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INVESTIGATING PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE ON THE CELLO

Tnia Lisboa1; Roger Chaffin2; Adrienne G. Schiaroli2; Abby Barrera2

1 Royal College of Music, Centre for the Study of Music Performance

2 University of Connecticut, Department of Psychology

ABSTRACT

The paper is a preliminary report of an ongoing study of an

experienced cellist learning a new piece of music and preparing for

public performance over multiple sessions. Practice sessions were

videoed and the performer commented on the process, reporting on

her decisions about fingering, bowing, technical difficulties,

dynamics and phrasing, amongst other dimensions. The 17 hours of

practice observed so far reveal that practice went through five

progressive stages; within sessions, practice was organized by the

formal structure of the piece, and the length of practice segments

increased across stages.

1. INTRODUCTIONStudies of music performance have generally focused on the piano

(e.g. Shaffer, 1981) and have rarely followed the preparation of a

piece from start to public performance (see Clarke, Cook &

Thomas, 2003 for an exception). None have gone on to look at

repeated public performances

The empirical analysis of music practice and performance offers an

opportunity to observe the cognitive processes involved in music

making in a situation that naturally provides a detailed and

potentially illuminating behavioural record (e.g., Miklaszewski,

1989). However, by itself, the behavioural record of practice is

relatively uninformative, unless complemented by the detailed

reports of an experienced musician. Together, the practice record

and an experienced musicians self-reports about the decisions and

strategies involved in the learning of a new piece can provide a rich

and compelling account of the creative process of making music

(Chaffin & Imreh, 1997, 2001, 2002; Chaffin et al., 2003; Chaffin,

Imreh & Crawford, 2002). Chaffin et al. (2002) used this approach

to explore the application of theories of expert memory and

problem solving to the domain of musical performance. In their

study, a concert pianist recorded her practice as she learned a new

piece for performance.

The present study extends the approach of Chaffin et al., (2002) to

the cello. The present inquiry will test the conclusions of the earlier

study for a new instrument and with a different performer. A

second purpose is to extend the approach from the study of practice

to performance. The main focus of the earlier study was on

memorization. In the present study we will see how the way a piece

is practiced and memorized affects its performance.

This paper provides a preliminary report of the study, which is

ongoing. A cello soloist (the first author) is recording her practice

as she learns a new piece of music and her public performances of

the same piece will also be recorded when learning is complete.

The cellist will also give detailed reports of her decisions abouttechnique, interpretation, performance and her perception of the

musical structure of the piece. The study will be the first to provide

a detailed behavioral description of the practice of an experienced

string player allowing examination of aspects of practice unique to

string players that were absent from earlier studies (e.g. decisions

about bowing, vibrato, the development of intonation). The study

will also be the first to relate observations of practice and live

performance.

2. METHOD2.1 The music

The piece chosen for study is the Prelude from J.S. Bachs SuiteNo. 6 for solo cello, which explores both the mellow quality and

virtuoso aspects of the instrument. The challenging nature of the

piece means that many hours of practice will be required, ensuring

ample opportunity to observe the learning process.

2.2 Procedure

The performer is recording each practice session using a digital

video camera; several public performances will be similarly

videotaped. During each session, the performer also records

periodic comments about what she is doing; similar commentaries

will be recorded after each live performance.

The cellist will provide detailed reports of her decisions about

technique, interpretation, and performance. Decisions will be

reported about technique, for hand position, fingering, and bowing;

about interpretation, for dynamics, tempo, phrasing and intonation.

At the end of the learning process, the cellist will report which of all

of these decisions she has to still be prepared to attend to during

performance. These will be the performance cues.

At time of writing, the only report to have been collected is for

musical structure. The cellist indicated the location of section

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boundaries on a copy of the score and provided a descriptive label

for each section.

Practice is transcribed by recording the location in the piece each

time the cellist starts and stops playing. The number of start, stops,

and repetitions of each bar are then related to the musicians

reports. The comments are also transcribed and will be subject of a

content analysis.

3. RESULTS3.1 Stages of the Learning ProcessBy the beginning of April 2004, the learning process had involved

33 practice sessions, totaling approximately 17 hours. Practice

occurred in three learning periods, separated by periods during

which the piece was not practiced. The first learning period

consisted of 10 practice sessions occurring over 2 weeks, followed

by a break of 2 months. The second period consisted of 13 practice

sessions, after which another interval of almost 8 months followed

when the performer was preparing different repertoire for public

performances. The third learning period includes 10 sessions.

