Nicholas Cook

The Perception of Large-Scale Tonal Closure

Music of the tonal period generally begins and ends in the same key, although passing through other keys in the course of a movement. Theorists of music generally ascribe great significance to such large-scale tonal closure. In order to test the effect of such closure upon aesthetic response, listeners were required to evaluate a number of compositions in two versions, one of which was in each case tonally closed while the other was not. The results indicate that the direct influence of tonal closure on listeners9 responses is relatively weak and is restricted to fairly short time spans—much shorter than the duration of most tonal compositions. Although large-scale tonal structure may not in itself be perceptible, it plays an important role as a means of compositional organization, and it is argued that the theory of tonal music is more usefully regarded as a means of understanding such organization than as a means of making empirically verifiable predictions regarding the effects of music upon listeners.

Interpretation and performance in Bryn Harrison’s être-temps

Abstract The majority of studies of performance focus on the tonal and metric music of the common-practice period, studied at the moment of performance rather than over a period of rehearsal, and usually divorced from the context of real rehearsal and performance (schedules, audiences, auditoria). This paper reports part of a larger project in which three newly commissioned works for solo piano have been studied from the moment that the performer received them, through a period of preparation and rehearsal, to their first public performance. The data consist of interview and diary data, audio recordings, and MIDI data taken from the piano at rehearsals and the public premiere. The paper is a collaboration between one of the composers (Bryn Harrison), the performer (Philip Thomas), and two analysts (Nicholas Cook and Eric Clarke). The paper demonstrates the stability of the performers approach to this complex music from a very early stage in the rehearsal process; some interesting attributes of his approach to rhythm and tempo; the function of notation as a “prompt for action” rather than as a recipe for, or representation of, sound; and the concealed social character of solo performance and apparently solitary composition. The paper concludes with a discussion and critique of the “communication” model of performance that prevails in psychological studies of performance.

Music Theory and 'Good Comparison': A Viennese Perspective

Most contemporary theorists feel uncomfortable about ascribing significance to inaudible relationships in music; we tend to assume that there should be some meaningful relationship between analysis and auditory experience. There is no obligatory reason why this should be so. The idea that what is significant in music should coincide with what is perceptible in it is not a universal one; according to Dahlhaus1 this is no more than a dogma of the last two centuries or so, while even today there are some types of non-Western music whose structural organization lies principally in the physical actions involved in performance, rather than in the sound? And David Lewin has recently argued that as theorists we place too much emphasis on perception as distinct from the broad range of activities through which people express their responses to music? But the fact remains that, in the West today, it is the perception of musical sound that is generally considered to be paramount in defining the meaning of a piece of music. Hence one of the most crucial questions we can ask about any theory of music-one which bears directly upon the validity which we can ascribe to it-is how it relates to the perceptual experience of the listener. In this article I try to show the problems inherent in any simple answer to the question, and to outline a rationale for the practice of analysis that overcomes these problems.

Beyond the notes

The way performers shape notes brings music to life. Nicholas Cook argues that measuring these subtle changes can help us appreciate and replicate the performers art.

The Ghost in the Machine: Towards a Musicology of Recordings

This article introduces the other contributions to this second issue of Musicae Scientiae devoted to the work of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and sets them into the larger context of musicological research into recorded musical performance. There is consideration of musicologys historically odd relationship to performance, including the historically informed performance movement and what is referred to as the ‘page-to-stage’ approach of recent music theory: CHARMs analytical projects focussed on aspects overlooked by the score-based approach, on the potential for bottom-up methods, and on the nature of performance style and the extent to which it can be meaningfully analysed by empirical methods. Another strand of CHARMs research investigated the extent to which the commercial practices of the record industry have helped to shape twentieth-century performance. The author includes brief accounts of his own projects with CHARM so as to provide an overview of the Centres work as a whole.

Methods for analysing recordings

If analysis means studying something in order to gain knowledge and understanding of it, then there are any number of ways of analysing recordings, and any number of reasons for doing so. Performers, recording engineers, historians of recording technology and historians of performance practice listen to recordings with quite different kinds of knowledge and understanding in mind: analysis means different things to them. The same applies to acoustic scientists, record collectors and archivists, or communication theorists, not to mention people in the A&R divisions of record companies whose job is to spot the next big hit. The list goes on. This chapter basically assumes that your reason for analysing recordings is to gain a better understanding of them as culturally meaningful objects, and more specifically that you are primarily interested in the effect of music as experienced in performance, whether live or recorded. In that sense its orientation is musicological, although that too is a term that can be defined in different ways. Recordings are a largely untapped resource for the writing of music history, the focus of which has up to now been overwhelmingly on scores, and recent technological developments have opened up new ways of working with recordings – ways that make it much easier than before to manipulate them, in the sense that we are used to manipulating books and other written sources. I begin by introducing software that makes it possible to navigate a number of different recordings, and to create visualisations that help to heighten aural understanding of what is going on in the music.

