Expressive goals for performing musicians: The case of clarinetists

Abstract

Music can convey emotions. Even in the performance of written rather than improvised music, the performer can modify the way they play particular elements of the music to convey specific emotions. Considerable research attention has been paid to the ways in which performers convey a small set of so-called basic emotions. In the current work, we investigated how musicians think they can convey a larger set of emotions in their performances by modifying musical elements and varying playing parameters. We presented 12 clarinetists trained in Western classical music with 55 pairs of expressive goals (EGs) derived from a list of 11 (e.g., to make the music sound happy, sad, or expressive), and asked them to provide similarity judgments for each pair representing how well they thought they would be able to distinguish between them when performing four excerpts of music, and how they would do it. The similarity judgments produced dissimilarity scores that were grouped using cluster analysis to form six independent, coherent clusters of EGs. Four clusters consisted of, or included, EGs representing four basic emotions: happy/ humorous; sad; angry/mad/ugly; and fearful. The other two clusters consisted of the EGs expressive/overly expressive/beautiful and deadpan. We therefore suggest that this set of six clusters could be used in future research on emotional and musical expression in music. Participants reported that to achieve specific EGs, they would vary the way they played a wider range of musical elements than in previous studies, albeit including many of the same elements. Among the playing parameters they reported, reed-bite force was mentioned most often, with consistent associations between more force and ugly or angry, and between less force and fearful and expressive EGs.