Robert Winter
Music Theory as Performative Listening
For virtually the entire run of both its ancient and modern incarnations, the field of music theory has been cultivated in almost complete silence. This seems odd for a medium whose very oxygen would seem to be the making of sounds. Conversely, the central European performance tradition has been transmitted with scarcely any reference to the major landmarks of modern music theory, beginning with A.B. Marx in the 1840s and extending to Heinrich Schenker and his successors. This can be partly explained by the talismanic domination of print for the last 500 years. Yet given Schenker’s deep interest in Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, it seems appropriate to examine the analytical and performance traditions of one of the composer’s most elusive and transcendent creations: the second-movement Arietta to the Piano Sonata in C Minor, Op. 111 (1822).
Several decades ago I argued that surrounding this movement was a “silent performing tradition” whose origins are difficult to trace but which may have its roots in the earliest complete recording of Op. 111 by Artur Schnabel in 1932. Sorting out this tradition (taking into account several newer recordings) demands allegiance to matters both theoretical and performative, especially as they impact the notion of “the cosmic pulse.” Using new digital tools that cast scores in a new light, and drawing upon a recording of the author’s own live performance as well as those of other artists, this presentation attempts to build a bridge between space-oriented analysis and time-oriented performance.
Scholar/ pianist/ media author Robert Winter is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards, having authored or co-authored major publications and articles on composers such as Beethoven and Schubert, compositional process and performance practice. He has conducted numerous live performances and lectures covering a vast range of musical and cultural topics at orchestra and opera concerts, festivals, libraries and a host of colleges, universities, and schools of music. An articulate international spokesperson for the role of content and the arts in the digital world, Winter has worked closely with both Apple and Microsoft in developing their early multimedia platforms and strategies. Having been invited by Bob Stein of the Voyager Company in 1989 to produce its first original interactive software title - today widely regarded as the first commercial interactive publication - Winter’s subsequent programs have been widely acclaimed as milestones in multimedia publishing. Since his last visit to NAFA in October 2013, he has released for international sale Music in the Air – the product of a decade of development and the first completely online history of Western music, incorporating even more of the features and musical experiences for which he has become so well known.
Jonathan Dunsby
‘Performance and Musicians’
The generic question, whether musical performance needs research, has many significant, positive answers, and in my opinion few negative ones. However, it is certainly a stimulating question. It opens up, for example, the question of what we mean by “research,” which in the field of performance studies can cover many poles, from autoethnography of contemporaneous music-makers to the close structural analysis of music, from the vast fields of historiography to the crucial detail of organology. Ultimately, these are distinctions at least as old as Guido Adler’s famed, 1885 division of musicology into the historical and systematic; and I am not aware of compelling arguments that in our brave new intellectual and cultural world such an epistemological position has seen the need for change. The generic question also opens up potential inquiry into the many different binaries of musical performance, live or recorded, improvised or notated, even human or by artificial intelligence, and so on. In this presentation, I shall take as my starting point a recent book series, the ‘Studies in Musical Performances as Creative Practice’ from Oxford University Press, published in 2017 and 18. These 1,789 pages, by some 124 authors, can be seen as a decisive response to the question of the need for research in musical performance, but my focused question today is what kind of musicians those authors seek to represent, to study, to hold up as models, to anticipate in the future. While there is far more to be learned from these five volumes than I can hope to acknowledge on one occasion, they stimulate some central, potential issues—as I see them—for the future development of performance studies.
BA in music, First Class, Oxford University, aged 20; PhD in music theory, adviser Alexander Goehr, Leeds University, aged 23. Piano pupil of Dame Fanny Waterman; prizes in Geneva, Leeds, Munich competitions; winner of the Commonwealth Competition.
Articles and reviews published in journals including Circuit, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, Music and Letters, Music Theory Spectrum, Musicae Scientiae, The Musical Quarterly, 19th?Century Music, 20th-Century Music; articles on ‘memory’ and ‘performance’ in The New Grove; book chapters include music-analytical studies of Debussy, Schoenberg, Schumann; books include Performing Music: Shared Concerns (OUP, 1996) and Making Words Sing: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Song (CUP, 2004); co-author with Arnold Whittall of Music Analysis in Theory and Practice (Faber, 1986); translator from French of Jean-Jacques Nattiez, The Battle of Chronos and Orpheus: Studies in Applied Musical Semiology (OUP, 2004); co-editor with Jonathan Goldman of The Dawn of Music Semiology (University of Rochester, 2017) including chapter ‘Music Semiology in the Mind of the Musician’; co-translator from French of Pierre Boulez, Music Lessons (Faber, 2018).