Beethoven's Unfinished Piano Concerto: a Case of Double Vision?*

During 1814-15 Beethoven sketched the first movement of a piano concerto, writing out a considerable proportion of it in full score. Some of the curious stylistic features that have been ascribed to this movement are the consequence of a faulty reading of MS Artaria 184, in which open-score sketches have been bound in with the autograph score. One curious feature, however, remains: the symphonic nature of the materials. There is some reason to believe that, because of this, Beethoven considered deleting the tutti exposition, resulting in a symphonic work with obbligato piano. Such indecision at a late stage in the compositional process could explain why Beethoven abandoned the work.

Recording practices and the role of the producer

Introduction The editors 1 Personal takes: Learning to live with recording Susan Tomes 10 A short take in praise of long takes Peter Hill 13 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone Donald Greig 16 Personal takes: Producing a credible vocal Mike Howlett 30 ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction Steve Savage 32 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer Andrew Blake 36 Personal takes: Still small voices Jonathan Freeman-Attwood 54 Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio Michael Haas 59 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering Albin Zak 63 Personal takes: Limitations and creativity in recording and performance Martyn Ware 77 Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80 Richard Witts 80

Between Science and Art: Approaches to Recorded Music

This issueof Musicae Scientiae features the work of staff and associates of CHARM, the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. Based at Royal Holloway, University of London in partnershipwith KingsCollegeLondon and the University of Sheffield, CHARM aims to promote the study of recordings within musicology, and more generally to complement musicologys existing focus on scores with a corresponding focus on music as performance. Because musicology does not have established methods for performance analysis in the way that it does for notated music, a significant part of CHARMs work consists of developing analytical approaches that draw on work outside musicology as traditionally defined, particularly in psychology and computer science, and the present issue of Musicae Scientiae illustrates this cross-disciplinary range of activity. The first four articles emerge directly from CHARMs portfolio of research projects. One of these projects, which began in 2005, involves comparative analysis of recordings of Chopins mazurkas, based on the extraction of timing and dynamic information. The first article, by Andrew Earis (who worked at CHARM during 2005-06), presents a semiautomated approach to the extraction of this information based on a digitised score of the music being performed; the second, by Nicholas Cook (who directs CHARM), is more musicologically oriented and presents some working methods and preliminary results based on the captured timing information. Although the article is organized round the methods employed, with the analyses serving primarily to illustrate the potential and limitations of the methods, the longer-term aim is to use these methods to address mainstream musicological issues, as well as to open up areaswith which musicology has not been significantly concerned but arguably should be. Another of CHARMs projects investigates expressive performance in recordings of Schuberts Lieder, and the third and fourth articles result from this project. Daniel LeechWilkinson offers a study of a single song, «Die junge Nerine» (The young nun), focussing on the one hand on the stylistic changes evident in the century of recorded performances of this work and on the other on the contrasted expressive meanings which different singers can create out of «the same» music; the article addresses matters of musicological interest but makes use of objective approaches (mainly spectrographic analysis) in order to support and develop its argument. The following article, by Renee Timmers (who worked at CHARM during 2004-06), offers a quite different pass over similar terrain: Timmers evaluates the extent to which performers employ variations in tempo, dynamics, and pitch in accordance with the musics structural and emotional characteristics, and concludes that «emotional characterisations of music playas important a role in the generation of expression as do structural characterisations». Whereasthe articlesmentioned sofar approachrecordingsasdocumentsof performance that is, they focus not on the recordings assuchbut on the performancesthey embody-

Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music

We have not even begun to tell the history of twentieth-century music. Susan McClary The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music ? What sort of a history of twentieth-century music might that be? The word ‘Cambridge’ is something more than a publisher’s imprint, for it locates this volume in a century-long tradition of Cambridge Histories and so emphasizes that this first large-scale, retrospective view of the twentieth century in music is a view from somewhere . As the title would lead you to expect, it is history written from a distinct and relatively homogeneous geographical, social, and cultural perspective: predominantly Anglo-American (though there are two authors from Germany and one each from South Africa and Australia), more male than female (gender representation in musicology, at least in the UK, remains far from equal), and white. That does not, of course, mean that our authors simply accept the traditional geographical, ethnic, and gender hierarchies of music history, for there is a strong revisionist strain in the book, one that attempts to contextualize and critique familiar narratives by juxtaposing them with alternative constructions of twentieth-century music. Like all historical writing, this Cambridge History is best understood as in essence a status report, a series of position statements in an ongoing dialogue, for no history can be more than a temporary stopping-point in a never-ending process of interpretation – which means that history is less a reflection of the facts than a construction of historians. What follows, then, is one particular set of constructions, the record of what a particular group of authors thought at a particular point in time.