Expression and communication in musical performance
E. F. Clarke
Introduction
The issue of
communication in music is regarded with some suspicion by music analysts and
music theorists for at least two reasons. One is the desire to avoid the
pitfalls of a naive and dogmatically intentionalist approach to musical
communication in which the composer is the 'sender', the listeners are the
'receivers', and the work itself is the 'channel'. The drawbacks of this
perspective, exemplified by Cooke (1959), are its rigidly prescriptive
tendencies, and its dependence either on loose and unreliable biographical
information to establish what the composer 'really meant' in a work, or on
apparently arbitrary or flimsily supported pronouncements by different
commentators as to the intended meaning of a work, all of which tend to deflect
attention away from the music itself. A second reason has been the influence of
a brand of structuralism which has regarded the work as an object, whose author
or composer is irrelevant - a position adopted by Roland Barthes, among others,
and encapsulated in the title of his essay "The death of the author"
(1977). Because this perspective encourages analysts to explore whatever
meanings may be found in a work, without regard for their possible origins in
the author's own mind, it precludes the possibility of regarding a work as a
vehicle which conveys meaning from one human 'sender' to other human
'receivers': the absence of a source removes one of the necessary terms in the
communicative chain. The attraction of this approach is that analysts can
concentrate on the music itself without having to consider its origins. The
approach also highlights the distinction between communication and meaning: the
meaning of an object, event or relation is a property that any observer is
entitled to pick up or construct for him or herself, without implying any
reciprocity between the creator and the receiver of meaning. Communication, on
the other hand, requires that the meaning recovered by the receiver be the same
as that of the sender - that meaning be shared by the two parties, the extent
of this reciprocity being a measure of the success of communication. It is
important to recognise that this carries with it no assumptions of conscious
awareness or intention: a person's sweating and trembling may communicate
anxiety to an observer very effectively and entirely veridically whether or not
the sender wishes to communicate this state of mind, or is even aware of having
done so.
While
communication is a somewhat fraught topic in the context of music
theory and
analysis, it is rather less hedged around with problems when musical
performance is considered. Rather than bringing with it the kind of conceptual
difficulties already touched upon here, it becomes an essential term through
which to understand the function of performance and the behaviour of
performers: performers are primarily engaged in attempting to communicate the
structure of the music to an audience. In order to investigate the
communicative function of expression in musical performance, I will initially
decompose performance communication into the separate activities of the
performer and listener before returning to a consideration of the two together.
Expression in
Musical Performance
The term "expression"
is used in a variety of ways in discourse about music, but I shall use it here
to refer to those continuously variable parameters of a performance that are
used by a player to convey an interpretation of the music. Instruments differ
in both the number and type of expressive parameters available to a performer:
for the piano, for example, modifications of timing, dynamic and articulation
are the only independently variable parameters available. For some instruments,
such as the harpsichord and organ, the range of expressive options is even more
restricted, while for others, such as the voice or violin, there is a greater
range of parameters that the performer can manipulate. In every case, however,
expression is conceived as small-scale continuous variations of these
parameters in a manner that is either not explicitly indicated in the score (if
one exists), or is indicated only in
vague terms. A simple definition of expression in performance is therefore a
pattern of systematic departures from the indications of the score - though we
shall see later that this definition is inadequate in certain important
respects.
Empirical studies
of performance expression (e.g. Clarke, 1988; Gabrielsson, 1988; Repp, in
press; Shaffer, 1981; Todd, 1985), which have been almost entirely restricted
to piano playing for purely technical reasons, have identified a number of
recurring characteristics which point to a particular model of the origin and
control 'of expression. The critical evidence is that performance expression
can be extremely stable over repeated performances that may sometimes span a
number of years (e.g. Clynes and Walker, 1982), is found even in sight-read
performances (Shaffer, 1981), and can be spontaneously changed by a performer
at a moment's notice (e.g. Clarke, 1985). These observations mean that
expression cannot possibly be understood as a pattern of changes in timing,
dynamic and articulation that is simply learned, remembered and applied to a
piece each time it is played, but must be regarded as being generated from the
performer's understanding of the musical structure. Any other model imposes
excessive memory demands on a performer, and is unable to cope with the mixture
of stability and flexibility that has already been mentioned. The stability of
performances over time is due to the stability of a performer's mental
representation of the musical structure; the existence of expression in
sight-read performances is the consequence of a performer forming a
representation of the music as s/he reads and parses it; and spontaneous
changes in expression are the inevitable consequence of the multivalence of
musical structures.
