Creative Research in Music

Informed Practice, Innovation and Transcendence

Anna Reid, Neal Peres Da Costa, Jeanell Carrigan, Anna Reid, Neal Peres Da Costa, Jeanell Carrigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367231354
  9780367231323
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000297287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Creative Research in Music explores what it means to be an artistic researcher in music in the twenty-first century. The book delineates the myriad processes that underpin successful artistic research in music, providing best practice exemplars ranging from Western classical art to local indigenous traditions, and from small to large-scale, multi-media and cross-cultural work formats. Drawing on the richness of creative research work at key institutions in South-East Asia and Australian, this book examines the social, political, historical and cultural driving forces that spur and inspire excellence in creative research to extend and to cross boundaries, to sustain our music industry, to advocate for the importance of music in our world, and to make it clear that music matters.

In the chapters, our authors present the ideas of informed practice, innovation and transcendence from diverse international perspectives. Each of these three themes has an introductory section where the theme is explored and the chapters in that section introduced. Taken as a whole, the book discusses how the themes in combination, with reference to the authorial group, are able to transform music pedagogy and performance for our global and complex world.

Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part 1
Informed Practice

1Life Informed Practice

Contemporary Considerations for Music Education

Neal Peres Da Costa

Informed practice in music embraces the complex creative and cultural practices of musicians and musicing over time. It has powerful potential to change the understanding and experience of vocalists and instrumentalists within wide-ranging music traditions from Western classical to jazz, popular and world—including music that is ‘captured’ in notational formats and/or orally transmitted.¹ Informed practice is applicable in music creativity (performance, improvisation and composition), education and research.

At the macro level, informed practice examines the purpose and meaning of music, its historical, cultural, societal, political and economical contexts, its performance spaces, and the ways in which we engage with it. At the micro level, it looks at the minutiae of the musical craft, the myriad of conventions (notated and unnotated) that influence musical form, sound and expression, as well as vocal and instrumental sounds and timbres and their effect on color, and balance.

Engagement with informed practice inevitably leads to an expansion of expressive and technical means,² and can enhance a sense of connection with the music and its composer.³ These factors intermingled with artistic agency (the musician’s evolving experience and intention),⁴ foster individual and innovative (autonomous) ways of musicing; one’s learned craft, stimulated by existing knowledge, undergoes transformation: the present informed by the past to mould the future.

In Western classical music, informed practice is strongly associated with historically informed performance (HIP), which investigates how music of the past may have sounded taking account of historically appropriate performing practices instruments and vocal production. The HIP enjoyed a meteoric rise in the second half of the 20th century (supported by the recording industry),⁵ claiming to be recreating music of earlier times as the composer(s) intended. This was seemingly in opposition to mainstream modern performance established by the 1950s,⁶ which HIPists saw as elevating the performer’s self-expression over the composer’s intentions.⁷ Yet, we are now beginning to understand that in pre-modern eras composers expected performers to have significant artistic input tin order to produce a ‘beautiful’ interpretation.⁸

Pioneers of HIP such as Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) understood that the score was incomplete, a mere starting point to which much was needed to be added to bring the music to life. For Dolmetsch it was paramount that students take an informed approach, discovering “what the Old Masters felt about their own music, what impressions they wished to convey, and, generally, what the spirit of their art was.”⁹ Such knowledge would spur imagination and ‘intuition’ to produce something unique to the individual practitioner. It would, as explained by Howard Mayer Brown, “inspire an imaginative re-creation in performance of the notes on the page.”¹⁰

For example, some classically-trained violinists accustomed to playing on steel strings using an ever-present vibrato, and using a modern Torte-style bow designed to make up and down bow-strokes of equal intensity, are experimenting with other options that might be more appropriate for earlier music. They use gut strings, ornamentally-applied vibrato and earlier-style bows designed to make up and down bow-strokes of unequal intensity. Informed practitioners arm themselves with all sorts of information that encourages them to question and be experimental each time they perform. They want to know “about the possibilities open to them.”¹¹ And they are fully cognisant of having and making choices in their interpretation, even if or when these go beyond the status quo.

An Evolving Status Quo

What relationship does informed practice have to music-making in the present time? We stand at the forefront of a new era. Increasingly, musicians are having to be multidisciplinary, they are conversant with different styles, techniques and languages. This curiosity to try new things is now becoming a trend in other areas of instrumental and vocal performance across all styles and genres of music making. At the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, it is leading to expansion in education opportunities, for example the establishment of The Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Chinese Ensemble, higher degree research projects involving Indigenous and ethnic musics, and interdisciplinary traditional and creative research in composition, jazz, and Western classical performance. Others are able to swap readily between multiple instruments and styles. They have expanded their capability and experience and, ultimately, their employability.

