enhanced feedback provided to musicians by other professionals involved in their training and de-velopment (see chapter 10). Some feedback is provided by formal assessments ( juries, examinations, etc.), although we should note in passing that some of the research on jury reliability does not inspire confidence (see chapter 11). Inter-pretational and aesthetic judgments are often unreliable, even when they are made by experts.
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For these reasons, some researchers have been investigating means of more objectively enhancing the feedback available to performers (see Juslin, Friberg, Schoonderwaldt, & Karlsson, 2004). Such feedback, at its best, can be frequent, consistent, specific, and accurate, as has been demonstrated in the sports psychology literature (Singer, Hausenblas, & Janelle, 2001). By analyz-ing performance features with the aid of a computer, Juslin and Laukka (2000) were able to isolate the specific variations that effectively communicated in-dividual basic emotions, such as happiness, sadness, or anger. In a situation in which the explicit performance goal is to communicate one of these emotions, it is possible to evaluate success in terms of the presence or absence of key features in the performance but also in terms of the communicative effective-ness of the performance, as measured by the proportion of listeners who reli-ably identified the intended emotion. Juslin and Laukka (2000) were able to show performers precisely what features of their performances were unhelpful or misleading, and they provided them with the oppor tunity to adjust their per-formances until they were reliably recognized as representing the desired emo-tion. Although this is a welcome demonstration that targeted feedback can enhance expressive performance, it is somewhat difficult to conceptually or practically extend such augmented feedback to more complex emotional mes-sages or longer works.
Finally, a word of caution is needed about the social relativity of judgments of performance quality. Even within a coherent culture or tradition, people pri-oritize different things. The things that are most important for baroque perfor-mance are different from those that matter most in late Romantic music.
Acquiring the specific rules of a new genre takes time, and acquiring the capac-ity to make appropriate judgments takes as much time. Conventional wisdom about a genre does not stay still, either. The way that Beethoven is played today in the West reflects a whole set of developments in historical research, modern performance practice, and conceptions of authenticity. The Beethoven perfor-mances of 50 years ago sound distinctly odd to the Beethoven proponent of to-day. When deciding how much weight to place on a particular judgment, it is always necessary to try to understand as much as possible about the social and cultural background and assumptions from which that judgment is being made.
Only if these assumptions are consistent with those on which you and others you relate to are premising your activities will there be a good chance that following the specific advice will lead to beneficial outcomes all around.
Study Questions
1. What do you consider to be the strongest evidence that expressive perfor-mance is rule-governed? Evaluate the claims that a perforperfor-mance can be both rule-governed and creative at the same time.
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2. What does research tell us about the role of conscious deliberate planning and verbal discussion and description in the construction of a musically convincing performance?
3. Can research tell us anything about the best ways to improve our expres-sive abilities?
Further Reading
The following are good and fairly comprehensive reviews of the literature on ex-pressive performance.
Juslin, P. N., Friberg, A., & Bresin, R. (2002). Toward a computational model of ex-pression in music performance: The GERM model. Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue 2001–2002, 63–122.
Parncutt, R., & McPherson, G. E. (Eds.). (2001). The Science and Psychology of Mu-sic Performance: Creative strategies for teaching and learning.See chapter 13, on structural communication, and chapter 14, on emotional communication.
Deutsch, D. (Ed.) (1999). The Psychology of Music. See chapter 14, on perfor-mance.
Kopiez, R. (2002). Making music and making sense through music. In R. Colwell &
C. Richardson (Eds.), The New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning (pp. 522–541). Coding and decoding of musical expression, includes
the sides of listener and performer.
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I
n this chapter, we discuss sight-reading, playing by ear, and recalling of memorized performance, because all three skills rely on our abil-ity to store and retrieve information from memory, albeit in different ways. In classical music learning, reading music plays a role for sight-reading and pro-vides a basis for acquiring new repertoire that will be performed from memory later. In jazz or popular music genres, as well as in most non-Western cultures, music is often handed down in oral traditions that by definition rely exclusively on memory.Playing by ear and sight-reading both occur in the learning of a piece, whereas performance from memory follows later. Compared with sight-reading, playing from memory conjures for the listener the illusion that the performer owns the piece. Yet the demands with regard to perfection differ in many respects.
When sight-reading, the musician can get away with some mistakes and a rather sketchy interpretation, whereas a memorized performance usually is note-perfect and conveys a unique interpretation. In sight-reading, which often takes place in the context of accompanying, the specific preparation for the performance is minimal, if not absent. Thus sight-reading happens “online,” a fact that the per-former has to cope with by using appropriate strategies. In contrast, memorized performances are extensively rehearsed “offline,” allowing the performer more leisure to optimize the performance.
In Western music history, notation emerged with the advent of polyphony and the need for different singers or musicians to coordinate (see Sadie, 2001,
“Notation”). Useful graphical representations of music have existed since an-tiquity and functioned as more or less precise memory cues. A common exam-ple may be tabulatures, that is, graphical notation that captures movements or hand positions and that were used for lute, guitar, or Chinese zither music. Our current music notation developed in the sixteenth century and was also used to
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