Founding Editor of the journal Music Analysis (1982-6); Life President of the (UK) Society for Music Analysis; President, Music Theory Society of New York State, 2009-13.
Guest lectures including Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, France, Greece, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, in addition to frequent appearances in the UK and USA.
Appointments include King’s College London, University of Southern California, University of Reading; Visiting Fellow at Princeton (Harkness Fellow, 1976) and Oxford (New College, 1992); in 2006-7 Slee Professor of Music Theory, SUNY University at Buffalo; faculty, Eastman (2007-).
Felix Diergarten
“Ich grolle, ich grolle nicht”: On the Interrelationship of Musicology and Performance Practice
Musicology and performance practice are mutually interrelated. While it is obvious how research influences performance practices (through editions, commentaries, treatises, reviews, and so on), it is a more recent concept to acknowledge how traditions of performance practice influence musicological assessments of specific styles, composers, or pieces. Following Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s idea that “much of what is said about pieces is actually said about performances of pieces” I will trace the performance history of Robert Schumann’s song “Ich grolle nicht” from the earliest recordings to present day. Changing performance traditions, I will argue, have altered the understanding of this song by musicologists in a fundamental way. Research and performance practice form a vicious circle: musicologists describe what they hear, while performers feel encouraged by descriptions of what they do. To escape this vicious circle, both musicologists and musicians need to mind the gap between notation und sounding realization—that is, they need to be mindful of the historicity of their own understanding of musical notation and of its possible realizations in sound. One might consider this the actual goal of “historically informed” performance practice.
Felix Diergarten obtained diplomas in conducting and music theory in Dresden, where he studied with Ludwig Holtmeier and Clemens Kühn and went on to study "Theorie der Alten Musik" at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis with Markus Jans. He holds a Dr.phil. from Dresden Hochschule für Musik "Carl Maria von Weber" where he wrote a dissertation on Haydn. At the University of Würzburg his Habilitation thesis on French Fourteenth-Century song was accepted in 2017. He was active as repetiteur, assistant-conductor and conductor at various theatres, including the Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam and the S?chsische Staatsoper Dresden. He received sholarships from "Cusanuswerk" and the "Richard-Wagner-Verband". From 2009 to 2016 he taught "Satzlehre" and "Theorie der Alten Musik" (music theory, history of theory and analysis) at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. Since 2016 he is professor for Music Theory and Musicology in Freiburg. He was Guest Faculty Member of the International Orpheus Academy for Music & Theory 2013 at the Orpheus Instituut in Gent (Belgium). More information:
https://www.mh-freiburg.de/en/faculty/person/details/diergarten/
Antonio Baldassarre
(Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland)
Changing Times: The Evolution of the Classical Music Critic Persona
“From my youth onward, I have always considered the occupation of the music critics of a distinguished, large paper as the most desirable alongside a professorship.” This statement, by the highly reputed yet also widely dreaded nineteenth-century Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), not only voices his vocation but also conveys the high reputation music criticism enjoyed in the nineteenth century - as both a force of fostering public education, and as a manifestation of the emancipated and erudite bourgeois layman. Since those days, the explicit influence and obvious presence of criticism in musical life has undergone significant vicissitudes. The shift concerning the role and status of music critique became evident in interviews we ran in 2016 with fourteen professional critics from the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. In those interviews, critics offered their perspectives on the function and significance of their writing, expressing concerns for the future of their profession and of cultural criticism in general. Taking a transdisciplinary approach, combining hermeneutic with empirical content analysis of the interview data, the keynote will provide insights into the evolution of the critic’s self-concept from the late nineteenth century to the present daytoday.
Antonio Baldassarre is Vice Dean, Professor and Head of Research and Development of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Music. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Zurich, and has held positions as Research Fellow, Lecturer, and Visiting Professor, at the Research Center for Music Iconography at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, U.S.A., the universities of Basel and Zurich, Switzerland, Universit?t für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Austria, the Facultad de Música of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. He is a Board Member of numerous national and international scientific and academic societies, including his role as President of Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM), and Member of the Directorium of the International Musicological Society. He has extensively researched and published on topics of music history, music historiography, the social and cultural history of music, as well as music iconography, visual culture, and performance studies.
