Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
King's College London, Music, Faculty Member
- Psychology, Music, Digital Humanities, Evolution of Music, Performance Studies (Music), Music Psychology, and 18 moreCognitive Science, Visualization, Performance Studies, Empirical Musicology, Systematic Musicology, Music Cognition, Music Performance, Embodied Cognition, Gesture, Embodied Music Cognition, Performance Practice, Embodiment, Cognitive Psychology, Voice Emotion Recognition, Motion Capture, Music Therapy, Music Perception, and Philosophy of Music Educationedit
- For more recent publications, including many PDFs, see https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/daniel.leech-wilki... moreFor more recent publications, including many PDFs, see https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/daniel.leech-wilkinson/publications/
For biography see https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/professor-daniel-leech-wilkinsonedit
ed Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Helen M Prior (New York: Oxford University Press)
Research Interests:
This is a book in progress. It’s about freeing classical music performance from unnecessary rules and constraints, and the benefits that might bring for performers and audiences. I’m writing it during 2019–20, and posting chapters in... more
This is a book in progress. It’s about freeing classical music performance from unnecessary rules and constraints, and the benefits that might bring for performers and audiences. I’m writing it during 2019–20, and posting chapters in first draft as they’re written. I’d very much like feedback, in the light of which I’ll make improvements. So the text will grow and change. Please follow it, and let me know what you think at daniel.leech-wilkinson@kcl.ac.uk. Please let others know at @ChalPerformance and anywhere that classical musicians follow.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Introduction Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink Personal takes: learning to live with recording Susan Tomes A short take in praise of long takes Peter Hill 1. Performing for (and against) the microphone... more
Introduction Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink Personal takes: learning to live with recording Susan Tomes A short take in praise of long takes Peter Hill 1. Performing for (and against) the microphone Donald Greig Personal takes: producing a credible voice Mike Howlett 'It could have happened': the evolution of music construction Steve Savage 2. Recording practices and the role of the producer Andrew Blake Personal takes: still small voices Jonathan Freeman-Attwood Broadening horizons: 'performance' in the studio Michael Haas 3. Getting sounds: the art of sound engineering Albin Zak Personal takes: limitations and creativity in recording and performance Martyn Ware Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978-80 Richard Witts 4. The politics of the recording studio Louise Meintjes Personal take: from Lanza to Lassus Tully Potter 5. From wind-up to iPod: techno-cultures of listening Arild Bergh and Tia DeNora Personal take: a matte...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
You don't need special techniques to analyse recordings: important work has been done using nothing more complicated than a CD player and a pencil to mark up a score, or a stopwatch to measure the duration of movements or sections of... more
You don't need special techniques to analyse recordings: important work has been done using nothing more complicated than a CD player and a pencil to mark up a score, or a stopwatch to measure the duration of movements or sections of them. But it's possible to make your observations more precise, to sharpen your hearing, and to explore the detail of recordings by using simple computer-based techniques. This document introduces a range of them and their uses, though it doesn't attempt to teach you everything you need to know in order to use the programs mentioned—for this you will need to refer to their user guides and help screens. All programs run under Windows (Audacity and Sonic Visualiser are also available for Linux and Mac OS/X), can be downloaded from the web, and are free. Remember that urls can change: if those given don't work, try Google.
Research Interests:
Cortot’s piano playing offers many opportunities to consider the relationship between sound, meaning, emotion, calculation, personality, society, and music. The key evidence at the heart of these interrelationships can be found in a... more
Cortot’s piano playing offers many opportunities to consider the relationship between sound, meaning, emotion, calculation, personality, society, and music. The key evidence at the heart of these interrelationships can be found in a detailed analysis of data describing timing and loudness in his recorded performances. A study of his 1926 and (recently rediscovered) 1928 recordings of Chopin Preludes, viewed through Sonic Visualiser software (www.sonicvisualiser.org), is used as a focus for a discussion of Cortot’s mythical expressive spontaneity.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Psychology and Perception
Research Interests:
Guillaume de Machaut was an important fourteenth-century French poet and composer. The four-part Messe de Nostre Dame is historically significant as the earliest example of a complete, stylistically coherent, through-composed setting of... more
Guillaume de Machaut was an important fourteenth-century French poet and composer. The four-part Messe de Nostre Dame is historically significant as the earliest example of a complete, stylistically coherent, through-composed setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by a single composer. The setting has close connections with Reims Cathedral and is thought to have been composed in the early 1360s, becoming a memorial mass on the death of Machaut's brother in 1372. It would most likely have been performed by unaccompanied solo male voices, and the suggested scoring for modern performance is two altos and two tenors or two tenors and two baritones. The five movements of the Mass are followed by a short dismissal, Ite missa est.
