Manfred Clynes, pianist.
| Number | 1149 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1999 |
| Drawer | 21 |
| Entry Date | 01/14/2000 |
| Authors | Repp, B.H. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | In: A Festschrift for Manfred Clynes (pp. 70-84). St. Louis, MO: MMB Music. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1149.pdf |
| Abstract | Introduction I first met Manfred Clynes at the 1985 Workshop on Physical and Neourophysical Foundations of Music in Ossiach, Austria. At the time he was head of the music research center at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, Australia. I was a researcher in speech perception with a strong interest in music perception and performance. I had done some experiments on memory for songs with two colleagues, Mary Lou Serafine and Robert Crowder, which had been my only foray into music-related research so far; this enabled me to present a paper in Ossiach and thus attend my first music conference. Incidentally, it was also my first conference in my native country, which I happen to share with Clynes. At the time, I had not heard of Clynes’ work, but I was struck immediately by its originality and its relevance to my musical interests. I was also very skeptical. After reading as many of Clynes’ publications as I could lay my hands on, I decided to conduct a perceptual test of his “composer’s pulse” theory (Clynes, 1977, 1983). He very kindly assisted me by synthesizing the musical materials for that study (Repp, 1989) in his laboratory, as I did not have the necessary equipment and experience then. He also provided much advice which later turned into criticism when I deviated from the original design of the study. I subsequently acquired a digital piano and MIDI software and conducted a second perceptual study with my own materials (Repp, 1990b), as well as an analysis of recorded piano performances in search of the “Beethoven pulse” (Repp, 1990c). Both studies elicited strong critiques from Clynes (1990, 1994), followed by desperate defenses and counterattacks on my part (Repp, 1990a, 1994b). I did not emerge unscathed from this battle. Clearly, my studies had some shortcomings, for which I was duly reprimanded. They were not totally worthless, however: Having appeared in mainstream journals, they attracted attention to Clynes’ important ideas, and they stimulated him to conduct a perceptual study of his own which provided impressive support for his theory (Clynes, 1995). I accept it as the last word on the issue, for the time being. So I entered the world of music research on a rocky path and with bruised knees, but I did not turn back. My initial experiments had been done on the side, as it were, but I soon began to phase out my speech perception research and decided that music research was what I wanted to do henceforth. This decision was facilitated by the liberal atmosphere and generosity of Haskins Laboratories, whose support (together with a 3-month research fellowship from the Institute for Perception Research in Eindhoven) tided me over a few unstable years, until I obtained a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health that, at the time of this writing, is holding my chin above water. In my initial years of music research I carved out a small niche for myself in the sparsely populated research areas of objective performance analysis, perception of expressive microstructure, and experimental aesthetics of music performance. Although every study I conduct reveals how much more I still have to learn, I have never regretted my decision to change fields and am enjoying my research greatly. I am deeply grateful to Manfred Clynes for providing the initial stimulus to change, and for remaining a source of inspiration. |
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