Zoekresultaten

Music and Business Cycles

Proceedings of the IASPM Benelux conference. Popular Music: Theory and Practice in the Lowlands.

Musicking in Groningen

This study focuses on the uses and functions of music in the life of individuals in the province of Groningen at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The study is an ethnomusicological study representing the sub-discipline of ethnomusicology-at-home. It uses Andreas Reckwitz’ formulation of practice theory as a theoretical starting point and introduces methodological principles from the field of qualitative sociology. Central in the study is the individual. 30 theoretically sampled individuals recounted their musical biographies in narrative-biographical interviews, which were analyzed in detail and eventually led to a sufficiently suggested grounded theory of the uses and functions of music in Groningen AD 2010. The theory consists o three interrelated compartments. The first compartment contains a description o the uses o music a expressed b the interviewees. ‘Use’ refers t the ‘customary exercise o music’ i concrete musical social situations. The result o this study i of this study. The study describes how three cultural codes seem to be shared amongst many (though not all) of the interviewees: the codes of playing an instrument, craftsmanship, and musicality, together forming the supercode of the music specialist. These three more general codes are combined with two further codes to form the highly specific and culturally hegemonic musical subject culture of art music, expressing that music is a specialism; it is the craft of playing an instrument by talented individuals; that this craftsmanship must be combined with expressivity; and that through this form of specialized expression musical objects come into being which represent the ideal realm of the artistic. By discussing this attempt at a grounded theory of the uses and functions of music in Groningen AD 2010, a picture is delivered of how individuals become musical individuals. Through their musicking in the context of concrete musical social situations they use music for the functions of affirmation, connection and regulation of the self; and they do this in the context of a web of cultural codes labeling shared and disputed – and sometimes hegemonic – ways of doing and talking. An evaluation of the theory and methodology used in this study shows that both assist in further developing the field of ethnomusicology(-at-home); an evaluation of the results in the light of existing research shows that they contribute to further insights into the uses and functions of music. Four areas for further research are mentioned: typologizing the uses and functions of music, musical discourses, musical subject cultures, and the place of the musical subject order of art music in contemporary society. The study ends with a description of the possible implications for conservatoires. Conservatoires are recommended to encourage students to think of their future audiences in the broadest possible terms, taking into account the wide variety of uses and functions of music figuring in the daily lives of musicking individuals. They are encouraged to make students look upon themselves (also) as service providers, and as such to be open and non-judgmental in their relationships towards the musical other. Conservatoires are recommended to translate this into their curricula by devising transformative projects in which students meet ‘musical others’, and by encouraging their students to take their possible audiences into account consciously in any musical social situation they devise or find themselves in.

The inquisitive, entrepreneurial and reflective attitude in a master of music

Promuse: professional integration of musicians and continuing education in music

Behavioral quantification of audiomotor transformations in improvising and score-dependent musicians

The historically developed practice of learning to play a music instrument from notes instead of by imitation or improvisation makes it possible to contrast two types of skilled musicians characterized not only by dissimilar performance practices, but also disparate methods of audiomotor learning. In a recent fMRI study comparing these two groups of musicians while they either imagined playing along with a recording or covertly assessed the quality of the performance, we observed activation of a right-hemisphere network of posterior superior parietal and dorsal premotor cortices in improvising musicians, indicating more efficient audiomotor transformation. In the present study, we investigated the detailed performance characteristics underlying the ability of both groups of musicians to replicate music on the basis of aural perception alone. Twenty-two classically trained improvising and score-dependent musicians listened to short, unfamiliar two-part excerpts presented with headphones. They played along or replicated the excerpts by ear on a digital piano, either with or without aural feedback. In addition, they were asked to harmonize or transpose some of the excerpts either to a different key or to the relative minor. MIDI recordings of their performances were compared with recordings of the aural model. Concordance was expressed in an audiomotor alignment score computed with the help of music information retrieval algorithms. Significantly higher alignment scores were found when contrasting groups, voices, and tasks. The present study demonstrates the superior ability of improvising musicians to replicate both the pitch and rhythm of aurally perceived music at the keyboard, not only in the original key, but also in other tonalities. Taken together with the enhanced activation of the right dorsal frontoparietal network found in our previous fMRI study, these results underscore the conclusion that the practice of improvising music can be associated with enhanced audiomotor transformation in response to aurally perceived music.

Cerebral activations related to audition-driven performance imagery in professional musicians

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to study the activation of cerebral motor networks during auditory perception of music in professional keyboard musicians (n=12). The activation paradigm implied that subjects listened to two-part polyphonic music, while either critically appraising the performance or imagining they were performing themselves. Two-part polyphonic audition and bimanual motor imagery circumvented a hemisphere bias associated with the convention of playing the melody with the right hand. Both tasks activated ventral premotor and auditory cortices, bilaterally, and the right anterior parietal cortex, when contrasted to 12 musically unskilled controls. Although left ventral premotor activation was increased during imagery (compared to judgment), bilateral dorsal premotor and right posterior-superior parietal activations were quite unique to motor imagery. The latter suggests that musicians not only recruited their manual motor repertoire but also performed a spatial transformation from the vertically perceived pitch axis (high and low sound) to the horizontal axis of the keyboard. Imagery-specific activations in controls were seen in left dorsal parietal-premotor and supplementary motor cortices. Although these activations were less strong compared to musicians, this overlapping distribution indicated the recruitment of a general 'mirror-neuron' circuitry. These two levels of sensori-motor transformations point towards common principles by which the brain organizes audition-driven music performance and visually guided task performance.