Research Interests:
The standard model of musical transmission, in which composers embody their intentions in works which they encode in scores which performers (and scholars in their imagination) decode as accurately as possible for audiences, is unpicked... more
The standard model of musical transmission, in which composers embody their intentions in works which they encode in scores which performers (and scholars in their imagination) decode as accurately as possible for audiences, is unpicked in the light of the evidence of recorded performance. It is replaced with a model that recognizes the large extent to which performances trigger the generation of musical meaning in the minds of listeners, and the extent to which changes in performance style cause those meanings to change. Some implications for thought about music are considered.
This Afterword to the special issue on Virtuosity takes the main contributions to the issue as a starting-point for a discussion of the normality of virtuosity, the anxieties it creates for performers, and the politics of virtuosity.... more
This Afterword to the special issue on Virtuosity takes the main contributions to the issue as a starting-point for a discussion of the normality of virtuosity, the anxieties it creates for performers, and the politics of virtuosity. Conclusions from Izabela Wagner’s (2015) study of the training of violin virtuosi are outlined. The relationship between virtuosity and conformity is considered. And suggestions are offered for increased virtuosity of creativity in the performance of western classical scores.
Research Interests:
Alfred Cortot's 1920 recording of Chopin's Berceuse has some unusual properties – illustrated here in a discussion of the relationships among rubato, loudness, variation form and melody – which shed new light on the score and... more
Alfred Cortot's 1920 recording of Chopin's Berceuse has some unusual properties – illustrated here in a discussion of the relationships among rubato, loudness, variation form and melody – which shed new light on the score and exemplify the pianist's ability to trigger embodied metaphor with unusual intensity. Comparisons with other recordings are made, and Jeffrey Kallberg's image of the Berceuse as a music box is considered in relation to the layout of the score and Cortot's performance. Drawing on the work of Antonio Cascelli, I compare Schenker's and Cortot's readings of melodic structure, which demonstrate the ecological validity of Cortot's construction. Some of the many respects in which analysis depends upon performance are discussed, as is the likelihood of very different performances in the future and the expectation that analysis will adapt itself to changing approaches to performance. The article is illustrated by Sonic Visualiser analyses presented as YouTube videos.
Research Interests:
Performance style is conceptualised as a collection of small ‘expressive gestures’ consisting of changes in frequency, loudness or duration within or between notes or phrases. Collections differ somewhat between individuals (personal... more
Performance style is conceptualised as a collection of small ‘expressive gestures’ consisting of changes in frequency, loudness or duration within or between notes or phrases. Collections differ somewhat between individuals (personal style) and change in content over time (period style). The changing style of Elena Gerhardt (1883–1965), as documented in her recordings of Schubert Lieder (1911–1939), is analysed through her habits of timbre, vibrato, scoops, portamento, tuning, and rubato. Beneath the general impression of consistency throughout her career, more detailed analysis of the data, especially concerning vibrato and rubato, reveals a process of gradual evolution consistent with the hypothesis that performance style changes in unrecognisably small steps which accumulate rapidly across a musical culture.
