Ictus 09-2 115 Practic ing perfection: How concert s olois ts prepa re for perfor mance* Roger Chaffin** (University of Connecticut) Tânia Lisboa (Royal College of Music) Abstract: Musical performances by concert soloists in the W estern classical tradition are normally memorized but there is little agreement between musicians about how this is done. T o find out, we have studied concert soloists preparing new works forpublic performance. The musicians’ reports about their musical decisions provide the key to understanding what they are doing in practice. Practice, in turn, provides a window into the musicians’ problem solving strategies. Combining musicians’ subjective reports with the objective record of what they do in practice andperformance provides insight into how they memorize. Perf ormers have a mental map of the piece in mind as they perform that tells them where they are and what comes next — a series of landmarks, hierarchically organized by the sections andsubsections of the music. The musician attends to theseperformance cues in orderto ensure that the performance unfolds as planned. Performance cues are establishedby thinking about a particular feature of the music during practice so that it latercomes to mind automatically. Performance cues help the soloist consciously monitorand control the rapid, automatic actions of playing, while adjusting to the needs ofthe moment. The skills involved in solo perfor mance in the W estern concert tr adition push human mental and physical capabilit ies to their limits. T o reach world- class level, the musician must put in 10-20 years of training and 20,000 hours of practice (Eric sson, Krampe & T esch-Römer, 1998). Once mastered, skills * Originally presented as a keynote lecture during the 18th edition of the ANPPOM annual congress, in Salvador (Bahia - Brazil) - September 2008. **Address corres pondence to: Roger Chaffin. Department of Psychology U-1020. University ofConnecticut. Storrs CT 06269-1020 USA - email: Roger [email protected] - t el: 860-529- 5428
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Abstract:Musical performances by concert soloists in the Western classical tradition
are normally memorized but there is little agreement between musicians about how
this is done. To find out, we have studied concert soloists preparing new works for
public performance. The musicians’ reports about their musical decisions provide
the key to understanding what they are doing in practice. Practice, in turn, provides
a window into the musicians’ problem solving strategies. Combining musicians’
subjective reports with the objective record of what they do in practice and
performance provides insight into how they memorize. Performers have a mental
map of the piece in mind as they perform that tells them where they are and whatcomes next — a series of landmarks, hierarchically organized by the sections and
subsections of the music. The musician attends to these performance cues in order
to ensure that the performance unfolds as planned. Performance cues are established
by thinking about a particular feature of the music during practice so that it later
comes to mind automatically. Performance cues help the soloist consciously monitor
and control the rapid, automatic actions of playing, while adjusting to the needs of
the moment.
The skills involved in solo performance in the Western concert tradition
push human mental and physical capabilities to their limits. To reach world-
class level, the musician must put in 10-20 years of training and 20,000 hours
of practice (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1998). Once mastered, skills
* Originally presented as a keynote lecture during the 18th edition of the ANPPOM annual
congress, in Salvador (Bahia - Brazil) - September 2008.
**Address correspondence to: Roger Chaffin. Department of Psychology U-1020. University of Connecticut. Storrs CT 06269-1020 USA - email: [email protected] - tel: 860-529-
the retrieval cue is not hard, but then it must be practiced to make it rapid
and reliable. This is what most people mean by “memorization”. There is
also another drawback. Content addressable memory involves thinking about
what you are doing. Thinking about highly practiced motor skills is a sure
way to disrupt them. In athletics, this is called “choking” (Beilock & Carr,2001). To think about a complex skill without choking takes practice. Memory
based on associative chaining develops quickly and easily for many people.
Developing reliable, content addressable access to that memory, however,
is a slower and more deliberate process that requires extended practice.
Here is how pianist Gabriela Imreh described the process of integrating
the two types of memory; she was talking about her learning of J.S. Bach’s
Italian Concerto (Presto):
“My fingers were playing the notes just fine. The practice I needed was in my head. I had to learn to keep track of where I was. It was a matter of learning exactly what I needed to bethinking of as I played, and at exactly what point so that as
I approached a switching point I would automatically think about where I was, and which way the switch would go”(Chaffin et al., 2002, p. 224).
What the pianist needed to be thinking of as she played were memory
retrieval cues that provided content addressable access to her memory for
the piece. We call these “ performance cues”. Performance cues are men-
tal landmarks that an experienced musician attends to during performance,
thoroughly rehearsed during practice so that they come to mind automatically
and effortlessly as the piece unfolds, eliciting the highly practiced movements
of fingers, hands, and arms. Performance cues become an integral part of
the performance and provide a means of consciously monitoring and
controlling the rapid, automatic actions of the hands.
There are different types of performance cues. Structural cues are
critical places in the formal structure of the music, such as section boundaries,
where musical material changes, and switches where the same theme or
pattern repeats at different points in the piece and might be confused.
Expressive cues represent musical feelings to be conveyed to the audience,
e.g., surprise or excitement. Interpretive cues are places where some aspect
of interpretation requires attention, e.g., a change of tempo or dynamics.
