Expressive Devices and Perceived Musical Character in 34 Performances of Variation 7 from Bach's Goldbergvariations

Abstract

Ninety-eight undergraduate music students rated thirty-four commercial sound recordings of Bach's variation 7 from the Goldberg Variations in an attempt to better understand the relationship between performance features and perceived musical character. The movement is in 6/8 and is characterised by a repeating dotted pattern. The piece is known to be played to express a variety of musical characters because of the two versions of the piece, one implying a pastorale interpretation, the other a gigue. Past literature predicted the performance of dotting to be the most important determining factor in establishing musical character in eighteenth century compositions where dotted patterns prevail. However, recent research suggests that the perception of dotting is convoluted by articulation and tempo. Using clustering techniques, five distinct and varied musical characters were evoked consistently across the performances (each cluster represented by the word bright, playful, delicate, majestic or agitated), as judged by the participants using an adjective checklist. The same participants rated the following performance features: tempo, articulation, dotting and loudness. Each of these features made statistically significant contributions in distinguishing between character clusters. However, dotting made a relatively small contribution. Regression analysis indicated that 65% of variation in judged dotting response could be explained as a linear combination of articulation and tempo. The study suggests that reducing musical character to dotting neglects the more significant contribution made by articulation, tempo and loudness.