In principle every
aspect of musical structure contributes to the specification of an expressive
profile for a piece, but a number of authors have shown that grouping structure
(or phrase structure) is particularly salient. Todd (1985; 1989) has produced a
strikingly effective formal model which takes the hierarchical grouping
structure of the music as its input and gives a pattern of rubato as its output
on the basis of an appealingly simple rule. The resulting rubato profiles
compare well with the profiles of real performances by professional players. A
number of other studies have also shown rule-like correspondences between various
aspects of musical structure and expression (e.g. Gabrielsson, 1987; Shaffer
and Todd, 1987; Sloboda, 1983; Sundberg, 1988).
If the origin and
control of expression is based on a representation of musical structure, then
it is appropriate to view expressive features as the signs of that structural
representation. Empirical studies and introspection indicate that we should
regard this semiotic relation in two ways: as the inevitable and insuppressible
consequence of a particular representational structure; and as a conscious and
voluntary attempt on the part of the performer to make audible an otherwise
abstract interpretation of structure. Evidence for the unconscious and
insuppressible quality of expression comes from attempts by performers to play without
expression: Seashore (1938/1967) showed that while the degree of expression is
reduced under these circumstances, it is never eliminated, and that it retains
the same general pattern that is observed under normal circumstances.
Similarly, Sloboda (1983) showed that the same melody presented to pianists in
two different metrical notations was played with different patterns of
expression even though the players were not asked to try to distinguish the two
metrical versions, and indeed did not notice that the two pieces were in all
other respects identical. For both the deadpan performances and the metrically
distinguished pair, performance expression was clearly related to basic
structural features of the material (such as phrase structure and metre) and
can thus be seen as the consequence of the performers' spontaneous parsing of
the musical structure. In this sense, therefore, the expressive properties of
the performances are symptomatic of the performers' representations of the
structure of the music.
Nonetheless it is
also clear that performers consciously shape the expression in their
performances in order to achieve particular structural and stylistic results.
Apart from overcoming purely technical problems this is the function of
rehearsal, involving changes in the degree to which an expressive parameter is
used within a performance; changes in which of a number of expressive options
is used to project a feature of the music (for instance, using articulation
rather than dynamics to highlight some feature of a phrase); and changes in the
performer's structural understanding. All of these can be thought of as
processes which emphasise the inherent or spontaneously emergent expressive
properties discussed above, or which superimpose a different pattern upon them.
In the case of a piece with a highly indeterminate or ambiguous structure, for
instance, there may be very little expressive patterning that arises directly
out of spontaneous structural parsing.
A systematic view
of the way in which structural information gives rise to an expressive
patterning is to propose a set of rules each of which takes a structural
description of the music as its input, and gives a sequence of expressive
transformations as its output. Although the expressive properties of skilled
performances can be extraordinarily subtle, this does not require that the
expressive rules themselves be very complex or
numerous, since the musical structures which constitute their input are
themselves multiply interpretable and multi-dimensional. It is this structural
indeterminacy which makes the whole expressive system so rich and variable,
since it is quite possible that no two structural interpretations (either by
different performers, or the same performer on different occasions) will be identical,
thus ensuring that the output of even a very simple collection of expressive
rules will be quite diverse. I have proposed elsewhere (Clarke, 1985) that as
few as nine such rules may be sufficient to account for a great deal of the
structurally derived expressive features of piano playing, covering timing,
dynamics and articulation, and Sundberg (1988) proposes a similarly small
number. The important point here is that the observed subtlety of performance
need not be directly written into the rules of expression themselves as long as
the structures which form their input are rich and complex. This means that the
problem of giving a convincing formal account of musical expression is very
largely the problem of developing a satisfactory approach to the representation
of musical structure.
However, it would
be a mistake to imagine that structure is the sole determinant of expression. A
wide range of other factors including the possibilities of the instrument, the
acoustics of the performing environment, the nature of the audience, the mood
and intentions of the performer, and even the performance ideology s/he
espouses will contribute to the result, sometimes to the detriment of structure
(as in the case of an indulgent and egocentric performer), but ideally in
conformity with the dictates of structure. This is an issue to which I will
return in the next section.