Research Interests:
Previous research comparing musically trained and untrained individuals has yielded valuable insights into music cognition and behaviour. Here, we explore two aspects of musical engagement previously studied separately, auditory-visual... more
Previous research comparing musically trained and untrained individuals has yielded valuable insights into music cognition and behaviour. Here, we explore two aspects of musical engagement previously studied separately, auditory-visual correspondences and sensorimotor skills, in a novel real-time drawing paradigm. To that end, musically trained and untrained participants were presented with 18 short sequences of pure tones varying in pitch, loudness and tempo, as well as two short musical excerpts. Using an electronic graphics tablet, participants were asked to represent the sound stimuli visually by drawing along with them while they were played. Results revealed that the majority of participants represented pitch with height (higher on the tablet referring to higher pitches), and loudness with the thickness of the line (thicker line for louder sounds). However, musically untrained participants showed a greater diversity of representation strategies and tended to neglect pitch info...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Over the past 100 years musicology and performance have had an uncomfortable relationship. Until recently musicologists tended to assume that they were uniquely qualified to tell performers how music should go: historians knew which... more
Over the past 100 years musicology and performance have had an uncomfortable relationship. Until recently musicologists tended to assume that they were uniquely qualified to tell performers how music should go: historians knew which instruments were used, ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
One of the many promising developments in attitudes towards the performance of early music is that an increasing number of scholar-performers are prepared to admit that most of what they do in constructing a performance style isof... more
One of the many promising developments in attitudes towards the performance of early music is that an increasing number of scholar-performers are prepared to admit that most of what they do in constructing a performance style isof necessityof their own in vention. 1 ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The concept of shape is widely used by musicians in talking and thinking about performance, yet the mechanisms that afford links between music and shape are little understood. Work on the psychodynamics of everyday life by Daniel Stern... more
The concept of shape is widely used by musicians in talking and thinking about performance, yet the mechanisms that afford links between music and shape are little understood. Work on the psychodynamics of everyday life by Daniel Stern and on embodiment by Mark Johnson suggests relationships between the multiple dynamics of musical sound and the dynamics of feeling and motion. Recent work on multisensory and precognitive sensory perception and on the role of bimodal neurons in the sensorimotor system helps to explain how shape, as a percept representing changing quantity in any sensory mode, may be invoked by dynamic processes at many stages of perception and cognition. These processes enable ‘shape’ to do flexible and useful work for musicians needing to describe the quality of musical phenomena that are fundamental to everyday musical practice and yet too complex to calculate during performance.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Music, Music Education, and 13 morePsychology of Music, Auditory Perception, Gesture, Music Psychology, Embodied Cognition, Embodiment, Empirical Musicology, Medicine, Cross-modality, Kinect, Motion Capture, Cross-modal Perception, and Frontiers in Psychology
Research Interests:
Le Voir Dit is one of the most fascinating of the works left by the celebrated poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), and at the same time, as John Stevens has said, ‘one of the most curious documents of the [fourteenth] century’.... more
Le Voir Dit is one of the most fascinating of the works left by the celebrated poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), and at the same time, as John Stevens has said, ‘one of the most curious documents of the [fourteenth] century’. Through 9000 lines of narrative, sixty-two lyrics in all the main forms (nine of them set to music), and forty-six letters which include comments on the character of the songs and on the business of producing poetry, music and manuscripts, we seem to take a guided tour of Machaut's emotional and professional life over three years of his old age. For more than a century it has proved a rich source of revealing quotations, sustaining many varied arguments. The story it tells of Machaut's literary and emotional affair with a young girl, Peronne, has been read at times as autobiography, at times as fiction; and the incidental comments on composition, performance and copying have been interpreted in studies ranging far beyond Le Voir Dit as evide...
PMM 4/2 contained a review by Susan Fast of Matthew Balensuela's new edition of the anonymous fourteenth-century treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris. Both Balensuela and Fast were struck by the theorist's... more
PMM 4/2 contained a review by Susan Fast of Matthew Balensuela's new edition of the anonymous fourteenth-century treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris. Both Balensuela and Fast were struck by the theorist's use of extracts from pieces by Nicholas de Aversa, about whom nothing more is known. The theorist quotes from compositions of others that we do know from surviving sources, including Landini's Donna die d'antor senta and some well-known motets, and in these cases he seems, as Balensuela points out, to be quoting from a rough memory of how the music goes rather than from a copy; his examples never correspond precisely to the music as we know it, yet similar passages in these pieces do illustrate the notational devices he is discussing. Consequently we may not expect to learn much about de Aversa from these (probable mis-)quotations.
