Performance style

Since the overarching goal of this research is to detect changes in expressive performing style over the half-century commencing 1951 to 2013, it is necessary to discuss the

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meaning of performing style and how the model will set about detecting it. In the search to explicitly detect expressive styling and compare performances, the model must be capable of handling a variety of characteristics such as tempo, phrasing/shaping, pitch and loudness, as well as instrument-specific characteristics (even beyond piano and violin) that include vibrato, pedalling, tonguing and fingering. Encompassing the totality of such characteristics in an analytical model is a worthy goal, even if it is difficult to agree how variables of performance intensity might operate in circumstances where listeners’ feelings were unclear, at least on early experiences of unfamiliar music. Typical expressive gestures that might otherwise make sense in the context of tonal music may be judged differently when considering non-tonal music, not least

Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions. Such gestures may appear irrelevant or even inappropriate to many listeners who may be confused by the apparent non-existence of any specific key. Schoenberg preferred the term pantonality, comprising all keys. He did not set out to obliterate key but to treat the twelve tones as equally important. His re-orderings of the row were systematic, developed as part of his overall theories of variation and derived from the nineteenth-century idea of ‘motive as the generator of larger formal structures’, something with which Schoenberg was very familiar in the music of Wagner and Mahler.16 _{Babbitt can be seen to support the view that the tone}

row is ‘far more importantly viewed as an ordering than … ultimate chromaticism’.17

Voice-leading, for Schoenberg, operated within the context of his ideals of harmonic progression.

Most (successful) performers adhere to the macro elements of a score, at least where a composer’s intentions are both known and unambiguous. Widmer and Goebbl note the evidence for strong similarities between performances of Schumann’s Träumerei18_:

pianists more or less observed the major ritardandi in the piece and clearly expressed the large-scale phrase structure of the piece through their timing – the differences between the pianists increased at lower levels of the structural hierarchy. A statistical analysis revealed a number of characteristic and distinctive phrasing behaviours, some of which could be associated (in a statistical sense) with certain pianists.19

16 _{Norton Dudeque, Music Theory and Analysis in the Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)}

(Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 13.

17 _{Milton Babbitt, ‘My Vienna Triangle’, in Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. by Stephen Peles and}

others (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 475.

18 _{Träumerei is from Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Op. 7.} 19 _{Widmer and Goebbl, Ibid., 210.}

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The same authors note a previous conference paper by Goebbl et al. that used performances of Chopin by several pianists to reveal individual, yet characteristic ‘performance strategies’.20

In attempting to detect differences in interpretations, a model must be capable of looking at the totality of each performance but provide detailed information at any arbitrarily lower level. Musical performance style is an aggregation of the

characteristics of performance: not so much individual performances but a class of performances that may belong to a period in time, to a socio-cultural framework, a performing school, or even a single performer. In totality, a performance style might include relationship to an audience and its involvement, whether music is scored, improvisation, whether the musicians belong to an elite social grouping, specific dress conventions, or whether music is performed for a specific ritual. The Saxify model provides for characteristics that can be measured and, if necessary, interpolated, ranked and compared. The present research is not concerned with non-aural aspects of

performance and makes no attempt to incorporate this in the model.

It is worthwhile to consider some new variable being added to the model. Keyboard articulation may appear to be a straightforward legato versus staccato concept. Experienced players know there may be a huge range of ways to actually articulate a note on a piano in a nuanced way. It is conceptually possible to define a range of values, for example, the 1-10 range of integers, that represent a spectrum ranging from fully

legato at one end to highly-emphasized staccato at the other. In this way, every note (or

beat) of a performance could have an attached articulation score that acts as a

measurement of a performance value, just as Ornoy listened intently to many recordings of Bach’s G minor Adagio for Solo Violin in an attempt to classify players on a range of such characteristics.21 _{He concluded that the younger Galamian/American school of}

violinists made significantly more varied use of articulation. The benefit of a computer- assisted approach is to take more of the data-collection burden at the front end and, by

20 _{Widmer and Goebbl, Ibid., 211. See also Werner Goebl, Elias Pampalk, and Gerhard Widmer,}

‘Exploring Expressive Performance Trajectories: Six Famous Pianists Play Six Chopin Pieces’, in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC’04), (presented at the 8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC’04), Evanston, Illinois, 2004).

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providing highly-detailed information on what is going on in a performance, facilitate MPS researchers to apply consistent analysis.