Musical Performance and Creativity

Question 1

1. What value has Musical Notation?

Answer 1

If music is not retained by man’s memory, it is lost, since it cannot be written down’

Bishop of Seville: 7th century

For most of man’s history and in many cultures today music is not written down

Question 2

2. Who introduced notation in the 11th century?

Answer 2

Guido of Arezzo (11th century) in Italy perfected a system of using up to four horizontal lines, with notes marke

Question 3

3. Who introduced rhythmic notation?

Answer 3

In his Art of Measurable Music, Franco of Cologne (1200) distinguishing four lengths of notes that correspond to the modern semibreve, minim, crotchet & quaver.

So composers were now able to indicate precise tones and rhythms but marks of expression came much later

Question 4

4. What do modern composers use to help give musicians instructions?

Answer 4

Modern day composers may give very detailed and explicit instruction on how they want performers to play their pieces

These fine details about expression in compositions are referred to as the microstructure

This does not allow much freedom in musical playing.

Question 5

5. What genres of music allow for more creative expression by musicians?

Answer 5

Performing musicians working in other genres may have more freedom of expression such as jazz**. **

Distinction between composer and musician is not as well defined as in classical.

performer is less well defined for some musical genres

Question 6

6. What is improvisation?

Answer 6

• Improvising musicians produce novel musical utterances in real time
• Blacking (1976) made parallels between musical improvisation and verbal production
• Native speakers of a language produce new utterances easily and fluently

Question 7

7. Is performing live music a demanding task?

Answer 7

For the improvising musician interactions between other musicians and with the audience are extremely demanding

“Flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)

concept of optimal creativity and experience

Question 8

8. What did Ashley 2009 state?

Answer 8

“The use of one’s abilities inside the constraints of one’s body and its limits in performance, the timing of one’s actions with external events, and retrieving and utilizing one’s knowledge promptly in improvisation provide a powerful framework for a sense of personal achievement”

**(Ashley, 2009) **

Question 9

9. Constraints on improvising musicians

Answer 9

Composers can draft and redraft scores

Improvising is more immediate. Like speech production but with the added difficulty of producing meaningful and interesting sounds in concert with other people (people don’t all talk together)

Question 10

10. Timing constraints are important state why.

Answer 10

“Music is the art that defines Man’s relationship to time”

Stravinsky

When improvising with others timing is a

critical concern, there is little margin for error

Question 11

11. Name some knowledge constraints

Answer 11

Improvising musicians rely on procedural (know-how-to do it – but outside of consciousness) knowledge rather than declarative (consciously known) knowledge

Declarative knowledge is accessed more slowly than procedural knowledge because it is interpreted before being used

Procedural knowledge includes information about musical structure that enables performers to produce coherent and stylistically appropriate musical output in- the-moment

Question 12

12. What did Johnson-Laid state about the consciousness of playing music.

Answer 12

It is difficult for improviser’s to explain how they do what they do

“Musicians can articulate only a limited answer, because the underlying mental processes are largely unconscious. If you ask yourself how you are able to speak a sequence of English sentences that make sense, then you will find that you are consciously aware of only the tip of the process

Johnson-Laird (2002)

Question 13

13. What is the nature of the information that improvisers are able to access?

Answer 13

Licks, Crips & Schemas can be thought of as recurring turns of phrase and are important in improvisation (Berliner, 1994)

Information about pitch organisation serves as a vocabulary or lexicon from which improvisers can select and on which transformations may be effected.

Question 14

14. What di Jarvinen (1995) study?

Answer 14

Carried out an in-depth analysis of improvised Saxophone solos by Charlie Parker and found that the pitch content of his improvisations reflected the principles of tonal organisation found in other musical repertoires

The broad statistical properties of tonality serve to guide the improviser at a deep structural level

Question 15

15. Steadman (1984) studied underlying harmonic prgressions explain this.

Answer 15

He has looked at how improvisers generate new versions of harmonic progressions from simpler underlying prototypes

He proposes a grammar of blues chord progressions which involves the use of typical transformation rules that allow simple progressions to be elaborated, recursively, into increasingly complex stylistically appropriate sequences.

