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Professor Richard Taruskin (University of California, Berkeley) delivers the keynote address of the Performers Voice Symposium 2009. Professor Taruskin discusses the current state of performance studies research.
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The performer’s conscious and subconscious processes in preparation for a concert or recital and their parallels with more traditional research has only recently come to broader scholarly attention. A number of important articles this decade, particularly in Rink’s Musical Performance (2002), the 2007 themed edition of The Dutch Journal of Music Theory, and the forthcoming Zurich University Yearbook based on an ELIA conference on the topic (2009), specifically deal with issues of process (with its interdependent and cyclical activities of preparation, rehearsal, interpretation, and reflection) and product, exploring its broader relationship to research. Professor Huib Schippers (Griffith University) expands on the findings of this research and discusses his experiences leading the Queensland Conservatorium Research Center and establishing a research culture focussed on the understanding of musical processes as research.
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Enrique Granados’ Goyescas is an enormous piano work of marvel and beauty. Its writing employs the most decorative style, harmonically and lineally, resulting in one of the most intricate and masterfully designed piano works of the late Romantic era. Almost at all times layers of counterparts interweave around the main melodic thread, and with all the elaborations and details to manipulate, a performer is prone to lose sight of the mental mapping of the musical structure during performance. Professor Hsin Hsing-Chwen (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan) demonstrates a preferred learning process approaching these problematic movements. Through her presentation, Professor Hsin Hsing-Chwen shares her experience as a professional pianist engaged in complex memory building and also manifests her interpretation of the work.
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Stephen Savage (Royal Northern College of Music) examines, through his own practice as a pianist, what the solo performer does, in the act of performance, to convey the content of a work to the listener. The range of treatments of sound and time are investigated, together with consideration of the role played by the performer’s body language, illusion and internally generated images. Factors deriving from innate characteristics and early training, and the distinction between personality and individuality are also explored in an attempt to account for the wide range of response to musical scores that listeners can experience when hearing performing artists.
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Developing the themes of Beyond the Score, Towards Performance and My Instrument – My Voice, Professor John Rink (University of Cambridge) discusses the ongoing role that scores can play as performances take shape over time.
