Is composition a mode of performing? Questioning musical meaning

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1 International Symposium on Performance Science ISBN The Author 2009, Published by the AEC All rights reserved Is composition a mode of performing? Questioning musical meaning Jorge Salgado Correia Department of Communication and Art, Aveiro University, Portugal The formalist approaches, focusing mainly on scores which are just sets of instructions have missed a significant part of music s processes of meaning production and its communicational dimension. This research is an attempt both to acknowledge the role that personal meanings play in the creation of a composition and of its performance and to verify if composers and performers work from the same mode of knowledge when making their respective meaning constructions. Based on gesture intermodality, a composer and performer created, separately, two video-clips that express the personal meanings that have guided their respective compositional or interpretative choices concerning two sections of a piece for solo flute. The two pairs of video clips were analyzed, compared, and conclusions were drawn. The results showed that, in spite of the different imagery used by composer and performer, the relations of tension and relaxation, movement, and rest were analogous: it appears that the personal meanings of the composer guided his work procedures to create those relations and that the performer has created a personal emotional narrative to give meaning back to those same relations. This study could support future research on the application of gesture intermodality in teaching strategies for musical performance. Keywords: music; meaning; intermodality; composition; performance The fact that performers cultivate a narrative attitude toward performance and performance preparation is a crucial notion for the present research, as it illuminates a range of questions on the difficult issues of musical meaning production. Although referring to listeners, Swanwick (1999) argued that it is our deep personal involvement with music that accounts for the high sense of value that we accord to it:

2 548 Patterns or schemata of old experiences are activated but not as separate entities. They are fused into new relationships. We can thus make an imaginative leap from many old and disparate experiences into a single, coherent new experience. It is this potentially revelatory nature of music that accounts for the high sense of value frequently accorded to it (p. 21). But these processes take place by the performers as well, who, consciously or not, more or less trained and more or less (historically) informed, end up projecting a personal interpretative style; and, we suspect, they take place also by composers, who, again, consciously or not, more or less trained and with more or less erudition, end up producing a score that is inevitably a pale reflection of their creation that is, of the performance that, intimately, they were imagining when composing. We believe that personal meanings play a central role in the creative process, unifying all the dimensions of the musical work and determining decisively the actions and events of a musical performance, be it imagined or actually performed. These meanings guide the performers intentionality in the unifying process of the musical creation and embodiment. However, it is the embodied nature of music that is perhaps most relevant to musical understanding as it will be explored in this article. Based on the theory of enactive cognition (cf. Gibbs 2006, Thompson 2001), Martinez (2008) argued that structural metaphors might, to a certain extent, model music experiences and demonstrated how listeners use the metaphorical component of music cognition to experience the underlying structure of tonal music. For professional performers, music is inseparable from a communicative dramatic attitude, their account of the music they are about to play is always (or, at least, hopefully) an aesthetically oriented narration of dramatic action (Maus 1997, p. 129). After having collected the available information be it anecdotal, historical, or analytic performers create a kind of synthesis, a personal amalgam that they apply to the music material. This synthesis is, thus, much more an open, personal, subjective, symbolic amalgam, emotionally motivated to a large extent, than a reductive, closed, rigorous, conceptual definition, deductively constructed. This synthesis has indeed to be concentrated, like an embryo that develops adapting itself to the environment, in order to pragmatically fulfill its function of (e)motionally exploring the musical material. Putting aside the issues concerning the specific instrumental techniques of each musical genre or style, which are in fact just means of expression, performers hermeneutic approach to scores, in other words, their subjective, symbolically charged, embryonic amalgam has a clear purpose: to create a communicative, convincing narrative of musical

3 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE 549 gestures: performers tell a story and the concert begins with Once upon a time (interview with Patrick Gallois, in Correia 2003). When applying their subjective, symbolically charged, embryonic amalgams to explore (e)motionally the musical pieces, performers are exploring figures, which are constellations of embodied symbolic meanings, and invoking inevitably analogies, metaphors, or, simply, memories. This implies that it is the realm of tacit knowledge that is aimed in this (e)motional exploration, as if the figures would invoke the actual presence of the (e)motional memories and the performers would re-enact them, recuperating their unconscious dimensions to a large extent and making in this way their interpretations more authentic and convincing. But, if composition is as a mode of performing, composers, when composing, should be applying a subjective, symbolically charged, embryonic amalgam as well, actively imagining a performance which would guide their compositional decisions. To find out more about this, and having in mind that one may express through different sense modalities (aurally or visually) the same gestural dynamics and shaping, we designed the experiment we report here. It is based, thus, on the application of the concept of intermodality (cf. Johnson 1987, Hatten 1999), which will enable us to compare the performer s and the composer s personal (embodied) meanings for the same piece. The simple verbal explanation of these meanings would utterly miss the point: their embodiment. Thus, we had to create the conditions under which these personal meanings could be manifested while keeping their embodiment. In order to do that, we asked both performer and composer to express in visual terms (directing videos for two excerpts of the piece) the same subjective, symbolically charged, embryonic amalgam they had created for the musical work. They were asked to translate their personal (embodied) meanings whatever they intimately and introspectively have imagined for each musical excerpt into visible scenes, actions, and physical gestures; our main objective being to understand if the role that embodied meanings play in composition is similar to the role they play in performance. If they play a similar role, then composition should be considered a mode of performing. Participants METHOD Composer was Sara Carvalho, who teaches composition at the University of Aveiro. The performer was Jorge Salgado Correia, who teaches flute at the University of Aveiro. The actors were Joana Carvalho, Graciana Romeo, Juan Capriotti, Miguel Correia, and the author.

