| Because music originates in expressive behavior, music's metric, tonal, and formal structures---and listeners' experiences of those structures---retain the traces of bodies in motion. In this study, I explore how varied interpretive renditions affect listeners' experiences and construals of music with a focus on durational contours, the constant undulations of tempo in human-generated performance. In particular, I am interested in listeners' experiences of renditions of Chopin's music that diverge significantly from general tendencies or conventions of performance. After offering a historical snapshot and analytical extension of previous approaches to durational contours in Chapters 1 and 2, I argue in Chapter 3 that durational contours are the traces of bodily gestures that listeners access through the covert movements of enacted cognition, and thus divergent renditions can afford new experiential knowledge.;In four subsequent analytical chapters I turn from listeners' enactions of performative gestures to their background feelings of being, the particular ways performers act out "being in" a meter, key, or formal section. Drawing on a corpus of more than six hundred renditions of two dozen of Chopin's pieces, I argue that listeners' experiences of "being" in metric, tonal, and formal phenomena is dependent on features of performance to an extent not often recognized: through unique durational decisions, performers can promote or inhibit metric entrainment (Chapter 4), recast tonal relationships by affording or denying the acquisition of a pitch as a tonal center (Chapters 5 and 6), and reshape perceived formal relationships at moments of closure or evaded closure (Chapter 7). A concluding chapter synthesizes these considerations of experience through a more complete analysis of a single piece. Throughout the study, I aim to contribute to the growing shift towards construing performance and analysis as coequal pathways to musical meaning. |
PDF Full Text Request