Question 16

16. What did Friberg and Sundstorm (2002) show with Time and Rhythm?

Answer 16

Friberg & Sundstrom, (2002) showed that improvisers have extremely fine control of timing and great accuracy

These are constrained by limits in what the body can do

Question 17

17. What models did Toiviainen (1995) use?

Answer 17

Used computation models of neural networks to explore tonal and rhythmic organisation of improvisations

She found that improvisers used centrally important “target notes” and highlighted the subtle interplay between pitch and rhythm in the improvisations

Question 18

18. What three key interactions between improvisors did Sawyer note?

Answer 18

Sawyer (1999, 2003, 2006) likened improvising to theatre. He identified three main elements

1) Improvisation: production of new ideas on the spot
2) Collaboration: locates creativity not in any one person but in the group as a whole
3) Emergence: “whole is greater than the parts” stresses dynamic qualities of unfolding musical events that are difficult to predict in time

Communal “flow”

Question 19

19. What did Seddon (2005) investigate?

Answer 19

Investigated verbal and non-verbal communication between student improvisers and proposed that empathetic attunement and creativity are key elements in successful group improvisation

Question 20

20. What is creativity?

Answer 20

“Creativity involves the development of a novel product, idea, or problem solution that is of value to the individual and/or the larger social group”

**Hennessey & Amabile, 2009 **

Question 21

21. Describe **Guildford’s tests of creativity (1967) **

Answer 21

Plot Titles, where participants are given the plot of a story and asked to write original titles.

Quick Responses is a word-association test scored for uncommonness.

Figure Concepts, where participants were given simple drawings of objects and individuals and asked to find qualities or features that are common by two or more drawings; these were scored for uncommonness.

Question 22

22. Who stated Guildford’s tests of creativity (1967) was inefficient?

Answer 22

Robert Sternberg

Claimed that this approach falls “short of distinguishing imagination from fantasy, relevant from irrelevant material, and contextually valid from rambling associations”.

Question 23

**23. Describe the Torrence test **of Creative Thinking (1966) **

Answer 23

Fluency – The total number of interpretable, meaningful and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.

Originality – The statistical rarity of the

responses among the test subjects.

Elaboration – The amount of detail in the responses.

Question 24

24. Do divergent-thinking tests measure creativity in the individual?

Answer 24

Insights from neuroscience suggests that a high degree of parallel processing involved in high level creativity (Miller 2007)

Question 25

25.

State some individual differences between performers

Answer 25

• Experiential differences
• Communicative intentions
• Intellectual and emotional differences
• Gender differences
• Cultural differences (familiarity with musical styles)
• Differences in technical capacities

Despite these individual differences musicians from the same traditions utilise many of the same expressive gestures. So stylistic traditions influence musical performance

The success or failure of any given performance reflects, in part, the musical capacities/skills of the performer

Question 26

26.

Musical communication is important state why.

Answer 26

• Research shows that good performances highlight the structural, stylistic and emotional aspects of the music
• Performers use expression both intentionally and unconsciously
• When they are asked to give “flat” performances they cannot completely eliminate expression (Gabrielsson, 1974; Palmer, 1989)

Question 27

27.

Timing and loudness used as expressive cues to signal important musical events

Answer 27

• Thomson & Cuddy (1997). Listeners heard musical segments played by a musician or generated on a computer. The were told to indicate whether or not they heard a change of key
• Expressive actions (timing and loudness manipulations) in the musician’s segments marked the key changes
• Listeners perception of key changes were influenced by these

Question 28

28. Name expressive manipulations of other aspects of music

Answer 28

Meter

• Strong beats tend to be emphasized in performance by lengthened durations and late onsets **(Palmer & Kelly, 1992) **

Phrasing

• Performers often “pull out” the duration of the notes (e.g. so notes are longer than notated) and increase levels of loudness within phrases
• They may then make a slight pause before beginning the next phrase
• The extent of the slowing down depends on the importance of the phrase in the overall structure of the piece.
• The more important the phrase is structurally the more likely it is to be lengthened (Todd, 1985; Shaffer & Todd, 1987)

Question 29

29. What did Palmer (1989) show?

Answer 29

• Palmer (1989) showed that performers play the melody line slightly before the accompaniment (20msec)
• This makes the melody stand out from its accompaniment

Question 30

30.

**Sundberg et al., (1983;1989) **Outlined performance rules to describe expressive actions in Western Music what were they?

