Conceptualizing Expressive Musical Performance: A Grounded Theory of Performance, Process, and Pedagogy.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Music has a distinctly magical quality that draws composers, performers, scholars, and listeners to the art form. Musical experiences consist of expressive and ineffable moments, convey meaning, and elicit affective responses in the listener. The performance of score-based music involves the translation of a written composition to auditory event - and it is this interpretation that makes music magical. It is the performer who ultimately breathes life into the music, subtly nuancing and individuating their interpretation, distinguishing it from other performances.This dissertation argues that primarily pedagogical interactions, in addition to other influential stakeholders and sources of knowledge, give rise to expressive performance skills in higher education. Defining expressive musical performance as that aspect of musical performance dealing with potential, preparation, and production, I present a model of performers' learning trajectories comprised of four stages: pre-preparation, technical preparation, expressive preparation, and production. Through participant interviews and video observations of lessons, I describe how student performers approach a new composition to prepare for performance with a specific sound or auditory goal in mind before they work to get the music 'under their fingers'. Once basic pitches and rhythms have been learned, performers begin to consciously and deliberately integrate expressive skills. The technical preparation and expressive preparation stages, however, are not freestanding milestones, but stages that inform one another, resulting in an iterative feedback loop that spans the majority of the learning trajectory, before performers progress on to the production stage. This learning trajectory is overseen by the performer-pedagogue, who guides the student's exploration of the music and plays a vital role in shaping the student's interpretation.The core of this dissertation closely examines the pedagogical interactions themselves through grounding, or the process by which participants in an interaction arrive at a mutual understanding (Clark & Brennan, 1991). I apply Clark & Brennan's presentation-acceptance phase model for achieving grounding, and in doing so, demonstrate how such a model must expand to address multi-modal means of communication. Through this exercise, I highlight the ways in which performer-pedagogues and students negotiate and achieve grounding by contributing knowledge to the pair's shared workspace. While much of the grounding process in the studio relies on verbal communication, in this setting, grounding is most often successful and expedited when verbal commentary is combined with aural modeling on the instrument, singing, or gesture.After establishing an overview of the performer's process towards an expressive performance - as well as the ways in which performer-pedagogues guide and shape their students' expressive conceptualizations through detailed study of their interactions - I present evidence from a score study task to identify the structural features of the music that afford or support interpretive decisions performers make. I argue that in preparing a work for performance, performers engage in analysis largely through segmentation, defining segment boundaries through association and disjunction (Hanninen, 2001). I conclude this dissertation by providing my own reflections on music theory pedagogy, taking into account the analytical activities that performers regularly engage with, and by contemplating ways in which our work in the music theory classroom can "infuse and permeate all aspects of a college music curriculum" (Rogers, 2004).