Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to Enhance Performance

385 Pages·2004·2.758 MB·English

by  Aaron Williamon (editor)

Title Pages
Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to
Enhance Performance
Aaron Williamon
Print publication date: 2004
Print ISBN-13: 9780198525356
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198525356.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Musical Excellence (p.ii)
(p.iii) Musical Excellence
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Acknowledgments
Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to
Enhance Performance
Aaron Williamon
Print publication date: 2004
Print ISBN-13: 9780198525356
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198525356.001.0001
(p.v) Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the contributors to this book, whose attention to detail,
general erudition, and insight into musical performance have been both
professionally rewarding and personally inspiring. I am also grateful to the Royal
College of Music (RCM) and to Oxford University Press for their support at every
stage of this venture.
My own involvement in research to enhance musical performance was sparked
by the multidisciplinary project “Zoning In: Motivating the Musical Mind.” The
project was based on a partnership between the RCM and The Leverhulme
Trust, and its aim was to enable musicians to improve their performance skills
and manage the high levels of stress that often accompany performance
situations. From 1999 to 2002, over 150 students at the College worked with a
team of scientists and musicians to learn complementary mental and physical
training routines drawn from four areas: (1) physical fitness, (2) Alexander
technique, (3) neurofeedback, and (4) mental skills training (each of which is
detailed in Chapters 9–12 of this volume). Since the inception of the project,
there has been a burgeoning interest in applied music research among RCM
faculty and students, and research outcomes have now been embedded into the
curriculum of the College. For this, I am most grateful to my esteemed
collaborators on the project, whose commitment to enhancing musical
performance has been steadfast: Christopher Connolly, John Gruzelier, Tobias
Egner, Brian Hawkins, Judith Kleinman, Janet Ritterman, Yonty Solomon, Adrian
Taylor, Sam Thompson, Elizabeth Valentine, and David Wasley.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the discerning advice of several individuals who
have, in numerous of ways, made this book possible: Paul Banks, Jennifer
Barnes, Martin Baum, Roger Chaffin, Eulalie Charland, Steve Cothran, Bob
Crenshaw, Hubert Eiholzer, Nick Foster, Scott Gwara, Patrik Juslin, Andreas
Lehmann, Tânia Lisboa, Karin Marson, Gary McPherson, Janet Mills, Javier
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Acknowledgments
Negrin, Karen Rayner, John Rink, Karin Rosenkranz, Charles Wiffen, and David
Wright.
Aaron Williamon
London, 2004 (p.vi)
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Foreword
Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to
Enhance Performance
Aaron Williamon
Print publication date: 2004
Print ISBN-13: 9780198525356
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198525356.001.0001
(p.vii) Foreword
Performers strive for excellence. Whatever the genre or specialism, at the
highest level, expressive impact supported by flawless execution is the goal to
which professional musicians aspire, knowing that only by this means will they
be able to communicate effectively with their audiences and derive personal
fulfilment from performing.
But the road is far from easy, as many professional performers can testify. In his
monograph on performance (with its evocative subtitle, Revealing the Orpheus
Within) Anthony Rooley, lutenist and director of The Consort of Musicke, writes
of the journey that he has traveled as a performer. He contrasts the experience
of performance when it feels as though nothing can prevent the “Orpheus
within” from being revealed, with earlier occasions when he found himself
hampered by aspects of his mental or physical preparation. Rooley's account of a
situation in which he had “never felt less like a performer” will have familiar
resonances for many: there can be few musicians who have not felt at some
point in their career that their performances have fallen below the standards
that they believe they can achieve.
It is to assist musicians in developing personal strategies that will enable them
to “feel like performers” and to perform to the best of their ability that this book,
Musical Excellence, has been produced. Bringing together the findings of
applied research on performance enhancement, based in many cases on insights
and intuitions contributed by experienced performers themselves, this volume
offers guidance to musicians on types of performance preparation that have
been shown to help in developing and maintaining musical excellence. Many of
these are techniques that can also assist in reducing the performance-related
anxiety that can make the experience less rewarding than it should be.
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Foreword
Admittedly, there are performers for whom such uncertainties seem not to
hamper artistic development. Their performances are distinctive, often from an
early age, and they appear to achieve and maintain high standards in a range of
performance situations, with the minimum of self-questioning. Perhaps it is
because we all know performers like this that there has been some reluctance
among musicians to consider scientifically grounded ways—commonly explored
in other performance fields—of enabling a wider range of performers to achieve
their potential artistically. It is perhaps born of the conviction that the qualities
that mark out the exceptional performer—to whose artistry and prowess
listeners instinctively respond—are innate, intuitive, and highly personal, and
that any attempt to analyze these is unlikely to reveal strategies that lend
themselves to replication or adaptation by others apparently less gifted.
This book does not discount the significance of this viewpoint but complements
it by sharing research findings on performance enhancement, findings which
suggest that performers who achieve greater control over their mental and
physical states can often surpass expectations of their potential as artists. The
areas singled out for (p.viii) attention in this book focus on matters that
concern many performers throughout their careers—matters such as practice,
memorizing, improvisation, and sight-reading. None of the strategies are offered
as “quick fixes,” but they are presented to encourage musicians to select and
explore for themselves approaches to fulfilling their potential as performers and
maintaining this momentum in their professional lives.
