Anatomy of a Performance: Sources of Musical Expression

Abstract

Research on music performance often assumes that a performer's intention to emphasize musical structure as specified in a score accounts for most musical expression. Relatively unstudied sources of expression in performance include notational variants of compositional scores, performer-specific aspects, and the cultural norms of a particular idiom, including both stylistic patterns that exist across musical works and expectations that arise from a particular musical context. A case study of an expert performance of a Mozart piano sonata is presented in which influences of historical interpretations of scores, performer-specific treatments of ornamentation and pedaling, and music- theoretic notions of melodic expectancy and tension-relaxation are revealed. Patterns of organization internal to the performance expression transcended the coarsegrained information given in scores, suggesting that performance is a better starting point than a musical score for testing theories of many musical behaviors.