Answer 30

Phrase arch rule: phrases are slow and soft at the beginning, fast and loud in the middle, and slow and soft at the end

Final Ritardando rule: how to slow down at the end of a piece

Melodic and harmonic change: changes in loudness and duration that depend on tonal stability

Research shows that computer generated melodies sound more musical when they adopt these rules

Duration contrast rule: slightly lengthen notes within phrases

Faster uphill rule: tempo increases as tones get higher and decreases as tones get lower

Punctuation rule: slight pauses between tones or phrases to segment the music and draw attention to particular features

Question 31

31. Sources of Expressivity in Performance
    * *Juslin (2003) GERM** model

Answer 31

G Generative rules: timing, dynamics & articulation highlight groups and metrical accent and harmonic structure

E Emotional Expression: manipulation of overall features (e.g. tempo) enables performer to give the same piece a different emotional character

R Random Fluctuations: human limitations in motor precision

M Motion Principles: Tempo changes follow patterns of human movement in order to obtain a pleasing

S shape Stylistic Unexpectedness: Deliberate deviations from stylistic conventions adds unpredictability and creates tension

Question 32

32. What is the GERM model based on?

Answer 32

Model based on the idea that musical expressivity is a multidimentional phenomenon that can be decomposed into the sub-components included in the model

Expressive devises serve to elucidate the musical structure of the composition to the listener.

But for the performing musician the need to communicate emotions is very salient

Question 33

33. What questions did Lindstrom et al., (2003) ask?

Answer 33

They asked English, Italian and Swedish conservatory students “In your view,, what does it mean to play expressively?”

Of those asked 44% said “communicating emotions” and 16% said “playing with feeling” 34% said “conveying the structure”

83% reported that they consciously tried to convey specific emotions in their performances “always” or “often”

Question 34

34. Can musical structure and musical emotions be fully understood in isolation?

Answer 34

Researchers sometimes assume that musical structure and musical emotions can be treated as separate phenomenon

But findings like those of Lindstom et al., are consistent with the belief, inherent in the writings of Mayer and Huron’s ITPRA model, that structure and emotions in music cannot really be considered or understood in isolation

Question 35

35. What is related to creativity?

Answer 35

Related to ideas about creativy is the notion of Talent

But Sloboda, Davidson & Howe (1994) suggest that reliance on a talent explanation for musical achievement results in a failure to acknowledge the crucial role of training and experience

Question 36

36. What did Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993) discover about proficient musicians?

Answer 36

Highly proficient musicians spent approximately twice as much time practising as moderately proficient musicians

Sloboda, et al., 1994; 1996

Looked at practise schedules for musicians with 5 different levels of musical proficiency

High- achievers spent as much as eight

times more time practising that lower achievers

Question 37

37. Sloboda, et al., 1994; 1996 looked at what schedules?

Answer 37

Looked at practise schedules for musicians with 5 different levels of musical proficiency

High- achievers spent as much as **eight **times more time practising that lower achievers

1) Parents of low achievers told child to “go and practise”. Parents of high achievers attended the music lessons and supervised the practise
2) High achievers became increasingly motivated to develop their musical skills during the adolescent period

Question 38

38. Research has made a very powerful case for the importance of practise.

But there are examples of individuals whose musical excellence cannot be explained by a mass practise model, name some.

Answer 38

Musical prodigies

If skills are on-line at very early stages of development they cannot simply reflect practise

Musical savants

Skills are extraordinary when considered in the context of their intellectual and other disabilities

They often cannot profit from formal teaching and appear to learn a great deal about music just by listening

Question 39

39. What haveempirical studies into musical savants revealed?

Answer 39

• Absolute pitch
• Exceptional musical memory
• Improvisation abilities
• Awareness of tonal structure
• Their skills DO NOT rely on rote memory

Question 40

40. Describe a musical Transposition Study with a Blind Musician with Autism (GN)

Answer 40

GN and 9 controls leanet a simple melody in C major.

One week later the participants were asked to:

1) Play the piece from memory
2) Transpose the piece in the keys of G, D, A, E, B, F#, C# maj

Playing the peice back: no difference

Transposing: GN was far superior especially keys with more black notes.

Inter-onset times across all transpositions

Question 41

41. Many of the most important early jazz musicians (e.g. Louis Armstrong) were self-taught. What was his story?

Answer 41

Study into Armstrong (Collier, 1983) highlighted factors implicated in his extraordinary abilities

Street performer from a young age. Extensive “ear” training.

1) Armstrong grew up in a very rich musical environment
2) Early systematic exploration of a performance medium (voice)
3) He had a lot of freedom to explore and experiment without negative consequences
4) No distinction between practise and performance
5) Strong motivation to engage in music
6) Graded series of musical opportunities and challenges

(Sloboda, 2005)