4 550 Materials Two excerpts with about 50 seconds duration taken from the work Solos III for flute by Sara Carvalho (CD Nova Música para Flauta 1999, ed. Numérica, No. 1095) were chosen as the musical material upon which the video clips were created. The first excerpt (M1) corresponds to the score measures from 1 to 16; the second excerpt (M2) from measure 123 to 137. For the video recordings, an amateur digital camera was used (Samsung S mega pixels). Procedure Sara Carvalho wrote the script and directed and edited two of the video clips expressing the view of the composer (Cv1, Cv2). She was asked to express in this way the meanings that each of the excerpts had for her when composing the piece Solos III. The performer was asked to do the same for the same two excerpts, reporting himself on the time when he was preparing to perform this piece (Pv1, Pv2). In all videos, the actors were asked to do exactly what the directors required, neutralizing as much as possible any kind of interference. The four videos are available on the internet: search term jorgesalgadocorreia. RESULTS The videos of the composer (Cv1, Cv2) tell the story of a man who sees and meets two women in two different scenarios; in Cv1, the woman is lying in the sun on a beach, and in Cv2, the meeting happens in a coffee shop. In her script the composer explained that, in her narrative for this piece, each section corresponds to a meeting of the same man with different women. The video of the performer for the first (Pv1) excerpt portrays the anxiety of a woman looking for something but trying not to be seen by the boy who happened to be in the same room. In the second video of the performer (Pv2), the camera catches a domestic discussion between a man and a woman. DISCUSSION Beginning with what the two pairs of videos have in common, the main thing to highlight seems to be the profound sense of narrative that all of the videos clearly display. Both composer and performer thought and worked in terms of constructing a narrative, of telling a story. The main structural points of the music beginning with the presentation of a conflict or an opposition (in M1 the opposition between the pizzicatos and the normal notes, in M2 the oppo-

5 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE 551 sition or dialog between low and high registers); growing tension through repetition (in M1 repetition and some degree of stretto, in M2 repetition and ascendant melodic movement); and conclusion (in M1 resolution of the opposition, confluence, in M2 definitive separation of the opposites, divergence) are clearly reproduced in the videos of both composer and performer. Of course, they tell different stories, but it is remarkable how the important structural features are present in both versions. For example, Cv1 and Pv1 both express in the end a sense of success, while Cv2 and Pv2 both express the same feeling of irreparable separation; also the points of highest tension in the videos are the same, corresponding to measure 8 in M1 and measure 135 in M2. It seems, thus, that embodied imagination assisted composer and performer in mapping the same expressive process between different experiential domains, and more importantly, this intermodal or transmodal operation was only possible because the structural features emerged from a system of spatial-temporal organization elaborated upon patterns of image schemata (cf. Johnson 1987). It is this fundamental connection to a bodily ground that makes personal meanings so decisive in musical meaning production and communication. But there was a remarkable difference as well. The two videos of the composer have both the characteristic of suggesting much more psychological action than physical: the viewer is invited to imagine what the characters are feeling and the musical gestures seem to portray much more these emotional experiences than the physical actions of the actors. There are a few exceptions where there is obvious coordination between the musical events and the visible actions in the videos of the composer: at the beginning and the end of Cv1, measure 8 in Cv1 where some agitation in the music is expressed through the movements of the actress, in Cv2 measure 134, and at the end where again and respectively the actor and the actress seem to physically express, say, more literally, the correspondent musical gesture. The physical actions in the two videos of the performer are much more connected with the musical events: the characters move with the music, so to speak, starting and stopping in synchrony with the musical phrases, expressing with movement and physical gestures the relations of tension and relaxation of the music. Only in Pv2 there are two occasions (curiously, both have sustained multiphonics) where the viewer has no physical action to interpret and is, thus, implicitly, invited to imagine what emotions the characters are experiencing; the first is in measure 128, where the man sits impotent and leans with his elbow on the arm of the sofa, and the second is at the end, measure 137, where the man walks devastated away from the woman and toward the window. To our understanding, these two different approaches result directly from the specific

6 552 conditioning of their respective professional activities: the composer is normally giving instructions and suggesting, while the performer is actually doing or performing and, as we have argued, for performers, music is inseparable from a communicative dramatic attitude. So, the videos of the performer reflect this additional preoccupation of communicating as intensively and as clearly as possible, exteriorizing in motion all the emotions. The exploration of this attitude is very useful for performance students as it is the application of gesture intermodality to develop intentionality and, consequently, expressiveness and musicality. Acknowledgments Many thanks to Joana, Graciana, Juan, and Miguel. Address for correspondence Jorge Salgado Correia, Department of Communication and Art, Aveiro University, Campus de Santiago, Aveiro , Portugal; jcorreia@ua.pt References Correia J. S. (2003). Investigating Musical Performance as Embodied Socio-Emotional Meaning Construction: Finding an Effective Methodology for Interpretation. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield. Gibbs R. (2006). Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatten R. (1999). Musical Gesture. Online lectures, Cyber Semiotic Institute, University of Toronto (available from Johnson M. (1987). The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martinez I-C. (2008). Enactive cognition and embodied mind: The imaginative and metaphorical component of music listening. Estudios de Psicología, 29, pp Maus E. F. (1997). Music as drama. In J. Robinson (ed.), Music and Meaning (pp ). Ithaca, New York, USA: Cornell University Press. Swanwick K. (1999). Teaching Music Musically. London: Routledge. Thompson E. (2001). Empathy and consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, pp