Basic cues represent the critical details of technique that must be executed
exactly for the performance to unfold as intended, e.g., the use of a particu-
lar fingering in order to set the hand up for what follows. Other ways of
classifying the different types of cues are possible, but this classification has
on one passage where she deliberately created performance cues to solve a
memory problem. Fourth, the cellist wrote out the score from memory after
a 10-month interval of not playing the piece. If performance cues are
landmarks in memory, as we have suggested, then they should be
remembered better than the rest of the piece. Finally we will look at bar-to- bar fluctuations in tempo during performance for evidence that the cellist
thought about performance cues as she played. Hesitations in early practice
performances from memory showed that performance cues were used for
memory retrieval. Fluctuations in tempo at expressive and interpretive cues
during polished performances suggested that performance cues correspond
to the musical gestures embodying the cellist’s musical interpretation.
Learning the PreludeThe cellist video-recorded her practice and public performances
from the first time she sat down with the Prelude until the tenth public
performance, 75 sessions and 3½ years later. She maintained a log in which
she recorded the date, time, and main goal of each session. She avoided
engaging in mental practice and so our data cover the entire 38¼ hours of
preparing the piece except for 16 sessions in which the cellist worked without
the camera to avoid distraction. The total practice time video-recorded was
almost 33 hours. During practice the cellist talked to the camera periodicallyabout what she was doing.
Practice occurred in three main learning periods separated by two
long breaks of 8 and 18 months respectively: (1) initial learning, consisting of
of 41 sessions, totaling 25½ hours, over 4 months, and (3) 2nd re-learning
consisting of 8 sessions, totaling 4¼ hours, over one month (see Figure 1).
There were additional shorter breaks of 1-4 months within learning periods
1 and 2. Eight public performances took place towards the end of learning period 2, two more at the end of learning period 3.
Stages of learning & Types of Practice The cellist identified five stages in her learning: Explore, smooth out,
listen, re-work technique, and prepare performance. These stages correspond
fairly well with those identified by Wicinski (1950, reported in Miklaszewski,
1989) except that Wicinski’s last two stages were repeated . The
correspondence is as follows (with Wicinski’s stages in italics): explore (initialideas), smooth out (work on technical difficulties), listen (trial rehearsals),
re-work technique (work on technical difficulties), prepare performance
(trial rehearsals). We will briefly describe each stage.
Exploration (sessions 1-14). The cellist began her exploration of the
expressive and technical possibilities of the piece by sight-reading through
it. She then focused on successive sections in each session until she reached the end of the piece in session 10. At this point, she was obliged to interrupt
her practice while the camera was repaired. When she returned to the piece
after a 6-week break, she worked through it again, section-by-section, in
sessions 11-14.
Smoothing out (sessions 15-20). In session 15, the cellist prepared
to play through the entire piece from memory, which she did for the first
time at the end of the session. The cellist said before she started playing
from memory, “ I’m going to keep the music here, but see if I can remember
most of it. If I can’t, I’ll just look.”, and as she finished, “Ok, I just about
know it. I think it’s memorized . This was typical. The cellist practiced with
the score open, but played from memory as much as possible.
In sessions 17-20 decisions about fingering and bowing were re-
evaluated; intonation and speed of vibrato were adjusted; and jerky left hand
movements during string changes were smoothed to eliminate unwanted
accents. At the end of session 19 the cellist announced, “I feel I am ready
to move on… I know the notes, bowing and fingering… I need to think
about phrasing [and] harmonies [to] bring them out.”
Listening to the music (sessions 21-32). After two hours of work on
phrasing and harmonies in sessions 21-26, the cellist put the piece aside for
8 months, bringing to an end the first learning period. Work resumed when
she took the opportunity offered by a rehearsal of other repertoire in London’s
Wigmore Hall to see how the Prelude sounded in a “proper” hall. She was
pleased to find that it was: “…[a] wonderful feeling! It is starting to
feel…[like] a real performance.”
Re-working technique (sessions 33-35). The cellist then took a four-
month break, during which time she listened to another musician’s
performance of the piece. She returned to the Prelude with new ideas for
fingering and bowing that were implemented in three long sessions of section-
by-section practice.
Preparing for performance (sessions 36-75). At this point, the cellist
began to prepare for the first public performance, less than a month away.
The first two performances, in Brazil, were followed two months later by
two in the UK. Three weeks later another four performances in the USA
brought the 2nd learning period to an end. After an 18-month break, she
periods – playing started at expressive cues and subsections. Later in each
learning period, expressive cues stopped being the main focus and other
aspects of the music were used as starting points instead. In the second half
of the initial learning period, in the “smoothing-out” stage, playing started at
the beginnings of subsections and at bowing cues. In the second half of the1st relearning period, as she polished her interpretation in preparation for the
first public performance, playing started at interpretive and expressive
performance cues.
The cellist’s concerns changed as practice progressed and are reflected
in where she chose to start. By starting at performance cues, she established
the links between thought and action needed to develop a content-addressable
memory. By doing so throughout the learning process, she developed the
speed and automaticity needed for the cues to work reliably under the
pressures of the concert stage.
