MUSICAL EXPRESSION AND INTERPRETATION

Musical Expression and Interpretation

Musical Expression and Interpretation

Introduction

Recent discourse has established a prevailing view of musical expression, the stated goal of NIME, one that relies heavily on the paradigm of western instrumental music. In this tradition, a composer creates a piece of music and notates it in a symbolic way. A performer then interprets the symbolic notation, thus rendering the piece as a performance to be experienced by a listener. Musical expression is a commonly held view that there is something other than sound itself to be communicated in music. The study of performance practice addresses “deviation” from the ideal of a score. It is in this deviation or “deformation” that many authors locate expression by a performer. Music is therefore conceptually divided into a predetermined part and a part contributed by the performer. Musicological literature distinguishes between the text notated symbolic artifact of the piece; and the act is an active interpretation of the text.

The Content of Musical Expression

As important as the concept of deviation from the text is the notion that there exist extra sonic artifacts that are somehow transmitted along with or through the music. “Performers communicate musical expression to listeners by a process of coding. Listeners receive music expression by decoding a consequence of this model is a search for standardized encodings of expressive or emotional artifacts within music. These encodings can be alternately conceived as natural mappings of musical cues to biological and/or psychological processes or as belonging to a kind of language of expression, with its own syntax and semantics that exists partly by convention and partly by design. The encoded content of musical expression is normally considered to be “emotion”. Psychologists and philosophers have debated whether emotional expression in music is necessarily a reflection of the inner-emotions of the composer/performer, or if emotional meaning can be “composed”. A profound philosophical question is how music can cause emotions in a listener without an explicit object for these emotions. For example, we can describe music with terms such as anger or love, without being angry or in love with anyone or anything in particular. With few exceptions, NIME has been conspicuously silent on what the expressive content of music should be. From the literature, we gather that it is not necessarily emotion that is the goal, but rather articulation of what Bill Verplank calls “style”: the ability to perform a prescribed act (e.g. play a melody) in a unique and personal way.

Rigorous and Pragmatic Analysis

Conflation of an Undefined Expressive Content with the Means of Expression Whatever this undefined expressive content in our community's discourse may be its mention frequently elicits a discussion of the specific ways in which musical performance countenances this expressive content: Scholars enumerate features of musical styles or consider strategies for performer-gesture-interface-sound mappings. In proceeding directly to the means of expression, this kind of argument conflates an ambiguously defined expressive content with the means by which it is expressed. A variation on this approach locates expression in the range ...