Perceiving
Expression
In essence,
listeners carry out precisely the same operations in relation to expression as
does the performer - but in reverse. We can think of the listener's initial
task as being the separation of expressive modifications from the underlying
structure of the music (particularly in the case of timing information where
rubato must be disentangled from rhythmic structure) so as to make sense of
what the expression is trying to convey. Empirical work has shown that for
timing we are very sensitive to expressive changes: in the context of a
perfectly metronomic performance with notes of between 100 and 400 msec
duration, listeners will reliably detect changes in length of a single note
somewhere in the sequence of no more than 20 to 30 msec, increasing to 40 to 50
msec with more realistic sequences that already contain an element of rubato
(Clarke, 1989). Psychoacoustical studies (see
The example also
shows that the perception of expression is structure-dependent, just as its
production is. The structural context may not only determine the distribution
of perceived expression in a sequence, but may also affect whether a timing
change is heard as expressive or as an error. In a recent study investigating
the effect of structure on expression in imitating rubato (Clarke, in
preparation; see also Clarke & Baker-Short, 1987), keyboard players were
asked to try to reproduce as accurately as possible heard performances of four
melodies which were either exactly as a previous performer had played them, or
were distortions of the performance. The distortions were of two types: an
inversion of the expressive timing profile, such that positive timing
deviations became negative and vice versa; or a translation of the timing
profile, such that the timing deviation of each note was shifted along the
sequence by one of two different time values. Both types of transformation have
the effect of leaving the form of the timing profile unchanged, while
dislocating its relation to the structure of the melody. The principal result
was that the unmodified performances were reproduced with greater accuracy and
stability than the transformed versions, demonstrating that an identical timing
profile, or its mirror image, can become unreproducible when its relation to
the underlying musical structure is disrupted. A subsequent perceptual
experiment with a group of music students who were played the transformed and
untransformed performances of the melodies showed that their judgements of the
quality of the performances followed the ability of the group of performers to
reproduce the different versions: the unchanged performances were considered
best, and the inversions worst, with the translations in between. However, it
is interesting that the performers were not entirely unable to grasp the modified
versions: their attempts to reproduce these strange-sounding performances
clearly showed partial success in reproducing the aberrant timing profile, and
there was evidence that for at least some versions of the melodies their
attempts became more like the target over three successive attempts. This
suggests that they formed some kind of direct acoustical representation of the
performance to guide their own attempts, even if the pattern of rubato appeared
to have no structural logic to it. The stability of such a representation
remains to be investigated, but it seems likely that it is rather short-lived
and comparatively easily disrupted. At a phenomenological level, it is striking
that although all versions of each of the melodies used in the experiment contained
the same total amount of timing deviation, its perverse distribution in the
transformed sequences had the effect of making these expressive' features sound
like unintended errors, or hesitations and uncertainties, on the part of the
performer. With further research of this kind it may be possible to specify
more clearly the structural constraints that can make the same few milliseconds
of lengthening or shortening sound like a mistake in one case and an acceptable
rubato in another.
In considering the
relationship between structure and expression, it is important to realize that
a performer is usually not merely trying to convey the most obvious and basic
structural framework of a piece, since this is often quite clear to a listener
from even a fairly inexpert parsing of the surface structure of the music. Only
under the peculiar conditions of a melodic dictation exercise, or in a piece
with an interesting and complex metrical structure would we expect a performer
to hammer out the metrical framework of a piece of music. Essentially this is a
principle of redundancy reduction: it is unnecessary (and irritating to an
audience) to emphasise information that is already available from another
source (the pitch and rhythmic structure of the music itself). Empirical
support for this is provided by Seashore (1938/1967) who showed that listeners
attributed a greater number of expressive features (in this case perceived
stress on metrical accents) to a performer than was actually measured to be the
case in the performance, as a result of their unconscious processing of the
musical structure. He summarizes this observation in a rhetorical question:
'Can it be that objective emphasis by the player, either by strength or
duration of the note, is comparatively secondary in value to the compositional
emphasis which the musical listener "feels into" the measure subjectively ?' (p. 244)
Where 'expert'
audiences are involved this principle becomes particularly important in trying
to understand the idiosyncracies of performance expression, and paradoxically
it can lead to two apparently opposite outcomes. On the one hand the expertise
of the audience means that a performer can rely on even the most subtle
gestures of performance being picked up and understood, and this may therefore
lead to a performance with apparently understated characteristics. The converse
of this can be heard in the rather gushing and overly demonstrative rubato of
popular recordings of the nineteenth century piano repertoire that are aimed at
the 'easy listening' market. On the other hand, the stylistic knowledge of an
audience can allow a performer to be more risky and even wayward in
interpretation, in the knowledge that the audience will have sufficient
understanding of the musical structure to be able to tolerate and enjoy the
transformations to which it is subjected in performance. One musical genre in
which this kind of treatment is common is jazz: because the repertoire consists
very largely of 'standards' with which the audience is expected to be familiar,
performers can devote their attentions to finding interesting and unusual ways
to interpret the music, rather than simply making sure that the musical
structure is faithfully conveyed. The dramatic rubato and inflections of pitch
and timbre audible in recordings of a singer like Billie Holiday make clear how
much this style thrives on, and requires, idiosyncratic and extreme expressive
treatment. The simplicity of the musical structure in many of the standards
provides a firm anchor that allows the performer to pull the performance around
in a striking manner, and a performance that aimed simply to emphasise the
metrical or phrase structure would clearly be absurdly inappropriate. Just as
this relatively fixed repertoire of music has led to a strong performer cult
within jazz, so also can the same phenomenon be observed in classical music:
when 'great performers' give gala performances, they invariably play well-known
music from the standard repertoire, allowing the attention of the audience to be
turned away from the music and onto the expressive activities of the performer.