Yoshitaka Nakajima中岛祥好
(Kyushu University, Japan)
Temporal Resolution Needed for Auditory Communication: Measurement With Mosaic Speech
Temporal resolution needed for Japanese speech communication was measured. A newexperimental paradigm that can reflflect the spectro-temporal resolution necessary forhealthy listeners to perceive speech is introduced. As a fifirst step, we report listeners’intelligibility scores of Japanese speech with a systematically degraded temporalresolution, so-called “mosaic speech”: speech mosaicized in the coordinates of timeand frequency. The results of two experiments show that mosaic speech cut into shortstatic segments was almost perfectly intelligible with a temporal resolution of 40 msor fifiner. Intelligibility dropped for a temporal resolution of 80 ms, but was still around50%-correct level. The data are in line with previous results showing that speech signalsseparated into short temporal segments of <100 ms can be remarkably robust in termsof linguistic-content perception against drastic manipulations in each segment, such aspartial signal omission or temporal reversal. The human perceptual system thus canextract meaning from unexpectedly rough temporal information in speech. The processresembles that of the visual system stringing together static movie frames of ～40 ms intovivid motion.
Keywords: speech, spectro-temporal resolution, intelligibility, mosaic, movie frames
Yoshitaka Nakajima is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Design, Kyushu University, and teaches general psychology, auditory psychology, time perception, applied musicology, scientific English, etc. He graduated in psychology from the University of Tokyo in 1978, and received a PhD in design at the Kyushu Institute of Design in 1999. His research fields include auditory perception, time perception, music perception, phonology, and speech signal processing. He is especially interested in auditory illusions, rhythm perception, and perception of speech syllables. He has been principal investigator of three large Grants-in-Aid of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He has been founding director of the Research Center for Applied Perceptual Science, Faculty of Design, Kyushu University, since 2013. He has supervised 14 PhD students including two current students (in auditory psychology, music psychology, and applied linguistics) since 2000 in the Kyushu Institute of Design and Kyushu University (they merged in 2003). He has supervised nine postdoctoral researchers since 2003. He is the principal inventor of four registered and two applied patents in Japan related to speech signal processing, and now works to commercialize these technologies. He read Chuang-Tzu when he was a student, and has been interested in Chinese culture since then.
John Rink
(University of Cambridge)
‘Between practice and theory: performance studies and/as artistic research’
Since 2000 the amount of work undertaken in the field of musical performance studies has grown exponentially. This paper reflects on what has been achieved over the last two decades and where performance studies might head in the future. It also highlights certain frictions with and within the ‘artistic research’ community, which at times has pursued conflicting agendas. One aim of the paper is therefore to generate greater synergy within this broad area of research and to find a way out of the corner into which some have painted themselves. A case study focusing on a singular performance by the pianist Alfred Brendel is presented with the particular purpose of demonstrating how the separation sometimes posited in the literature between ‘academic researchers’ and ‘artist researchers’ might be challenged or overcome. Consideration is also given to what musical performance studies and artistic research offer performers themselves in terms of theoretical insight on the one hand and artistic inspiration on the other.
John Rink is Professor of Musical Performance Studies in the Cambridge Faculty of Music, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at St John's College. He studied at Princeton University, King's College London, and the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral research was on the evolution of tonal structure in Chopin's early music and its relation to improvisation. He also holds the Concert Recital Diploma and Premier Prix in piano from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He specialises in the fields of performance studies, theory and analysis, and nineteenth-century studies, and has published six books with Cambridge University Press, including The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (1995), Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997), Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (2002), and Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (with Christophe Grabowski; 2010). He is a co-editor of Chopin Studies 2 (with Jim Samson; 2004) and the Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (with Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Eric Clarke; 2009); he is also General Editor of the five-book series Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which Oxford University Press will publish in 2017. He co-edited one of the books - Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance - in collaboration with Helena Gaunt and Aaron Williamon.
John Rink directed the ￡2.1 million AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which was based at the University of Cambridge from 2009 to 2015 in partnership with King's College London, the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London, and in association with the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He currently directs the Cambridge Centre for Musical Performance Studies, which was launched at the University of Cambridge in 2015. He is one of four Series Editors of The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition, and he directs two other research projects: Chopin's First Editions Online (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) and Online Chopin Variorum Edition (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). He was also Principal Investigator of the project 'Cross-cultural perspectives on the creative development of choirs and choral conductors', which was pursued in collaboration with the Universidade de S?o Paulo and funded by the British Academy. He was an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and he chaired the Steering Committees of the AHRC's 'Beyond Text' and 'Landscape and Environment' Strategic Programmes; he also served on the AHRC's Advisory Board and chaired the Science in Culture Advisory Group. He sits on the editorial board of Music & Letters and Musicologist; is on the Advisory Panels of Music Analysis, the Institute of Musical Research, and several UK research projects; and has been a member of the AHRC's Peer Review College. He holds several honorary appointments, including Visiting Professor in the Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London; Guest Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music; Visiting Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London; and Guest Professor, Shanghai Normal University. In 2012-13 he was Ong Teng Cheong Visiting Professor in Music at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore. He was a member of the jury of the XVII International Chopin Competition held in October 2015 in Warsaw. In 2017 he was invited to join the Society for Musicology in Ireland as a Corresponding Member. He also became Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge in 2017.
