Expression and Movement in Music
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Hearing through the Body: Expression and Movement in Music Georgios Papageorgiou Music Department, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom 2012 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Georgios Papageorgiou, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 2 Abstract This thesis engages with complex issues of musical expression and movement, and their relation, on the one hand, to musical structure and, on the other hand, to embodied musical experience. It aims to fill a gap in music theory and analysis: most methods overemphasise abstract conceptualisation of structural relations at the expense of the more dynamic, intuitive aspect of musical experience. As a solution, it offers a specific analytical method that can be used to explore dynamic aspects of music as experienced through the whole body. Drawing mainly on nineteenth-century piano music, I analyse aspects of structure in both composition and performance in terms of expressive and motional qualities, revealing the relationship between musical and physical movement. Expressivity in music derives its meaning, at least partly, from the embodied experience of music: performers shape expression through their whole body while listeners react to it in a comparable way, albeit less overtly. Two related systems of graphic notation are introduced, which provide a non-verbal means of representing expressive movement and at the same time encourage an immediate, visceral relationship to the music. The first notation captures the animated quality of expressive movement by analogy with the motion of a bouncing ball, while the second breaks down the expressive musical flow into discrete gestural patterns of specific motional character. While the ultimate value of this method lies in the analytical process it instigates, it also provides a novel theoretical framework that sheds light on the interaction, as well as integration, between structures such as metre, rhythm, harmony and voice-leading, which are traditionally studied mostly independently. In addition, it provides a useful tool for the study and communication of performance interpretation, based on data extracted from recordings in the form of tempo and dynamic fluctuation graphs. 3 Copyright © Georgios Papageorgiou, 2012 All rights reserved. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the author’s prior consent. 4 Table of Contents Abstract ...........................................................................................................................3 Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................7 List of Figures .................................................................................................................9 Media Examples ............................................................................................................ 18 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 20 Chapter 1: The Gap between Theory and Practice .......................................................... 37 1.1 The conflict between theorists and performers .................................................................. 38 1.2 Thinking through the body................................................................................................... 41 1.3 Rational thinking .................................................................................................................. 45 1.4 Eurhythmicising Music Theory ............................................................................................. 48 Chapter 2: Towards an Integrated/Rhythmicised Music Theory ..................................... 60 2.1 The reductionist approach ................................................................................................... 62 2.2 Analysis through/as performance ....................................................................................... 77 2.3 Rhythmicising stability and instability................................................................................. 82 2.4 Gestural process at the forefront ....................................................................................... 97 2.5 Metre opposed to rhythm ................................................................................................ 108 2.6 Integrating musical structures .......................................................................................... 121 Chapter 3: Music Analysis through Movement ............................................................ 132 3.1 Musical expression as movement ..................................................................................... 132 3.2 The “Bouncing Ball” analogy .............................................................................................. 143 3.3 Gestural motion ................................................................................................................. 158 Chapter 4: Musical Structure and Experience ............................................................... 173 4.1 Musical structure and experience ..................................................................................... 173 4.2 Compositional structure and Expressive Potential ............................................................ 176 4.3 Performance structure and Experienced Expression ......................................................... 198 Chapter 5: Analysis of Performance Interpretation ....................................................... 212 5. 1 Tempo and dynamic fluctuation ....................................................................................... 213 5.2 Isolating tempo and dynamics .......................................................................................... 233 5. 3 Dynamo-Tempo graphs ..................................................................................................... 251 5. 4 Dynamo-Tempo patterns .................................................................................................. 255 5.5 Special surface-level expressive effects ............................................................................ 270 Epilogue: Playing with Gestures .................................................................................. 283 6.1 «Alice»: Engaging students through story telling ............................................................. 283 5 6.2 The “Bouncing Ball”: Analysis through virtual movement ................................................ 286 6.3 Structuring expressive movement ..................................................................................... 290 6.4 Performing through virtual gestures ................................................................................. 294 References ................................................................................................................... 298 Discography ................................................................................................................ 318 Appendix A ................................................................................................................. 319 List of Terms ............................................................................................................................. 320 6 Acknowledgments I am grateful to my supervisor Nicholas Cook for providing close guidance throughout the whole process of researching and writing my thesis. I would also like to thank all those who provided any kind of help to me and especially my professors at the University of Oregon (Steve Larson, Robert Hurwitz, Jack Boss, Harold Owen and Angelo Dias), my professors at the Eastman School of Music (William Marvin, David Temperley, Matthew Brown, Daniel Harrison, Marie Rolf, Steve Laitz, Robert Wason, Matt BaileyShea and David Headlam), professors and staff members at Royal Holloway (Julie Brown, Julian Johnson, Henry Stobart and Elias Nanette), Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Mine Do ğantan Dack. Many thanks also to my friends and to Constantinos Xenofontos. I would like to express my biggest thanks to my parents and family whose patience, love and endless support were invaluable. 7 To my parents 8 List of Figures Figure 1.1 Interdependence of bodily and cognitive processes with embodied metaphors. Figure 1.2 Reproduction of Figure 3.7 from Pierce’s Deepening Musical Performance (p. 61) showing a graphic representation of a contouring exercise on Debussy’s “Bruyères”, bars 1-4. Figure 1.3 Snapshot of the “Performance Worm” visualisation of the first four bars of Daniel Barenboim’s performance of Mozart’s F major sonata K.332, second movement. Figure 1.4 A Mozart Performance “Alphabet” (cluster prototypes) computed by Segmentation, Mean, and Variance Normalisation and Clustering from performances of Mozart Piano Sonatas by six pianists. Figure 1.5 John Rink’s Figure 10.2 showing an “intensity curve” of “Valée d’Obermann” based on the author’s performance. Figure 2.1 Schumann’s “Aus meinen Tränen spriessen” from Dichterliebe. Figure 2.2 Reproduction of Schenker’s Example 22b from Free Composition . Figure 2.3 Reproduction of Lerdahl