2013 Performance Studies Network International Conference (review)

The Second International Conference of the Performance Studies Network (PSN2) took place at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, United Kingdom, 4–7 April 2013. Performance studies are fast becoming a new area of research in music and computing. The conference attracted over 110 participants, of which 66 were from the United Kingdom. The paper authors and special session presenters hailed from 15 different countries—United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Portugal, Spain, Malaysia, China, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Netherlands, and Romania—and included a variety of research backgrounds including musicology, historiography, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

Proposals were invited on all topics in music performance studies that addressed key research questions of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Centre for Music Performance as Creative Practice. The questions included: (1) How is musical performance creative, and what knowledge is creatively embodied in musical performance? (2) How does music in performance, and indeed the very act of performance, take shape over time? (3) How does understanding musical performance as a creative practice vary across different global contexts, idioms, and performance conditions (such as solo and ensemble, in the rehearsal room, recording studio and concert hall)? And (4) In what ways is creativity distributed across the conventional categories of composition, performance, and improvisation?

Although not all papers presented were computer-related, all touched upon topics pertinent to the computer modeling of performance. Additionally, the conference was closely tied to performance not only in theory but also in practice. A highlight of the conference was a concert and a keynote session by the Britten Sinfonia, convened and moderated by John Rink. On the final day, musician participants came together in lively collaboration over an improvisation session at the Creative Workshop facilitated by improvising musicians Jeremy Thurlow, Ewan Campbell, and Lucy Downer. The four-day program was organized into three parallel sessions, which took place in the Recital Room, the Concert Hall, and Lecture Room 2 of the Faculty of Music.

The presentations covered ideas that can be broadly categorized into performance, creativity, and composer-performer-listener communication. Almost all the studies presented focused on some aspect of performance analysis in connection to other domains. A large number of studies were aimed at understanding individual and group creativity. Finally, many talks examined performance as a collective enterprise among different parties—composers create musical pieces that they pass on to performers; performers interpret the pieces and perform them for listeners; and listeners (in the case of a PSN2 workshop) then feed their impressions back to the composers and performers, thus completing the circle. The entire cycle encompasses critical aspects of performance analysis. We have separated out a few additional categories that overlap with this performance analysis cycle, namely: improvisation and composition, creative learning, new interfaces, and speech and audio perception. In total, these seven categories cover the majority of talks at PSN2.

Category 1: Performance

A core topic at the conference was expressivity in performance. Regarding the performer’s identity and musical expression, Claire Holden proposed ways in which performers might exercise individual decision-making in the context of period rules that represent historically informed performances. Further in this direction, Mary Hunter’s talk dealt with how classical performers imagine and articulate individual identities in performing pre-existing works. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Helen Prior brought up the idea of shape in relation to music, showing that performers use a rich vocabulary of words and images as heuristics, or shortcuts, to “map many interactive technical habits into concepts,” and proposed that expressiveness might be a kind of heuristic for mapping sound onto feeling states. Alfonso Benetti, Jr.’s results from interviews with 20 pianists demonstrated that expressive parameters such as melody shaping, emphasis, articulation, structure, rubato, and dynamic contrasts contribute to expressiveness strategies. In a study on J. S...