Dorottya Fabian
(UNSW, Australia)
Qualitative Measurement of Individual Difference in Performances of J.S. Bach’s Music: A model
Musical performance has been researched intensively and extensively during the past 30-40 years from a variety of angles. Historical musicologists have been interested primarily in studying stylistic changes over time as evidenced on sound recordings. They have established certain trends and theorized reasons for these trends. What has been somewhat neglected is the study of individual difference and specific artistic signatures. In this paper I present a theoretical framework and model for such investigations in the future.
To identify individual differences an analyst has to consider three basic aspects: 1) the salient characteristics of a single person; 2) whether an individual is more similar to him/herself over time and across situations than to others; 3) whether the variation within an individual is less than that between people in general. Therefore, the study of individual artistic signatures requires establishing norms and then ascertaining the degree of difference across relevant parameters. I propose to illustrate how this works through identifying individual differences of performances of J. S. Bach’s music. The model is based on repeated focussed listening and subjective but systematic rating of performance parameters. The norm of these parameters is established through a review of performance practice literature. The results are visualised in “radar” charts and show clear differences among contemporary individual violinists reflecting trajectories of tradition and innovation (e.g. Mullova, Tetzlaff, Kremer, Kuijken, Montanari, etc.) in performances of Bach’s Solos for violin.
“My research focuses on changes in interpretations of Western Classical (concert) music as evidenced on commercial sound recordings. I study both the technical and expressive dimensions of interpretations and focus primarily on string, vocal and keyboard players and repertoires. I'm also interested in audience response, how and why taste and aesthetic preferences change, and the role of culture in all this. My approach embraces both quantitative, experimental and qualitative, empirical methods of investigation.”
She is regularly invited to serve on review panels of tertiary institutions offering degrees in music; to assess dissertations, grant and fellowship applications, to review journal articles and conference submissions and to be on scientific and organizing committees of international music performance and music psychology conferences. In September 2015 she waas elected to the editorial board of Musicae Scientiae for a 3-year term. She has been playing a key role in the activities of the Musicological Society of Australia's Sydney Chapter, formerly as chapter Convenor and more recently as mentor of the annual student presentations day and the annual staff symposium day.
Dorottya Fabian's main teaching area is musicology. In the undergraduate program she is in charge of courses in European music history focusing on the 18th-19th centuries, and of research methods and honours preparatory classes. Currrently she teaches the upper-level core courses in history and culture of music, the gateway course in the Music Inquiry stream of the BMus degree and contributes to the courses in creative practice / performance. Over the years she has taught aural development at all levels, harmony, analysis, performance practice, keyboard studies and orchestration as well, and has coached many chamber ensembles, including the Handbell group.
Ariane Je?ulat
(Universit?t der Künste Berlin, Germany)
Super librum cantare - Mutual dependencies between performance practice and counterpoint theory in 16th century polyphonic vocal music
Music-theoretical sources for music of the 16th century are abundant and well documented. The treatises deal with questions of the tone system, the organization of church-tonal modes, vocal practice, tuning and temperament theory and, of course, counterpoint. In relevant, well handed down and excellently edited writings such as the “Liber de arte contrapuncti” by Johannes Tinctoris (14, it is noticeable, however, that there seem to exist some gaps in the theory of counterpoint: There is a lacuna between very basic and simple rules in the contrapunctus simples note-against-note (“punctus contra punctum”) and extremely elaborate musical examples, which is hardly commented on in the instructions of the textbook. Therefore, today's research is concerned with the question of how such textbooks were used and how these examples could eventually become instructive.
While the intensive music-theoretical study of these Renaissance sources between 1960 and 1985, which began with the generation around Carl Dahlhaus and Claude V. Palisca, sought above all to correct Hugo Riemann's historical-philosophical interpretation of the emergence of harmonic tonality, current scientific approaches are more concerned with closing this gap between theory and performance practice by using practical methods to reconstruct which didactics and artistic practice could mediate between the very simple set of rules and the complex polyphony. The sometimes very detailed instructions from the music theory of the late 16th century and the 17th century on the "super librum cantare", i.e. the joint improvisation of polyphonic chants to only one given voice, is a valuable source of information for scholars since it not only confirms and corrects known rules and regulations, but also opens up new perspectives as to how such examples of music in the treatises could be brought into harmony with the rules and regulations, and how a far more informative part of musical theory is concealed in the examples, which is most likely to be revealed when they are implemented in a singing ensemble and improvisedly varied, confronting the contrapuntal principles in a different temporal quality and on a higher formal level than in the "rhythmically calmed" note-versus-note movement in contrapunctus simplex.