So, in reality, the status quo is not static, but evolving. What then is the role of our higher music education institutions? The notion that a music conservatorium conserves the music discipline while passing it on to the next generations is something one often hears. But this notion seems to engender a feeling of stasis as “our strong conservatoire tradition with dominating transmissive teaching practices aimed at isolated specializations leads us to canonize how music should be performed.”¹² Is it not the role of a music institution to transmit the latest, best-practice knowledge in music, formed of prior knowledge re-examined and updated?

In any case, no matter what we teach our students, they will not necessarily carry that practice forward in exactly the same way. Kenneth Hamilton points out that “pianists are often exaggeratedly proud of their pedagogical pedigrees—as if musical talent were passed down by apostolic succession.”¹³ If this were true, musical style would never change. On the contrary, as Will Crutchfield posits, students do not generally mimic their teachers, but react by imitating and by being rebellious. Their playing is the progressive style of the new twenty-year-old virtuosi rather than the “style that was current.”¹⁴

There are myriad ways in which informed practice can shape music-making depending on the intentions and goals of the practitioner. Today, they can draw from an ever-developing armoury of practices; they can pick and choose the practices that they consider important in bringing a musical work to life.

The Dimensions of a Musical Artwork

A musical composition is analogous to a painting, the end product of a painter’s artistry. It portrays a particular scene, with colours, brush strokes and textures that are both idiosyncratic to the painter and recognisably of the painter’s era. We recognise a Rembrandt because it is idiosyncratically Rembrandt, and also because it shares characteristics with other contemporary Dutch painters. We can appreciate a painting from different viewpoints: for what it says to us now, for what it meant to those who first viewed it, and for the message that the painter intended to send. We can delve into the social, cultural, political and economic background of the painter and the painting, the reason why and for whom it was painted. And we can look at its reception over time. The more we know about it, the richer our appreciation and understanding of it. A musical work can be viewed in a similar way to a painting, but there are other factors to consider. A musical work is a sound painting, but it is not captured physically in a score in the same level of detail as a painting.

The Score as a Road Map

Music cannot be encapsulated in a score (which is more akin to a road map devoid of vegetation, houses and people), a shorthand method that lacks sound, expression, fluidity and life; it cannot capture what the composer had in mind. Even in the twentieth century, when classical music composers supposedly notated more exactly what they wanted, serious anomalies present themselves. Igor Stravinsky was at pains to decree that “a piece of mine can survive almost anything but wrong or uncertain tempo […] I regard my recordings as indispensable supplements to the printed music.”¹⁵

Regardless of era, music scores generally lack information of the unnotated practices that were considered indispensable for highly artistic expression, that the composer expected the performer to add with consummate taste and skill (in the language of the composer’s time). The score requires extraordinary input from the practitioner, who artistically sculpts a sound painting using timing, dynamics, articulation and many other expressive means. Bringing the score to life requires many complex decisions and each practitioner will do this in individual ways. So, unlike a painting which has a set appearance, a music work will have innumerable sounding versions. To get as close as possible to the composer’s expectation for a musical work, if that is the intention, we might consider many factors. If the music is notated, such factors include the composer’s notational practices and what these were meant to signal to performers, the unnotated performing conventions of the composer and era and the purpose of the music, its social and political background, how it was received, the space and environment in which it was first performed, performer and audience etiquette and any messages the composer might have intended to portray to listeners. If the music has been orally transmitted (rather than notated) or is even largely improvised, then we may or may not have a more complex situation in terms of being informed or authentic. On the one hand, the notes and their expressions may have changed over time, and on the other, at least remnants of earlier practices and traditions may have been transmitted faithfully, but could need special consideration in terms of cultural protocols, the subjects of burgeoning research.¹⁶

Some would argue that none of these considerations are important, that whatever a practitioner does with the music is what gives it life. Others believe that whatever they have come to understand as the particular musical work has been handed down to them over time, sometimes directly from the composer. However, recent research has revealed that musical style has changed significantly over time due to many factors. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the change of style was accelerated due largely to the development of sound recording, editing, and intervention from a producer and the resulting expectations of the recording industry and consumers.¹⁷ Today, many find it important to be armed with as much information as possible about the music in order to have a deeper connection with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART 1 Informed Practice
• PART 2 Innovation
• PART 3 Transcendence
• Notes on Contributors
• Index