Performance as Experience: the problem of assessment criteria

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Performance Criteria ◽  
Assessment Criteria ◽  
Subjective Response ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Conceptual Thought ◽  
Performed Music ◽  
Aesthetic Values

Examination criteria, as distinct from guidelines regulating content and presentation, are problematic as applied to musical performance. Given the epistemological gap between musical and conceptual thought, forms of words are not readily available to distinguish objectively between the good and the mediocre performance. Criteria need therefore to be designed to complement the examiner's subjective response rather than substitute for it, and analytical concepts prove to be less reliable than ‘aesthetic terms’ (Sibley). In the context of Western art-music, the ‘good’ musical performance will be one that proposes its own ‘possible world’ (Bruner), situated within the larger ‘world’ of culturally contingent aesthetic values. Aesthetic terms provide the best means we have of access to the experiential world of performed music.

Marrying Past, Present, and Future

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Merchant
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Wedding Music ◽  
Musical Genres

This chapter examines the ways in which musicians cross the four musical genres in Uzbekistan: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. Most of the women interviewed for this book interacted with all four genres at some point, and most have strong opinions about each type of practice. The diversity of styles of music present in events associated with Uzbek weddings and the ubiquity of weddings means that they act as unifiers for Tashkenters across disciplinary divides. The chapter first provides an overview of the importance of wedding music throughout Central Asia before discussing the significance of musical performance at weddings. It shows that wedding music is a vital part of the musical economy in Tashkent and is one that involves a wide range of musical styles, including most of those institutionalized in the Uzbek State Conservatory.

scholarly journals “Re-narrating” Disability through Musical Performance

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Sunandan Honisch
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Physical Difference ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
The Impact

The combination of disability and music performance engages two principal dimensions: the reality of living and functioning as a musician with an impairment (lived experience), and the outside perceptions of that reality which intrude upon an audience’s experience of, and response to a musical performance. In recognition of the fact that these two aspects of disability affect both performer and audience in numerous complex ways, this paper addresses both of these dimensions in turn, and then examines how they intersect in the context of a live musical performance. The central purpose of this paper, then, is to elucidate the dialectical relationship between the lived reality of being a visibly impaired musician, and external views of that reality. I shall argue that the presence of visible physical difference in the context of a Western art music performance disrupts conventional binary oppositions between ability and disability, and as such opens up a space for both performers and audiences within which they can re-think their relationships to, and interactions with, people whose lived experiences sometimes may be very different from their own. To support this project, I draw upon Henri Giroux’s conception of culture as “the primary sphere in which individuals, groups, and institutions engage in the art of translating the diverse and multiple relations that mediate between private life and public concerns.” Following Giroux’s assertion that “private issues” connect with “larger social conditions” (".fn_cite($giroux_2004).", 62), I explore the relationship between the private experience of physical impairment, and the impact of physical difference on society in general and musical performance in particular, by using my own experiences as a musician with physical impairments as a point of reference.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Tiki Taane’s With Strings Attached: Alive & Orchestrated and postcolonial identity politics in New Zealand

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oli Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Performance Group ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Television Documentary

This chapter explores how the New Zealand popular music artist Tiki Taane subverts dominant representational practices concerning New Zealand cultural identity by juxtaposing musical ensembles, one a ‘colonial’ orchestra, the other a distinctively Māori (indigenous New Zealand) kapa haka performance group, in his With Strings Attached: Alive & Orchestrated album and television documentary, released in 2014. Through this collaboration, Tiki reframes the colonial experience as an amalgam of reappropriated cultural signifiers that enraptures those that identify with colonization and colonizing experiences, and in doing so, expresses a form of authorial agency. The context of Tiki’s subversive approach is contextualized by examining postcolonial representational practices surrounding Māori culture and orchestral hybrids in the western art music tradition, and through a discussion about the ways the performance practice called kapa haka is represented through existing scholarly studies of Māori music.

THE NON-CANONIC STATUS OF MOZART’S CANONS

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEAL ZASLAW
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Circle Of Friends ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Peculiar Nature

Mozart's canons are rather inadequately represented in the Köchel catalogue and the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. The same may be said about other music for his immediate circle of friends, colleagues and patrons, as well as his dance music and his contributions to pasticcios. Neglect of these ‘minor’ genres perhaps arises at least in part from anachronistic paradigms, for instance ‘masterpieces for posterity’. And the canons suffer additionally from the peculiar nature of their sources and transmission, from uncertainty about the position of canons in the ‘canon’ of Western art music and probably also from embarrassment over some of Mozart’s texts. Mozart’s canons have been studied not only less often than his operatic, church, chamber and orchestral music, but also less well.

Hearing Film Music Topics outside the Movie Theatre

2021 ◽  
pp. 548-574
Author(s):  
Janet Bourne
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Extraction Method ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Movie Theatre

This chapter describes a cognitively informed framework based on analogy for theorizing cinematic listening; in this case, it tests the hypothesis that contemporary listeners might use associations learned from film music topics to make sense of western art music (WAM). Using the pastoral topic as a case study, a corpus of film scores from 1980–2014 determines common associations for this topic based on imagery, emotion, and narrative contexts. Then, the chapter outlines potential narratives a modern moviegoer might make by listening “cinematically” to a Sibelius movement. The hypothesis is empirically tested through an experiment where participants record their imagined narratives and images while listening to WAM and film music. The meaning extraction method, a statistical analysis for identifying associational themes, is used to analyze people’s responses.

Landmarks in the Study of Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Nettl
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
Single Model ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Music Making ◽  
History Of

Historically, research on improvisation has been related to the discovery of non-Western musics, folk music, and jazz, and has depended on the development of recording techniques for its principal kinds of data. The concept of improvisation is not unitary, but includes many vastly different kinds of un-notated music-making, which casts some doubt on the efficacy of the term itself. In the history of Western art music, improvisation was originally ignored or seen as craft rather than art, but since ca. 1980 it has occupied increased attention. The association of improvisation with oral transmission has sometimes been misunderstood. The most successful standard research study has been the comparison of performances based on a single model, for example, raga in India, maqam and dastgah in the Middle East, or a series of chord changes or a tune in jazz. Improvisation as a concept—for example, as a metaphor of freedom—has been important in recent research.

scholarly journals Evolving Musical Sight Reading Exercises Using Expert Models

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Pierce ◽  
Tim Hendtlass ◽  
Anthony Bartel ◽  
Clinton J. Woodward
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Algorithm ◽  
Reading Skills ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Resource Constraint ◽  
Difficulty Level ◽  
Sight Reading ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Expert Models

Sight reading skills are widely considered to be crucial for all musicians. However, given that sight reading involves playing sheet music without having seen it before, once an exercise has been completed by a student it can no longer be used as a sight reading exercise for them. In this paper we present a novel evolutionary algorithm for generating musical sight reading exercises in the Western art music tradition. Using models based on expert examples, the algorithm generates material suitable for practice which is both technically appropriate and aesthetically pleasing with respect to an instrument and difficulty level. This overcomes the resource constraint in using traditional practice exercises, which are exhausted quickly by students and teachers due to their limited quantity.

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