The lecture integrates the research work of Philippe Canguilhem, Barnabé Janin, Markus Jans, Jean-Yves Haimoz, Anna Maria Busse Berger, Julie E. Cumming, Peter Schubert and Massimiliano Guido with my own scientific-practical works and their documentation with student ensembles for more than 10 years.
Ariane Je?ulat studied at the University of Arts (UdK) Berlin. From 2000 to 2004 she has been lecturer at the Institute of Musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin, from 2004 to 2015 professor for music theory at the Academy of Music Würzburg and since 2014 member of the Institute of Music Research of the Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. Since summer 2015 she has been professor for music theory at the University of Arts (UdK) Berlin. She received a doctorate degree at UdK in 1999 and her habilitation at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2011. Her publications focus on questions of music theory, the music of Richard Wagner and music after 1950. Since 1989 she has worked continuously in the group die maulwerker, an ensemble for contemporary and experimental music founded by Dieter Schnebel. Since 2015 she has been a member of the editorial team of ZGMTH. Dr. Cosima Linke
Gesine Schroeder
When Igor went West. Music theoretical approaches to an orchestral performance
Today compositions have lost their central role in the field of music thoery. The change of focus might be a reaction to a change that has long since taken place in composing itself. Since the anti-works from the 1950s and the aleatoric and graphically notated pieces, conceptual art and performance-art have resumed their central part over the passed one and a half decades.
How a performance analysis can be done will be shown using Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird as an example. The piece seems to me to be well suited for my endeavours especially considering the several existing versions by the composer himself: composed in Russia, the premiere in Paris from 1910 included a staged ballet performance, there are two suites dating back to 1911 and 1919 (Swizzerland) as well as a later version of the Firebird-suite from 1945 (U.S.A.) also with a staged ballet performance. I focus on the ending of the piece in the version from 1919. The Performance is by the Berlin Philharmonics conducted by Valery Gergiev at the Berliner Philharmonie in December 2018 and present a possible thorough research of the passage. Beside the audio-visual recording the components of the research would comprise the following factors:
· the score Gergiev used (personal annotations);
· the parts of the ochestra (bowing, tempo indications, dynamic, articulation, where appropriate retouches);
· an interview concerning the concert given by Gergiev;
· attending the rehearsals and section rehearsals;
· interviews with orchestra members;
· details concerning the recording. Which technology did the sound engineer use? According to what principles did he select, arrange and set up the microphones? How did he edit and mix the recorded sound?
· visual aspects of the recording. Which camera angles where used during filming? How was the editing done? How did they use close-ups? How did they use zooming functions? How was the lightning?
· looking at the function of the analyst, what does the part of the listener/reader entail (according to Roland Barthes)?
Prof. Dr. phil. Gesine Schr?der was appointed full professor for music theory at the University for Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig in 1992. In 2012, she accepted a chair at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Having returned to Leipzig in 2017, she continues to lecture in Vienna. Gesine Schr?der has published widely in the fields of New Music, counterpoint around 1600, techniques of transcription, the theory and practice of orchestration and conducting, and Gender Studies, especially men’s choir. She served as president of the GMTH (Association of German-Speaking Music Theory) between 2012-16.
Born in Wilster/Holstein in Northern Germany in 1957, Gesine Schr?der studied Musicology, Music Theory, Cello and German Literature in Berlin before focusing on music theory, improvisation, and aural training. Her dissertation on Stravinsky’s instrumental écriture around 1920 won the Joachim-Tiburtius-Price in 1991. Before and during her tenure in Leipzig, Gesine Schr?der has taught at the University of Arts Berlin, the University for Music “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin (1985-92) and at the Dresden College of Music (2011-12). As a guest advisor she has lectured in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong), Poland (Poznań, Wroc?aw), in Izmir, Oslo, Paris, Santiago de Chile, and Zürich. Gesine Schr?der was a member of scientific committees (EuroMACs 2014 in Leuven, Belgium, and 2017 in Strasbourg, France, a. o.), a member and of the scientific board of the Romanian journal revArt, the Journal of the Russian Society for Music Theory, the periodical Musik & ?sthetik and a musicological series from University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. She served as Dean of Faculty (2010-12) and is currently Dean of Studies of the department of composition and music theory in Leipzig (since January 2019).