ABSTRACTEarly recordings raise fundamental questions about our response to music. Why do these performances seem so strange to us? How could they ever have made musical sense to listeners? How might we make sense of them now, in our very... more
ABSTRACTEarly recordings raise fundamental questions about our response to music. Why do these performances seem so strange to us? How could they ever have made musical sense to listeners? How might we make sense of them now, in our very different music-cultural environment? This paper looks at some of the ways in which musical sounds model other processes involving change over time. A mechanism is proposed that may underlie the cross-domain mappings generating musical meaning. Music is seen to be exceptionally adaptable to the modelling of other experiences, able to offer many potential likenesses, among which those with most relevance to what an individual brain already knows and believes are favoured by conscious perception. Performance and perception styles change over time as certain kinds of potential meaning are selected for their relevance to other aspects of contemporary experience. The model helps to explain how subjectivity is constructed and how it changes.
Research Interests:
It is a curious feature of Dowland's Second Booke ofSongs (1600) that 'Flow my teares', his texting of the Lachrimae Pavan, is placed second. One might expect that a work already admired, emulated and bowdlerized would more... more
It is a curious feature of Dowland's Second Booke ofSongs (1600) that 'Flow my teares', his texting of the Lachrimae Pavan, is placed second. One might expect that a work already admired, emulated and bowdlerized would more naturally have headed the collection whose melan-choly ...
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT
Research Interests:
This chapter discusses concepts and terms that professional musicians find useful in preparing for and talking and thinking about expressive performance. An example is “shape,” which, as recent research has shown, is immensely flexible... more
This chapter discusses concepts and terms that professional musicians find useful in preparing for and talking and thinking about expressive performance. An example is “shape,” which, as recent research has shown, is immensely flexible and useful for sharing ideas about how to generate expressive performance without having to specify exactly which sounds might be required. The word is used between musical performers with a high level of mutual understanding, as a way of communicating expressive features that are actually very difficult to articulate in more detail. Further examples of heuristics for musical expression are drawn from a recent interview study of professional musicians, and their implications are discussed. It is argued that this kind of terminology, easily dismissed as superficial or vague, is in fact precisely targeted to the nature of the task and is highly effective in use by musicians.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The concept of shape is widely used by musicians in talking and thinking about performance, yet the mechanisms that afford links between music and shape are little understood. Work on the psychodynamics of everyday life by Stern (2004,... more
The concept of shape is widely used by musicians in talking and thinking about performance, yet the mechanisms that afford links between music and shape are little understood. Work on the psychodynamics of everyday life by Stern (2004, 2010) and on embodiment by Johnson (2007) suggest relationships between the multiple dynamics of musical sound and the dynamics of feeling and motion. Recent work on multisensory and precognitive sensory perception, and the role of bi-modal neurons in the sensorimotor system, helps to explain how shape, as a percept representing changing quantity in any sensory mode, may be invoked by dynamic processes at many stages of perception and cognition. These processes enable ‘shape’ to do flexible and useful work for musicians needing to describe the quality of musical phenomena fundamental to everyday musical practice and yet too complex for practitioners to analyse or specify.
Read at https://www.musicandpractice.org/volume-3/ . Responses to eight questions posed by Erlend Hovland. 1) If higher music education is in crisis, how do we judge its seriousness and where do we seek the solution? 2) How... more
Read at https://www.musicandpractice.org/volume-3/ .
Responses to eight questions posed by Erlend Hovland. 1) If higher music education is in crisis, how do we judge its seriousness and where do we seek the solution? 2) How conservative can the conservatoire be? 3) Should the conservatoire accept that the prospects of the few should dictate its educational practices and its criteria of success? 4) To what extent do the educational practices sustain a power structure where the student cannot claim ownership and agency? 5) Shall the conservatoire educate craft-persons or artists? 6) How can we enhance the aesthetic reflection both inside and outside our institutions? 7) Does the conservatoire need ‘critical friends’? 8) Are we educating too many musicians?