The following stages can be identified on the basis of the cellists

log of practice sessions and her memory of her progress. (It should

be noted that transitions from one stage to another occurred at

different times for different passages, depending on the degree of

technical difficulty that needed to be overcome).

Stage 1. Sight-Reading (session 1)In the first session, the performer went through the piece once

(sight-reading) after which, she started to break up the piece into

shorter segments to practice and memorize.

Stage 2. Exploring the Music (session 1-14)In these initial sessions, attention was focused on decisions about

fingering (left-hand positions), bowing, and on the study of the

bowing suggestions in different editions. During this time, practice

was mainly restricted to playing short sections with occasional runs

through the entire piece.

Stage 3. Smoothing Out (sessions 15 - 19)During this stage, the performer started to work on technical

matters such as smooth shifting of the left hand (i.e. avoiding jerky

movements resulting in accents), intonation, and speed of vibrato.

Although decisions about fingering and bowing had been made

during the previous stage, changes to some of these decisions were

still being made. By the end of session 19, the cellist announced

that she was starting to shift her attention to other dimensions:

I feel I am ready to move on. I need to think about

phrasing, harmonies (to bring out). I know the notes,

bowing and fingering!

Stage 4. Listening to the music (sessions 20 26)During this next stage, attention shifted to fluency and on putting

the piece together. The aspects of the piece mentioned most

frequently in the comments at this stage were timing, dynamics, the

study of the harmonic structure of the piece, phrasing, and

projection of sound:

I did not have the music but it was good to play with

adequate acoustics I found out that I needed to use

more bow to project

Stage 5. Trial Performances (27 current)The trial performances started during a rehearsal for a performance

of other repertoire at the Wigmore Hall in London. Being in a

proper concert hall, provided the opportunity for trying out the

memorized piece and for evaluating the learning process:

wonderful feeling! It is starting to feel as a real

performance.

During this time, the cellist listened to another musicians

performance, which suggested further changes of fingering and

bowing.

Additional StagesAt this point we anticipate that there will be at least one additional

stage during which the piece will be polished and worked on at

different tempi. The performer anticipates that this final stage will

continue even after preparation of the piece has been completed

and public performance begun. Contrary to the concert pianist

described by Chaffin et al. (2002), the performer in the present

study does not anticipate a stage in which practice consists simply

of maintenance practice.

I cannot see myself stopping the polishing, or thinking

about fingering and bowing, which I can even change

on stage!

The first public performance will take place in July 2004,followed by three others before the end of the year.

3.2 Practice records for sessions 10-20Figure 1 shows the practice records for Sessions 13 and 15. Session

13 is typical of stage 2 practice in which each session was restricted

to part of the piece. Session 15 is typical of the smoothing-it-out

stage with practice throughout the whole piece occurring in one

session.

In the practice records, each line represents the continuous playing

of the bars shown at the corresponding locations on the horizontal

axis. The beginning and end of each line thus indicates where

playing started and stopped. Each time playing stopped and startedagain, a new line begins immediately above the previous one. The

record thus reads from bottom to top and from left to right. Both

records show the cellist starting at the beginning of the piece and

working on the piece in sections. In session 13, practice was

restricted to two passages, approximately bars 23-33 and 46-69,

whereas in session 15 practice involved sections from across the

entire piece and the session ended with a run through from

beginning to end.

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Figure 1: Practice records for Sessions 13 and 15

3.3 Practice segments in sessions 10-19

Table 1: Characteristics of practice in session 10-19

The length of segments played without interruption increased from

stage 2 to stage 3. Table 1 shows the average length of practice

segments in sessions 10-19, together with the number of segments

and duration of each session. Segment length began increasing in

session 15, reflecting the new goal of joining together shorter

segments into longer passages, and the increase continued in

sessions 16 and 17. The return to shorter practice segments in

sessions 18 and 19 demonstrates that the transition from one stage

to another was gradual, not all-or-nothing.

3.4 Organization of practice by formalstructureStarting and stopping during practice tended to occur at the section

boundaries of the formal structure. Figure 2 shows the percentage

Figure 2: percentage of times that playing started (top row) or

stopped (middle row) in the first, last or intervening bars of each

section.

of times that playing started (top row) or stopped (middle row) with

three bars showing the values for the first, last and intervening bars

of each section. The bottom row of the figure shows the number of

times bars were repeated as a function of their position in a section.

