Musical motion: some historical and contemporary perspectives.
| Number | 923 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1993 |
| Drawer | 17 |
| Entry Date | 07/14/1998 |
| Authors | Repp, B.H. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Royal Swedish Academy of Music, 79, edited by A. Friberg, J. Iwarsson, E. Jansson, and J. Sundberg, SMAC 93, Proceedings of the Stockholm Music Acoustics Conference, July 28 to August 1, 1993, pp. 128-135. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0923.pdf |
| Abstract | The idea that music “moves” has a long and varied history. Some aspects of this notion are metaphoric (e.g. the movements” between pitches, harmonies, or keys), whereas others are more literal. The latter derive from the performer’s actions that bring the music to life. This gestural information is encoded in the expressive microstructure of the performance at several hierarchically nested levels. Some older demonstrations in support of this proposition have used the technique of “accompanying movements”, devised and elaborated in Germany by authors such as Eduard Sievers, Gustav Becking, and Alexander Truslit. Contemporary approaches, most notably those of Manfred Clynes and Neil Todd, focus instead on performance analysis and synthesis. Todd has provided evidence that tempo modulations in expert performances obey a constraint of linear changes in velocity, suggesting that music is “set into motion” by some kind of force or impulse function. Clynes has proposed (following Becking) that the parameters of these underlying functions distinguish different composers. The notion of ‘spatio-temporal’ coupling’, illustrated by Paolo Viviani’s work on drawing movements, suggests a theoretical basis for the recovery of spatial movement from temporal information. Physical laws of motion thus impose constraints on performance microstructure, constraints that are also reflected in listeners’ perception and aesthetic judgments. |
| Notes |
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