It is through sustained positive experience in individual practice, in rehearsal,
and in performance itself that excellence is fostered. As this book shows, applied
music research has the potential to contribute to each of these areas. I hope,
therefore, that those individuals and organizations involved in the education,
training, and employment of skilled performers will take account of the findings
that research into performance enhancement is making available, will ensure
that the information is shared and used, and will do whatever they can to foster
further investigation. The music profession as a whole can only benefit if
performers acquire, during their training, strategies for physical and
psychological preparation which complement and support their musical
preparation and which they can continue to apply and refine as part of their
ongoing career development.
In the introduction to her autobiographical journal, Full Circle, which recounts
her final year on the operatic stage, Janet Baker speaks of help she received that
enabled her “to understand and participate in the joy of performing”—help that
focused on the need to prepare “musically, physically and psychologically for a
performance and then stand aside to allow the music to speak for itself.” The
relief that this gave from the fear that had dogged her for much of her
professional life she describes as a miracle. Musical Excellence does not claim to
achieve miracles, but it does offer insights into the kinds of preparation that may
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Foreword
help performers retain the joy of performing while achieving the standards that
are demanded of professional musicians today. If you are a performer, I hope
that you will feel encouraged to explore some of these ideas for yourself.
Janet Ritterman
Royal College of Music
London, 2004
References
Baker, J. (1982). Full Circle. London: MacRae Books.
Rooley, A. (1990). Performance: Revealing the Orpheus Within. Shaftesbury, UK:
Element Books Limited.
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Contributors
Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to
Enhance Performance
Aaron Williamon
Print publication date: 2004
Print ISBN-13: 9780198525356
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198525356.001.0001
(p.xi) Contributors
Roger Chaffin is professor of psychology at the University of
Connecticut. His recent work on piano performance reflects a
longstanding interest in how knowledge is represented in the mind,
which previously led him to study the representation of word meaning
in memory, how new words are learned, analogical problem solving,
what people know of their own memory abilities, and the effects of
gender on thinking. His work has appeared in journals such as
Psychological Science; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition; Cognitive Science; and Memory and
Cognition. His books are Practicing Perfection: Memory and Piano
Performance (Erlbaum, 2002), Cognitive and Psychometric Analysis of
Analogical Problem Solving (Springer-Verlag, 1991), and Memory in
Historical Perspective: The Literature before Ebbinghaus (Springer-
Verlag, 1988). He is an amateur flute player who has performed in
public exactly once.
Christopher Connolly is co-founder of SyCon: The Sporting
Bodymind Group, a London-based consultancy that has pioneered
applied sports psychology in mental training since 1979. He trained
with Moshe Feldenkrais in the Israeli scientist's revolutionary
movement education system, which he then taught throughout
Europe before establishing the first professional training program in
this method in the UK. Since, Connolly has worked as coach and
mental trainer with professional, national, and Olympic teams in
Britain, Europe, and the United States, as well as with several diverse
organizations within the business community. He has co-authored
numerous books with John Syer, including Think to Win (Simon and
Schuster, 1991), How Teamwork Works (McGraw-Hill, 1996), and
Sporting Body, Sporting Mind (Simon and Schuster, 1998). In 1999,
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Contributors
he helped launch “Zoning In: Motivating the Musical Mind,” a
performance enhancement research project based at the Royal
College of Music, London.
Jane W. Davidson is reader in music at the University of Sheffield.
She has a background in psychology, music, drama, and
contemporary dance, and teaches areas of the curriculum related to
the social psychology of music and performance, including masters
courses in psychology of music and music theater studies. Her
extensive publication record reflects a strong interest in bodily
expression, performance, communication, and also the therapeutic
and developmental aspects of artistic creativity and performance.
Davidson performs as a singer/dancer, but her main artistic output is
in the direction of operas. She has worked with companies such as
Complicite and Drama per Musica and forthcoming projects include
the medieval music drama Ludus Danielis with Andrew Lawrence-
King.
Tobias Egner is a research fellow in the fMRI Research Center at
Columbia University. He studied psychology at Goldsmiths College,
University of London, and undertook his PhD research at Imperial
College London, involving a collaboration with the Royal (p.xii)
College of Music, London. He has worked extensively in the field of
physiological self-regulation of the electroencephalogram (EEG) and
its relation to event-related brain potentials and attention, as well as
music performance measures. Other research interests encompass
the investigation of central executive processes in normal and altered
states of consciousness (e.g. hypnosis), particularly by integrating
various neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic
resonance imaging and EEG measurements. His personal musical
development has been limited to a short-lived career as a singer with
a punk rock band.
Anders Friberg is a researcher in the Department of Speech, Music,
and Hearing at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He
has been working mainly with the synthesis and analysis of music
performance, leading to a patented rule system translating the score
to a performance, modeling common principles used by musicians
concerning phrasing, metrical patterns, intonation, etc. Recently,
Friberg has been focusing on automatic extraction of music
parameters from audio and its relation to the emotional/ motional
qualities of performance, as well as recognition of emotional qualities
in dancing. This has resulted in the development of an interactive
collaborative game, in which the players interact using singing and
dancing. He teaches a course on musical communication and music
technology and is an active pianist with a degree from Berklee
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