An assessment of
the originality or expressivity of a performer can only made if I ' there is
some neutral baseline against which to make the comparison. The most obvious
baseline, and one which has the appeal of theoretical simplicity, is a
perfectly metronomic or deadpan performance. This is essentially a return to
the definition of j expression given towards the beginning of this paper, where
expression was characterised as continuously variable departures from the
indications of the score. This is, however, too neat. The problem is that the
baseline should be perceived as neutral, and this is certainly not true of
metronomic performances, which sound unnaturally devoid of variability. Strict
metricality in performance can actually be used as an expressive device, as
styles as diverse as disco music and moto
perpetuo illustrate. The true baseline against which to assess expressivity
would be a performance with perfectly normative rubato (and the equivalent in
all other relevant expressive parameters), the effect of which should be to
make the performance sound ' . blandly
predictable. Because it is not easy to establish exactly what pattern of
rubato, a dynamics and articulation would achieve this, and since any such
normative performance would almost certainly be different for different
listeners, most empirical work on expressive performance retains the metronomic
baseline as its standard, since this at least provides a fixed reference point.
In fact most empirical studies of performance expression can be seen as an
attempt to establish the general characteristics of a normative performance.
There is still some way to go, however, before a reasonable picture of this
normative pattern that can be adapted to different styles of music and
different performance practices is established.
Although I have
once again concentrated initially on structure as an element to be retrieved
from performance and as a vital factor in making sense of a performance, it
would be a mistake to imply that structure is the only kind of information
conveyed by expression. Listeners also pick up information about a variety of
attributes of the performer and his/her instrument, including his/her state of
mind, technical competence, and even the difficulty (technical or physical) of
the music - though this is something that many instrumental traditions are at
pains to conceal. The unaccompanied violin and 'cello music of J.S. Bach is a
striking example of this, where a significant element of expression in the
music comes from the sense of physical and technical effort and the need to
overcome the inherent constraints of the instrument in producing polyphony on
essentially monophonic instruments. The Chaconne from the D minor violin
Partita, for example, contains numerous places where a change in instrumental
technique and an associated change in the sense of physical tension reinforces a structural feature. At the other extreme,
information is conveyed symbolically through the performance conventions that a
player uses, consciously or unconsciously. The conventions of a particular
performance practice not only convey specific expressive information within the
confines of that style, but as a whole convey an ideological message - such as
the 'authenticity' of the performance. It is because these different kinds of
semiotic relation coexist and develop in parallel that expression in musical
performance is so rich and multidimensional, and can be interpreted in such different
ways by different listeners.
Expression and
Twentieth Century Music
A number of
developments in the music of this century have made the relationship between
structure and expression, and even the definition of performance expression,
considerably more problematic than for the music that I have so far considered.
The first of these is the dramatic change in European music around the turn of
the century that resulted in the abandonment of tonality by many composers, and
the loss of the relatively homogeneous style that characterised the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. A consequence of this is the increased difficulty of
understanding the structure of such music, not only in strictly analytical
terms, but also for the listeners and performers of the music. A symptom of the
difficulties for performers is the enormous increase in the number of
expressive markings in the scores of early twentieth century composers (for
example the composers of the Second Viennese School), as if the composers were
no longer confident that their performers would be able to identify the
significant features of the music, or be relied upon to treat them expressively
in an appropriate way. In short this represents a breakdown of the undeclared
contract between composers and performers (and their audience) in which
performers could be assumed both to have sufficient insight into the musical
structure and also sufficient unconscious understanding of an appropriate
performance practice to be able to interpret the music without explicit
instruction from the composer.