Responses to eight questions posed by Erlend Hovland. 1) If higher music education is in crisis, how do we judge its seriousness and where do we seek the solution? 2) How conservative can the conservatoire be? 3) Should the conservatoire accept that the prospects of the few should dictate its educational practices and its criteria of success? 4) To what extent do the educational practices sustain a power structure where the student cannot claim ownership and agency? 5) Shall the conservatoire educate craft-persons or artists? 6) How can we enhance the aesthetic reflection both inside and outside our institutions? 7) Does the conservatoire need ‘critical friends’? 8) Are we educating too many musicians?
Read at https://challengingperformance.com/dido-belinda/#1511203354013-d73eecc6-d3dc . Attacks the policing of classical music performance, and offers 'Dido & Belinda' (Helios Collective, 2016) as an example of a legitimate use of a... more
Read at https://challengingperformance.com/dido-belinda/#1511203354013-d73eecc6-d3dc .
Attacks the policing of classical music performance, and offers 'Dido & Belinda' (Helios Collective, 2016) as an example of a legitimate use of a classical score today. The same website includes a video of a complete performance, preceded by an 8' documentary on the making of 'D & B'. Developed from a talk introducing performances of 'Dido & Belinda', the paper provides some historical and philosophical justification for a radical rereading of 'Dido & Aeneas' as currently conceived that embraces music as much as, and in parallel with staging.
Attacks the policing of classical music performance, and offers 'Dido & Belinda' (Helios Collective, 2016) as an example of a legitimate use of a classical score today. The same website includes a video of a complete performance, preceded by an 8' documentary on the making of 'D & B'. Developed from a talk introducing performances of 'Dido & Belinda', the paper provides some historical and philosophical justification for a radical rereading of 'Dido & Aeneas' as currently conceived that embraces music as much as, and in parallel with staging.
Research Interests:
Musicians use a rich vocabulary of images to describe the effects they wish (or wish others) to produce. These function as heuristics, short-cuts based on experience that solve problems too complex to resolve at sufficient speed using... more
Musicians use a rich vocabulary of images to describe the effects they wish (or wish others) to produce. These function as heuristics, short-cuts based on experience that solve problems too complex to resolve at sufficient speed using analytical thought. Such heuristics package-up many interacting technical habits into concepts which, while apparently naïve, are actually rich in associations, meanings and implications acquired through practice, learning, and teaching others. This kind of musicians’-speak, far from falling short of the precision and understanding expected of musicological discourse, actually works more efficiently and precisely than technical description to convey intentions. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the nature of some of the heuristics used by performers in relation to musical expression, and on the ways they relate to one another, drawing on empirical evidence of musicians’ own experiences of using such concepts in their everyday teaching and performing.
Read at http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.12.18.1/mto.12.18.1.leech-wilkinson.php . The standard model of musical transmission, in which composers embody their intentions in works which they encode in scores which performers (and scholars in... more
Read at http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.12.18.1/mto.12.18.1.leech-wilkinson.php . The standard model of musical transmission, in which composers embody their intentions in works which they encode in scores which performers (and scholars in their imagination) decode as accurately as possible for audiences, is unpicked in the light of the evidence of recorded performance. It is replaced with a model that recognizes the large extent to which performances trigger the generation of musical meaning in the minds of listeners, and the extent to which changes in performance style cause those meanings to change. Some implications for thought about music are discussed.
Portamento was a significant expressive device among performers for at least two hundred years; yet, for the past sixty it has made musicians uncomfortable. More than a change of fashion, this suggests responses formed at a relatively... more
Portamento was a significant expressive device among performers for at least two hundred years; yet, for the past sixty it has made musicians uncomfortable. More than a change of fashion, this suggests responses formed at a relatively deep psychological level. Drawing on work in developmental psychology, and reading in the light of it performances of art music lullabies, it is suggested that portamento draws on innate emotional responses to human sound, as well as on our earliest memories of secure, loving communication, in order to bring to performances a sense of comfort, sincerity, and deep emotion. The decline of portamento after the First World War and its sudden disappearance after the Second is traced to a new emphasis—influenced by psychoanalysis and reflected in writings on music—on darker meanings in music, which can be understood in the light of the reinterpretation of human motives and behavior forced on a wider public by the Second War. Portamento, because of its association (however unconscious) with naive trust and love, became embarrassingly inappropriate. This hypothesis also sheds light on the deepening of vibrato after the War, new objectivity and authenticity in Bach, the rise of music analysis, and the performances and writings of the avant-garde.
