Musicology, like the other disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences, around 1950s changed the way using methodology to ground their results and opinions. It was deceptive to use the comparative method for practices across different societies, and so the Comparative musicology was superseded by Ethnomusicology. The ethnomusicologist as a specialist in a particular musical culture represented the conviction that cultural practices could be comprehended only in the context of the societies that they were flourished. This turn influenced the branch of theory and analysis in musicology, were style analysis was supplanted by the approach on specific structural design of musical works. Consequently, the concept of large musical data sets-juxtaposition brought out and the computational approach-method could be the most appropriate. Unfortunately musicologists were reluctant in the adoption of technology in mainstream musicological problems and so computational methods were active only on the perimeter of the discipline.
Some further steps were made and particularly in music performance, were I would like to focus. The idea that performance is “a re-creative rather than reproductive act, and that each performance is a unique realization of the performer's conception of the music”(1) causes methodological problems. One methodological approach is based on the statistical analysis of reproducibility were the same music is performed several times by an individual and the other approach focuses on the same performance/s of more than one individual. In literature the choice of the approach has varied. When the condition of collection of the musical material is controlled and usually the individuals are not experts then the statistical approach is used (2) and when the individuals are experts then the approach is based on the skills and precision of the performers to be given grounds for qualitative results (3).
A quite recent project that actually connects the experience of playing (or listening to) music with the study of music is The Mazurka Project: Recorded Music as Performance. Professor Nicholas Cook, director of "CHARM" (the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music) and one of his colleagues, Craig Sapp, has been working on this project at the University of London. Sapp, is the principal researcher on the Mazurka project (4). As a project based on computational methods, aims to work with fuller data sets: to look into as many as possible recordings of Chopin's Mazurkas and create an analytical mechanism which uses musical features such as tempo and dynamics to create a general rule to look at any other repertoire. Additionally, the specific project, creates radical “pictures” illuminating special features of each performance (are called timescapes and dynascapes) (5).
The general idea of these timescapes is that performances can be compared according to their pictures and also related with the total of their performances. The output of such a project give answers to questions like how much rubato do the performers use, where they speed up, how they interpret the rhythmic pattern of the mazurka in different places in the piece? Another important and interesting aspect of this creation of new “pictures” is that are not like other academic analyses which are difficult to understand unless you are trained to do so. These mere representations of the performance are not “highly evolved discourse distant from the experience of performing or listening”, as Cook would say (6).
From the point of view of the listener, the research project affirms the observations of the human feeling of intuition that makes a differentiation in the interpretation called “schools” (like those around Horowitz and Rubinstein). Another observation is that the recordings are getting slower and the questions raised here are if there is an evolution of the performance tradition or modern recordings are adjusted in that way. That would be interesting to research and answer since the concept of evolution is gaining ground (see evolutionary musicology).
For the future, it would be also interesting too to see if the computational approach-method could develop tools and mechanisms to identify the individual performer and even further to be able to simulate such a performance of an individual artist based on musical “DNA” of an artist. Such a musical DNA creation would a real challenge because it would create new debates around the nature of the performance and the artistically real. A new space for cultural products will flourish changing at the same time the hypostasis and value of the cultural product.
References:
(1) Clarke E.F., “Psychology of music, §IV: Performance”, The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie, London : Macmillan, 1980.
(2) E.F. Clarke: ‘Imitating and Evaluating Real and Transformed Musical Performances’, Music Perception, x (1992–3), 317–41; J.A. Sloboda, ‘The Communication of Musical Metre in Piano Performance’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, xxxv (1983), 377–96.
(3) L.H. Shaffer: ‘Performances of Chopin, Bach and Bartók: Studies in Motor Programming’, Cognitive Psychology, xiii (1981), 326–76; B.H., Repp, ‘Diversity and Commonality in Music Performance: an Analysis of Timing Microstructure in Schumann's “Träumerei”’, JASA, xcii (1992), 2546–68.
(4) The Mazurka Project gained high musicological respect by exposing the faked Joyce Hatto recordings.
(5) Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, , accessed 21 June 2009.
(6) Nicholas Cook, “Performance analysis and Chopin's mazurkas”, Musicae Scientiae, (“Between science and art: Approaches to recorded music”), Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall 2007), p.183-208.
Bibliography
Clarke E.F., “Psychology of music, §IV: Performance”, The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie, London : Macmillan,1980.
Clarke E.F., ‘Imitating and Evaluating Real and Transformed Musical Performances’, Music Perception, x (1992–3), 317–41
Cook N., “Performance analysis and Chopin's mazurkas”, Musicae Scientiae, (“Between science and art: Approaches to recorded music”), Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall 2007), p.183-208.
Repp B.H., ‘Diversity and Commonality in Music Performance: an Analysis of Timing Microstructure in Schumann's “Träumerei”’, JASA, xcii (1992), 2546–68.
Shaffer L.H., ‘Performances of Chopin, Bach and Bartók: Studies in Motor Programming’,Cognitive Psychology, xiii (1981), 326–76.
Sloboda J.A., ‘The Communication of Musical Metre in Piano Performance’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, xxxv (1983), 377–96.
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/index.html
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/projects/chopin.html
http://www.mazurka.org.uk/
http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/articles/generaltopics/TheMazurkaProject.html