The stylistic
changes in European music at the turn of the century did not only affect pitch
structure, and in certain respects the corresponding developments in rhythmic
structure have had a greater impact on expression and communication. The reason
for this is that metrical structure forms a vital framework around which
expressive timing is organised for both performers and listeners. Without the
sense of a regular framework of beats and the accompanying principle of
rhythmic structures based on small integer multiples of a basic underlying
pulse, it is almost impossible for listeners to pick up the sense of
continuously variable tempo on which rubato depends, or for performers to make
use of it with precision and control (see Clarke, 1987b for further
discussion). One of the characteristics of music in the early part of this
century is a progressive increase in the complexity of its metrical structure,
resulting in an effective abandonment of metre in a significant amount of music
from around the time of the second world war. With the
addition of an increasing interest in the compositional control of dynamics and
articulation, listeners faced the prospect of being unable to distinguish
structure from expression in this music, and performers struggled to find ways
to interpret it without simply being a slave to the(
dictates of the score. One of the consequences of these radical changes has
been the need to establish a new performance practice to deal with the technical
and aesthetic demands made on performers. An indication of the gradual
establishment of such z performance practice is the existence of individuals
and ensembles who specialize it the performance of twentieth century music -
not only because they have a mastery of its technical requirements, but also
because they have an understanding of how t( interpret this music.
The final
developments in twentieth century music that I want to consider here ( are the most radical from the point of view of performance
expression: the use of non-categorical, indeterminate and graphical notation,
and the arrival o electroacoustic music. While notational innovations and
electroacoustic music do no present identical issues for performance, they are
in many ways closely related. In both cases the distinction between categories
of musical structure and continuously variable departures from (or
modifications of) those categories is blurred o eliminated. The notational
developments mentioned have meant that rhythm and pitch structure have lost the
character of consisting of discrete values, and that 1 progressively more
improvisational component has been introduced into the music Structure in the
music of composers such as Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Jolt Cage combines
elements of precise specification with elements that are entirely, determined
by the performer at the time of performance in a way that makes the(
distinction between structure and interpretation (and thus expression)
difficult t( maintain. In the case of electroacoustic music this process is
taken one step further: it 'classic' electroacoustic music of the kind that
exists on tape alone, or as a file in ; microcomputer, the distinction between
the piece and its performance completely disappears since the performance
consists of little more than activating a fixed sown( source.
While these
observations are not intended as an attack on musical development in the
twentieth century, there are nonetheless consequences for listeners that should(
be recognised. One is that if it becomes more difficult, or impossible, to distinguish
an expressive component in performances of this music, then the performances
mal be perceived as 'cold' or’ inhuman' - particularly in the context of the
obsession wit performers as individuals that currently prevails in our musical
culture. It is no difficult for the 'coldness' that is perceived in the
performance to become associate( with the music
itself, and with a sense of alienation on the part of the audience however
unjustified these attributions may be in reality. Part of the failure o
twentieth century music to be accepted by a wider public is, I believe,
attributable to (this problem. A second consequence of the reduction or absence
of perceive (expression in performance also contributes to the resistance to
twentieth century music in a way that is perhaps more direct. As I have tried
to indicate already expression has an important part to play in articulating
and communicating structure to listeners, and if the impact of expression is attenuated
or eliminated it may b, considerably more difficult to make perceptual sense of
the music. A failure v perceive any expressive markers in the performance may
exacerbate the intrinsic, difficulties for listeners in picking up and making
sense of the structure c contemporary music - which is obviously a prerequisite
to accepting and enjoying it.
There have been a
number of responses to this situation by different groups
o composers. One is the acceptance and even the deliberate cultivation of this coldness
abstraction and objectivity - a response that is most obviously associated with
the music of
The main arguments
of this paper can be summarised as follows. Communication in performance can be
regarded as the conscious and unconscious processes by which musical structure
is encoded into the variables of expression, and correspondingly decoded by
listeners. The process contains unconscious components in the construction by a
performer of a representation of the music, and in the way that this
representation is activated in the physical actions of musical production; and
it contains conscious components in the active search by a performer for
interesting and enlightening ways to explore and project that structure. Listeners
are essentially engaged in the reverse process, decoding and interpreting the
structure of the music and the intentions of the performer from the
continuously variable parameters of performance. A variety of features is
conveyed by expression, ranging from quite concrete facts about the instrument,
state of mind and expertise of the perfomer, through more abstract structural
features of the music, to the ideological allegiances of the performer in
relation to performance conventions. According to this view, performance
communication depends on departures from expected patterns of continuation
established both within an individual performance and also with reference to
more stable external norms. It is, however, exceedingly difficult to specify
the limits within which this distinction between norm and acceptable deviation
operates. Furthermore, a number of difficulties for contemporary music derive
from the uncertainties surrounding our understanding of the basic structural
organization of this music, the identification of appropriate performance
practices, and the increasingly fuzzy boundary between a canonical
representation of the music (equivalent to the score) and its transformation in
performance.
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