In this paper we describe two projects aiming to shed light on the notion of shape, a concept widely used by musicians to refer to various musical characteristics but one that has so far been almost entirely neglected by the research... more
In this paper we describe two projects aiming to shed light on the notion of shape, a concept widely used by musicians to refer to various musical characteristics but one that has so far been almost entirely neglected by the research community. Project 1 is a study examining how musicians and non-musicians represent sound visually, making use of an electronic graphics tablet and tailored capturing software to gain insight into visualised musical shapes and the processes that produce that visualization. Project 2 aims to measure people’s shaped responses to music as expressed through hand, arm and whole body movements using Microsoft’s® KinectTM technology and a WiiTM remote controller. The digitally acquired data and methodologically advanced analyses from both projects have already influenced and will continue to inform other, humanities- and social science-driven projects, to the same extent as the latter have enhanced the progress of the former. We are convinced that the overarching investigation of ‘Shaping music in performance’ can only benefit from such a collaboration.
Research Interests:
Cross-modal mappings of auditory stimuli reveal valuable insights into how humans make sense of sound and music. Whereas researchers have investigated cross-modal mappings of sound features varied in isolation within paradigms such as... more
Cross-modal mappings of auditory stimuli reveal valuable insights into how humans make sense of sound and music. Whereas researchers have investigated cross-modal mappings of sound features varied in isolation within paradigms such as speeded classification and forced-choice matching tasks, investigations of representations of concurrently varied sound features (e.g., pitch, loudness and tempo) with overt gestures—accounting for the intrinsic link between movement and sound—are scant. To explore the role of bodily gestures in cross-modal mappings of auditory stimuli we asked 64 musically trained and untrained participants to represent pure tones—continually sounding and concurrently varied in pitch, loudness and tempo—with gestures while the sound stimuli were played. We hypothesized musical training to lead to more consistent mappings between pitch and height, loudness and distance/height, and tempo and speed of hand movement and muscular energy. Our results corroborate previously reported pitch vs. height (higher pitch leading to higher elevation in space) and tempo vs. speed (increasing tempo leading to increasing speed of hand movement) associations, but also reveal novel findings pertaining to musical training which influenced consistency of pitch mappings, annulling a commonly observed bias for convex (i.e., rising–falling) pitch contours. Moreover, we reveal effects of interactions between musical parameters on cross-modal mappings (e.g., pitch and loudness on speed of hand movement), highlighting the importance of studying auditory stimuli concurrently varied in different musical parameters. Results are discussed in light of cross-modal cognition, with particular emphasis on studies within (embodied) music cognition. Implications for theoretical refinements and potential clinical applications are provided.
Research Interests:
Cortot’s piano playing offers many opportunities to consider the relationship between sound, meaning, emotion, calculation, personality, society, and music. The key evidence at the heart of these interrelationships can be found in a... more
Cortot’s piano playing offers many opportunities to consider the relationship between sound, meaning, emotion, calculation, personality, society, and music. The key evidence at the heart of these interrelationships can be found in a detailed analysis of data describing timing and loudness in his recorded performances. A study of his 1926 and (recently rediscovered) 1928 recordings of Chopin Preludes, viewed through Sonic Visualiser software (www.sonicvisualiser.org), is used as a focus for a discussion of Cortot’s mythical expressive spontaneity.
Research Interests:
Early recordings raise fundamental questions about our response to music. Why do these performances seem so strange to us? How could they ever have made musical sense to listeners? How might we make sense of them now, in our very... more
Early recordings raise fundamental questions about our response to music. Why do these performances seem so strange to us? How could they ever have made musical sense to listeners? How might we make sense of them now, in our very different music-cultural environment? We look at some of the ways in which musical sounds model other processes involving change over time. A mechanism is proposed that may underlie the cross-domain mappings generating musical meaning. Music is seen to be exceptionally adaptable to the modelling of other experiences, able to offer many potential likenesses, among which those with most relevance to what an individual brain already knows and believes are favoured by conscious perception. Performance and perception styles change over time as certain kinds of potential meaning are selected for their relevance to other aspects of contemporary experience. The model helps to explain how subjectivity is constructed and how it changes.
