Elizabeth Roach
Prof. Lee Bartel
Mus. 2122H
Tuesday October 30th,
2012
On
Virtuosic Performance
One
of the greatest joys in the life of a musician is a rewarding performance.
Whether it’s based on a receptive audience, or a more personal out of body
experience, pulling off a show that you can be particularly proud of is highly
satisfying. By drawing on recent studies and literature, as well as my own
personal experience, this paper will look at the science behind a great
performance and what it takes for your brain to reach that level. How does a
virtuoso become virtuosic?
Can
one person be born better equipped for the needs of a musician than another? As
Robert Jourdain explains in his book Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy, an extraordinary musician, whom he refers to as a
virtuoso, is often thought to possess better bones, muscles, nerves, and brains
than those musicians who never quite reach the same level (Jourdain, 223). I
believe it has a lot more to do with nurture, and less so with nature. During
my undergraduate degree at Toronto’s Humber College I had a classmate who was
often described as a prodigy. While I had started studying the saxophone
seriously at the age of 17, he had already been in a structured 8 hour a day
practice routine for ten years. His early exposure and dedication is what gave
him his unmatched facility and musicianship. Studies show that the brain’s
corpus callosum, which facilitates interhemispheric communication, is
significantly larger in musicians with early and intensive training (Schlaug,
2001). A 15% increase in size and
number of fibers is an enormous difference in the amount of information being
transferred. As far as nature vs. nurture is concerned there is evidence that
both play important roles in virtuosity.
There
is one phrase that has undoubtedly echoed in the ears of every musician since
they first began their education: practice makes perfect. It is very rare to
meet a musician with excellent technique and facility on their instrument that
hasn’t reached that level without years of practice. Although a musical
performance relies heavily on physicality – motion, breath, dexterity,
endurance – all things that are perfected through continual practice, so much
more has to do with mental hierarchies. While describing how the limits of an
average musician’s motor system can sometimes expand, Jourdain writes:
“Such
experiences suggest that the better part of virtuosity may have little to do with
gross neurological advantage. Instead, virtuosity may depend on how the musician’s
mind is organized during performance – how the body is comported, how
attention is focused, and above all, how imagery is brought to bear. In this view,
virtuosity is mostly a matter of abstract planning, not raw muscular control.”
(Jourdain, 225)
The deep, flexible and well trained
mental hierarchies of a professional musician allows their mind to be freed
from the more specific and intricate details involved in tasks like
sight-reading music and performing in an orchestra. Jourdain describes an
amateur musician’s experience with this world as exhilarating and he is correct
in saying so. I can recall sitting in my parent’s living room listening to a
new jazz album my father had recently recorded; I was probably 15 or 16 years
old at the time. We were listening to an improvised piano solo and I began
humming the melody as soon as it came back in. My mother asked me how I knew
that the solo was going to end and I realized that I had just “felt” it. At
this point I wasn’t necessarily following the harmony or the relationships
between the chords, but I wasn’t counting bars anymore either. I knew on an
unconscious level that the form was ending on the last chorus of that
particular solo, and I knew that due to my previous observations and
experiences in similar situations. Jourdain maintains that in “miraculous”
instances in performance when an amateur plays something considered above their
skill level, the physical capability has probably long been there, it’s just
the pathway that hasn’t been formed yet.
In
a 1993 study titled Cognition in Jazz Improvisation: An Exploratory Study, Mendonça and Wallace investigated the thinking
processes of jazz improvisers in performance, with a particular focus on the
cognitive processes related to perception and reasoning of time and to
creativity. This study showed that a deep level of knowledge and comfort with
the genre is integral for the musician to step back, look at the larger musical
structure, and have a “conversation” with his partner.
“The analysis of the “I Got Rhythm” protocols for Group One
provides additional insight
into how improvisers collaborate while simultaneously abiding by constraints
of an evolving musical structure and generating, evaluating and executing
new ideas.” (Mendonça and Wallace, 6)
Once you have the neural pathways
and hierarchies in place to function automatically at a superficial level, the
planning and anticipation skills necessary to perform music will be in place.
A
virtuosic performance depends on many things, please note that this paper
doesn’t even attempt to address psychological aspects. Jourdain raises the
question of why some musicians will achieve greatness while other musicians,
who practice just as hard and for as long, will never reach the highest
standard of musicality. It seems to be an ideal mélange of multiple factors,
including early exposure, reinforced mental hierarchies, and pure physical
advantages that lead to an easier road for a lucky few.
Bibliography
Deutsch, Diana. The Psychology
of Music. New York: Academic, 1982. Print.
Jourdain, Robert. Music, the Brain and Ecstasy: How Music
Captures Our Imagination. New York (NY): Quill, 1997. Print.
Mendonça, David, and William A. Wallace. "Cognition in
jazz improvisation: An exploratory
study." 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Chicago,
IL. 2004.
Schlaug, Gottfried. "The Brain of Musicians." Annals
of the New York Academy of Sciences 930.1 (2001): 281-99. Print.
3 comments:
This paper reminded me of Malcolm Galdwell's Book "Outliers". He explains how ten thousand hours of practice can make someone an expert at their trade. This can be applied to creating neuron pathways after many years of practicing an instrument to become a virtuoso. I like how you said it was that nurture was an important factor, also physiological, psychological factors are considered when looking at virtuosos or outliers.
When talking about how we sometimes just have these moments where everything works and we stop thinking, I think about how I felt when I was first learning to conduct - keeping a consistent beat pattern and remembering to cue were all conscious parts of my thinking all the time, which prevented me from doing anything more complex. Once that started to fall into the background and I stopped having to think about it, it all seemed almost completely automatic. It makes me wonder how many other kinds of tasks - not even necessarily musical - might work this way.
Such an interesting topic. One of the thins we begin with in music pedagogy is teaching students to acquire new skills, whether technical or auditory. The sentence that particularly resonated with me in your essay had to do with the performer's mental processes during a performance - and how this kind of mental organization is key to a successful performance.
This kind of mental organization seems to get at this optimal state of "flow," which is sometimes described as a merging of action and awareness, where consciousness, mind, and body become harmoniously directed. I wonder if and how this kind of processes can be incorporated into a teaching and performing practice.
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