Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music Performance

Distributed Cognition in Musical Activity

Linda Kaastra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429619168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica classica

Through the systematic analysis of data from music rehearsals, lessons, and performances, this book develops a new conceptual framework for studying cognitive processes in musical activity.

Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music Performance draws uniquely on dominant paradigms from the fields of cognitive science, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, and psycholinguistics to develop an ecologically valid framework for the analysis of cognitive processes during musical activity. By presenting a close analysis of activities including instrumental performance on the bassoon, lessons on the guitar, and a group rehearsal, chapters provide new insights into the person/instrument system, the musician's use of informational resources, and the organization of perceptual experience during musical performance. Engaging in musical activity is shown to be a highly dynamic and collaborative process invoking tacit knowledge and coordination as musicians identify targets of focal awareness for themselves, their colleagues, and their students.

Written by a cognitive scientist and classically trained bassoonist, this specialist text builds on two decades of music performance research; and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of cognitive psychology and music psychology, as well as musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and performance science.

Linda T. Kaastra has taught courses in cognitive science, music, and discourse studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University. She earned a PhD from UBC's Individual Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program.

Part I
Musical Thought on the Bassoon

In the first part of this volume, I examine what it means to think musically with the bassoon. Instrumental performance complicates some of our most stable ideas about music. What is a note on the bassoon? A detailed exploration of the bassoon and lessons from some of its finest players will help to explore cognition at the level of the person/instrument system.

1Ecological Foundations

A theory of cognition in music performance should provide a specific explanation of cognitive processes that musicians use. For example, in his chapter “The Way to Carnegie Hall,” Roger Chaffin compares theories of musical practice (Chaffin, Imreh, & Crawford, 2002). There are theories that feed into debate about the role of genetics in talent (p. 75), theories about the different forms of motivation and effort that pave the way to greatness (p. 75), theories about the amount of time it takes to achieve greatness, measured in hours or years (pp. 75–79), and theories about the quality of practice time (pp. 79–81). Theoretical explanations offer a higher-level treatment of the results of analytical work on relevant data (see Perri 6 & Bellamy, 2012, pp. 33–37; Creswell, 1998, pp. 84–87; D’Andrade, 1995, pp. 178–181).

Chaffin, Imreh, and Crawford (2002) formulate a theory of cognition in music performance which we can call the “performance cue theory” (Chaffin, Imreh, & Crawford, 2002). Performance cues are aspects of music-making that draw the attention of a musician during practice and performance. According to this theory, these aspects can be basic, interpretive, or expressive. Basic cues include aspects of technique and patternwork that require attention. Interpretive cues include decisions about phrasing, dynamics, and tempi. Expressive cues include aspects of the performance that are meant to convey emotion. All three types of cues are tied to structural aspects of a composition. According to this theory, a performance cue is an aspect of music-making that a musician “attends to and makes decisions about” (p. 167) while learning to perform a composition. Performance cue theory is “grounded” in the sense that it directly engages the performer in knowledge making about musical practice (see Chaffin, Imreh, & Crawford, 2002; Chaffin et al., 2009; Ginsborg & Chaffin, 2011; Demos et al., 2018). For this reason, performance cue theory has explanatory power for cognitive processes involved in learning a work for concert performance, an important aspect of Western art music genres.

A theory becomes a model when it presents a structure for predicting cognitive processes (see D’Andrade, 1995, p. 178). For example, the performance cue theory offers a model of cognitive processing in musical practice that can be stated this way: successful performers attend to basic, interpretive, and expressive cues in practice and performance (Chaffin, Imreh, & Crawford, 2002, p. 167).

Basic Cues	Fingerings	Technical difficulties	Familiar patterns
Interpretive Cues	Phrasing	Dynamics	Tempi
Performance Cues	Basic	Interpretive	Expressive

Using Chaffin’s model, performers can identify dimensions of practice as indicated in the preceding chart. Following these steps will improve the chances of a successful outcome. The performance cue model has explanatory power for managing the workload involved in learning a composition for a concert performance. However, it is less effective for explaining tacit aspects of musical learning in general, the social aspects of music-making or aspects of musical practice that fall outside of the specific focus on a musical work.

This chapter looks at some aspects of cognition in music performance that lie outside of the scope of explanation for Chaffin’s performance cue theory. Theoretical areas introduced in this chapter include part one of a discussion of representation in music performance (beginning on page 17), a discussion of goals in musical activity (page 28), a discussion of cognitive resources (page 30), and a discussion of focal and subsidiary awareness (page 31). It might help some readers to skim these sections before delving into some of the details on the bassoon and the case studies on the particulars of bassoon performance. Some readers may also wish to jump to the concluding chapter of this book to consider how ideas introduced here scale up to orchestral performance.

Musical Activities

Consider the following examples of musical activity:

• Bassoonist A is in a practice room sitting in a chair, looking at a music stand that has a tuner on it. They play a series of long tones, scales, and intervals while looking at the tuner to calibrate their pitch to A = 440.
• Bassoonist B sits in the second chair of the symphony orchestra, holding a low C while the conductor adds members of the wind section, one by one, to build a polychord, a mix of notes from two different chords.
• Bassoonist C is standing backstage before a recital, swaying slightly, eyes closed, head moving, fingers twitching on the instrument.
• Bassoonist D is in a dressing room of a concert hall in a major city, sitting in front of a lighted mirror. After sitting in rest position for a few minutes, they assume performance position, run through the orchestral excerpt for the “Overture” to The Marriage of Figaro, and then go back to rest position.

I begin very simply with the idea that an account of cognition in music performance should be basic enough and general enough to handle the wide variety of situations in which musicians operate. Musicians operate skillfully in many different musical situations. Tuning, for example, can be carried out with a device that provides a visual display of pitch frequencies so that a musician can adjust pitches to a standard scale (bassoonist A). Tuning can also take place in an ensemble with one member of the ensemble acting as the pitch referent (bassoonist B). Tuning can be the focus of a musical activity, and it can take place in the background. Sometimes musical activity is imagined (bassoonist C). Sometimes musical activity is layered, such as practicing auditioning or rehearsing a performance (bassoonist D). We need an account that can handle all these things.

What Is a Representation?

As I mentioned in the Introduction, many models of cognitive processing view representation as fundamental to the study of cognition. This is because the ideas of representation and computation have considerable explanatory power. In his discussion of cogn...