Abstract

For the past decades, insightful memoirs have been published by collaborative pianists, providing an insider’s perspective on the art of piano accompaniment. This paper draws on my doctoral thesis that used an autoethnographic narrative to explore the experiences of collaborative music performance from the perspective of a piano accompanist. The narrative incorporated creative writing elements such as direct speech and descriptive scene setting to recreate the experience of collaborative music performance, allowing the reader to gain some insight into its creative process, and thus understand elements of musical taste and how this impacts on the experience of collaborative music performance. The paper argues that this methodology provides an appropriate way to examine such subjective experiences and that the use of autoethnographic narrative, incorporating creative writing techniques, can be a useful addition to music research methodologies, particularly in the field of music performance research.

Highlights

  • Autoethnography has emerged since the turn of the twenty-first century as a useful methodology for examining personal and collective creative practice (Pace 2012; Bartleet and Ellis 2009a)

  • The complexities of musical stimuli do not allow for a definitive understanding of musical taste and preference, but the role of music as a tool for engaging with the depth of emotions that we experience as humans, demands a closer investigation of experiential psychology, and this can be delivered through autoethnographic investigation

  • The use of memory in the creation of data has been criticised by realist researchers as lacking in rigour and systematicity (Wall 2006), Coffey notes that the process of ethnography relies on the use of memory of the researcher to recall experiences in the field and of the social interactions that were observed by the ethnographer (1999)

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Summary

Introduction

Autoethnography has emerged since the turn of the twenty-first century as a useful methodology for examining personal and collective creative practice (Pace 2012; Bartleet and Ellis 2009a). I read many books and articles about autoethnography, looking at the work of Ellis and Bochner, whose articles in the second and third editions of the Handbook of qualitative research (Denzin and Lincoln 2000, 2005) provided some blueprints for using autoethnography in a scholarly context. Some autoethnographers represent their data in poetry (de Vries 2007), music (de Vries 2006) or art (Holman Jones 2005). This article will look at the construction and presentation of this data and argue that this mobilisation of elements of creative writing was an appropriate way to examine the subjective experiences that occur in the moment of collaborative music performance and the effect of musical taste on the experience itself

The piano accompanist as collaborative artist
The aesthetics of music
Music performance and emotion
Writing autoethnographic narrative
Writing a compelling narrative
Conclusion
Works cited
Full Text
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