Performance style is conceptualised as a collection of small ‘expressive gestures’ consisting of changes in frequency, loudness or duration within or between notes or phrases. Collections differ somewhat between individuals (personal... more
Performance style is conceptualised as a collection of small ‘expressive gestures’ consisting of changes in frequency, loudness or duration within or between notes or phrases. Collections differ somewhat between individuals (personal style) and change in content over time (period style). The changing style of Elena Gerhardt (1883-1965), as documented in her recordings of Schubert Lieder (1911-1939), is analysed through her habits of timbre, vibrato, scoops, portamento, tuning, and rubato. Beneath the general impression of consistency throughout her career, more detailed analysis of the data, especially concerning vibrato and rubato, reveals a process of gradual evolution consistent with the hypothesis that performance style changes in unrecognisably small steps which accumulate rapidly across a musical culture.
In this paper we describe two projects aiming to shed light on the notion of shape, a concept widely used by musicians to refer to various musical characteristics but one that has so far been almost entirely neglected by the research... more
In this paper we describe two projects aiming to shed light on the notion of shape, a concept widely used by musicians to refer to various musical characteristics but one that has so far been almost entirely neglected by the research community. Project 1 is a study examining how musicians and non-musicians represent sound visually, making use of an electronic graphics tablet and tailored capturing software to gain insight into visualised musical shapes and the processes that produce that visualization. Project 2 aims to measure people’s shaped responses to music as expressed through hand, arm and whole body movements using Microsoft’s® KinectTM technology and a WiiTM remote controller. The digitally acquired data and methodologically advanced analyses from both projects have already influenced and will continue to inform other, humanities- and social science-driven projects, to the same extent as the latter have enhanced the progress of the former. We are convinced that the overarching investigation of ‘Shaping music in performance’ can only benefit from such a collaboration.
This is a book in progress. It’s about freeing classical music performance from unnecessary rules and constraints, and the benefits that might bring for performers and audiences. I’m writing it during 2019–20, and posting chapters in... more
This is a book in progress. It’s about freeing classical music performance from unnecessary rules and constraints, and the benefits that might bring for performers and audiences.
I’m writing it during 2019–20, and posting chapters in first draft as they’re written. I’d very much like feedback, in the light of which I’ll make improvements. So the text will grow and change. Please follow it, and let me know what you think at daniel.leech-wilkinson@kcl.ac.uk. Please let others know at @ChalPerformance and anywhere that classical musicians follow.
I’m writing it during 2019–20, and posting chapters in first draft as they’re written. I’d very much like feedback, in the light of which I’ll make improvements. So the text will grow and change. Please follow it, and let me know what you think at daniel.leech-wilkinson@kcl.ac.uk. Please let others know at @ChalPerformance and anywhere that classical musicians follow.
Research Interests:
This conference paper from 1984/85 offered some ways of using 14th-century diminished counterpoint teaching as a starting-point for reductional analyses of medieval compositions. I intended to turn it into an article, but never did.... more
This conference paper from 1984/85 offered some ways of using 14th-century diminished counterpoint teaching as a starting-point for reductional analyses of medieval compositions. I intended to turn it into an article, but never did. Occasionally people still ask to see a copy so, while clearing my office at King's, I've rescued the examples from the rubbish bin and am putting it all here. I hope, though rather doubt, that it's still of some use.
This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an... more
This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely collective process of construction. Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies draws together a wide range of both leading and emerging scholars to offer a critical survey of STS applications to music studies, considering topics ranging from classical music instrument-making to the ethos of DIY in punk music. The book's four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology. Raising crucial methodological and epistemological questions about the study of music, this book will be relevant to scholars studying the interactions between music, culture, and technology from many disciplinary perspectives. Antoine Hennion is Professor at Mines ParisTech, and the former Director of the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation. He has written extensively on the sociology of music, media, and cultural industries. Christophe Levaux is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège, Belgium. His research focuses on approaches to 20th-century American music and Actor-Network Theory.