Comments about performance cuesThe cellist’s comments during practice provide further support for the
idea that performance cues helped her to remember. We will describe
comments about the memory problem in bars 68-69 that we referred to
earlier (on page 122). The cellist first noted the potential for a problem in
session 8, “ It’s [bars 68-69] exactly the same pattern but…a [4
th
] higher [as bars 66-67 )”. She commented on this again in session 13, “ Next two
bars, the same again”. In session 30, another comment suggests that she
was confusing the two passages when she played from memory and used
the bowing to keep them straight. “Okay, I forgot completely…Well, I
remembered more than I could remember [last time], and the clues [cues]
that I reported to the camera last session actually helped [me] very
much to remember where the up-bows are….” Her comment on session
33 explains why cues were needed, to help her remember. Figure 5 shows
the up-bows reported as performance cues in bars 68 and 69 almost two
years later.
In session 33, the cellist was still having memory problems and suggested,
“ Maybe the dynamics would help because I’ve got a crescendo on the
up-bow.” The crescendo is circled in her report of interpretive performance
cues for bar 68 and annotated “(visual memory) – bowing” (see Figure 7).
The comment explains what this means: Thinking about the crescendo on the
up-bow helped her keep the two passages straight. We saw in the previous
section that interpretive cues were practiced in sessions 33-35 (see Figure 6).
This comment from session 33 shows one reason for this practice — to help
with memory.
This was not the end of the story. In practice session 44, the day
before the first public performance, the cellist had a memory failure in bar
68 during a practice performance. She stopped, swore, and went back for another try. Although she made no further comment, we know what had
happened, because we know the history of this passage. Once again she
had confused bars 66-67 and bars 68-69. The two performance cues that
she had established (for bowing and dynamics) had let her down. Still more
practice was needed to make them function reliably every time.
Recall
Ten months after the end of learning period 2, the cellist wrote out thescore from memory. She had not looked at the score or played the piece in
the intervening months. Probability of correct recall was measured for each
half bar by dividing the number of notes correctly recalled by the number of
notes in the score. Not surprisingly, the cellist’s recall showed substantial
forgetting; accuracy was 52%.
We looked for the landmarks in the cellist’s memory: places that she
remembered better than others. Figure 8 shows the probability of correct
recall as a function of position in a subsection (left panel) and position with
respect to expressive performance cues (middle panel), and basic performance
cues (right panel). The left panel shows that recall was best for the first bar ina subsection and declined for each successive bar that followed – a classic
Figure 7: Example from the Cellist’s Report of Interpretive Performance Cues
These results are remarkably similar to other studies that have looked at
serial position effects for performance cues in written recall (Chaffin et al.,
2002, pp 212-216; Ginsborg & Chaffin, 2007). In each case, there were the
same negative serial position effects for expressive and structural performance
cues and positive serial position effects for basic performance cues. The effectssuggest that expressive and structural cues provide content-addressable access
to memory, while basic performance cues operate by serial cuing.
Hesitations in practice performancesHesitations in practice performance provide another way of showing
that performance cues are used for memory retrieval. Figure 9 shows the
tempo of practice performances measured in half-bars for the entire piece.
The left panel shows the mean tempo of the first three practice performances(in sessions 15-18); the right panel shows the mean tempo for seven practice
performances late in the learning process, after the initial public performances
(in sessions 45-66). There were two pronounced downward spikes in the
early performances, representing substantial, momentary slowing. The
locations of the downward spikes are marked by arrows in the left panel.
The corresponding locations in the right panel of Figure 9 are also marked,
but there are no spikes. There was no slowing in the late performances.
Because slowing occurred only in the early and not in the late practice performances, it was almost certainly due to hesitation rather than to
expressive tempo variation.
Why did the cellist hesitate? Again, her reports provide the answer. At
the location of the first spike, the cellist reported a switch – a place where
the same pattern repeats at different points in the piece. The switch is the
place that the two repetitions begin to diverge. If the musician takes one
continuation, she is at one location in the piece. If she takes the other, then
she is at a different location. The musician has to chose the right continuation
or suddenly find herself switched into an entirely different location in the
piece. Performance cues are needed to ensure that the right switch is made.
The downward spike in the early performances suggests that the cellist
knew that she had to choose but was unsure which path to take. Its absence
in the late performances suggests that memory retrieval was now up to
speed. The knowledge of how to continue came to mind quickly enough that
there was no longer any need to hesitate. The cellist did not report this
switch as a performance cue, but these data suggest that it was functioning
1 0 : B a r - b y - B a r T e m p i o f P o l i s h e d P e r f o r m a n c e s S h o w i n g t h e L o c a t i o n o f E x p r e s s i v e P e r f o r m a n c e C u e s
1 1 : B a r - b y - B a r T e m p i o f P o l i s h e d P e r f o r m a n c e s S h o w i n g t h e L o c a t i o n o f I n t e r p r e t i v e P e r f o r m a n c e C u e s