Playing started in the first bar of a section more often than in the last

bar or than on intervening bars (F(2,99)=6.17, p

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investigator must, at times, choose between the two roles when they

conflict. This is the current position of the first author which

provides an opportunity for examining the performer/researcher

paradigm. The initial contribution of the first author was in the role

of the performer, selecting the piece for study and recording

practice. At this stage, the performers involvement in plans for

data analysis and in the formulation of hypotheses was deliberatelylimited to minimize the possibility that her practice strategies might

be influenced. For this reason, she avoided reading the previous

research of her collaborators (e.g. Chaffin, Imreh & Crawford,

2002) or reflecting unduly on the hypotheses that the study might

test. This restriction, however, soon came to feel arbitrary and

confusing and was progressively abandoned.

As learning progressed the performer was in regular contact with

her collaborators, discussing the ongoing transcription of practice,

and engaging in a dynamic process of working out the ways that she

would provide the detailed reports of her musical decision-making

needed to understand the learning process. As a result of these

exchanges, it became clear that the performer needed to be more

fully informed about the direction of the study, both in order to

participate effectively as an informant and in order to feel

comfortable with her role as an investigator.

At the same time, the first author felt a strong reluctance to reflect

closely on the learning process that she was in the middle of. For

instance, in the present paper we have provided a summary of the

practice sessions based on the performers log of her practice

sessions and her comments made during each session. We also

described the development of practice as an emerging series of

stages. However, at the time of writing, the first author has found it

impossible to reduce the detailed and complex memory of her

progress to a set of tidy stages and boxes. The division of practice

into stages in the present description is, therefore, mainly based on

behavioral and temporal criteria, although also reflecting some of

the performers own intuitions about her progress.

It is really hard to separate this out. As a cellist, I still

feel I am at the initial stages, but looking into the log

book, it seems as if I have moved on. I cannot be

objective and categorise this.

4.2 A Work in ProgressThe learning process that we are studying has not yet concluded.

Our description is necessarily tentative and subject to revision. By

August, the first public performance of the piece will have taken

place, more practice sessions will have been transcribed, and the

performer will have provided additional reports of her

decision-making about technique, interpretation, and performance.

By then, we expect to have a more complete picture of the stages of

the learning process and a clearer picture of how practice in

different sessions reflected the cellists strategies and goals.

It is already clear that the technique of combining expert report and

detailed quantitative analysis of practice developed by Chaffin et al.

(2002) will provide an informative picture of the learning process

for a different performer and instrument. We believe that this

combination of behavioural record of practice and self-report by an

expert can be adapted to any instrument. We expect the data, that

this study provides, to address a wide range of questions about

practice, memorization, interpretation, and performance.

In the present report, we have also tried to describe some of the

issues that must be addressed in this kind of collaboration between

a performer and a psychologist. The participants must establish a

common ground and develop a shared understanding of how the

data reflect the experience of the musician, and the research process

must respect the demands that the dual roles of performer and

investigator place on the musician.

5. REFERENCES1. Chaffin, R. & Imreh, G. Practicing perfection: Piano

performance as expert memory, Psychological Science,

Vol. 13, 2002, 342-349.

2. Chaffin, R. & Imreh, G. A comparison of practice andself-report as sources of information about the goals of

expert practice. Psychology of music, Vol. 29, 2001, 39-69.

3. Chaffin, R. & Imreh, G. (1997). "Pulling teeth and torture:Musical memory and problem solving. Thinking &

Reasoning: Special Issue on Expert Thinking, 3, 1997,

315-336.

4. Chaffin, R., Imreh, G., & Crawford, M. Practicingperfection: Memory and piano performance. Mahwah, NJ:

Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

5. Chaffin, R., Imreh, G. Lemieux, A., & Chen, C. (2003).Seeing the big picture: Piano practice as expert problem

solving. Music Perception, 20, 2003, 461-485.

6.

Clarke E., Cook N. & Thomas P. Interpretation andcreativity in contemporary piano music. In Kopiez,

Lehmann, Wolther & Wolf (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th

Triennial Conference of the European Society for the

Cognitive Sciences of Music. Hanover, 2003.

7. Miklaszewski, K. A case study of a pianist preparing amusical performance. Psychology of Music, Vol.17, 1989,

95-109.

8. Rink, J. The practice of performance. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995.

9. Shaffer, L. H. Performances of Chopin, Bach, and Bartk:studies in motor programming. Cognitive Psychology, Vol.

13, 1981,326-376.

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