As mentioned in my last blog post, a 2011 study headed by Marcia Higuchi and others has shown that technical accuracy and expressivity in piano playing may not always work hand in hand. The research involved analyzing the performances of nine pianists. After some organized practicing, the pianists were instructed to play the same piece twice. The first performance focused on cognitive aspects, such as accuracy of pitch, rhythm, and technique. The second performance centered on affective aspects, such as playing with nuance, phrasing, and agogic accents. Researchers concluded that, through analysis of audio files, emotionally infused performance may limit cognitive and motor skills in piano playing; in addition, they also found that a cognitively informed performance may negatively impact the expressivity behind music-making.
The study further explains this phenomenon by delving into the physiological reactions of the brain upon executing cognitive or affective performances. When the brain performs cognitive tasks (in this case, accuracy towards the score), several regions of the frontal cortex are occupied with monitoring working memory. However, these same regions must also regulate emotional aspects through the amygdala (a part of the brain that manages the relationship between sensory details and emotional reactions). It seems that the brain is struggling to juggle a lot of material at once, which may explain the difficulty that pianists in the study were having—for instance, playing with accurate pitches in the left hand during emotionally oriented performances. Moreover, difficulties were also extant in the pianists’ problematic formulation of a nice legato line—which implies attention to musical phrasing—when trying to get all the notes and rhythms correct as part of a cognitively informed performance.
Although this study offers an interesting point of view on the dichotomy between expressivity and accuracy in musical performance, I think, ultimately, musicians need to work towards synthesizing the two. My problem with this study is that the pianists were given enough time to learn the music to produce a performance that would be mediocre at best—the type of performance that would “get by,” so to speak. However, if the participants were given more time—say, three months on a piece of music—I believe that their cognitively and expressively informed performances would probably not differ much from each other. After all, speaking from my own experiences, given enough time with any piece of music, my duty as a performer is to find a balance between the technical and artistic facets so that both can shine through equally.
Despite this wish for technique and artistry to culminate on a plane of equality in a musical performance, I do realize that there are certain scenarios in which it is challenging to integrate both aspects. One thing that comes to mind is sight-reading. Growing up, my parents had always asked me to practice sight-reading, and it makes me cringe whenever I think back to those days. What a stupid, stubborn child I was. Every time they told me to try reading through music, I would purse my lips, stare them down my button nose, and argue that my teacher didn’t assign it. And then I’d storm off, grinding my feet into the carpet.
How I wish I had listened to my parents. Had I only spent a few minutes a day reading through music. In an article on cognition and motor skills in piano sight-reading, Brenda Wristen emphasizes the development of basic motor patterns, quick visual recognition of musical schema and notational tropes, and the ability form auditory representations just by looking at the score. All of these skills are necessary to becoming a proficient sight-reader, and, perhaps more importantly, they use various learning modalities—a topic that I went into some extent in my first and second blog posts. Now, how does this tie into my discussion of cognitive performance versus affective performance? I think that sight-reading is a cognitive-driven exercise, meaning that when I sight-read, I am trying to get through a piece with a steady tempo as accurately as I can—the goal of execution is based on following the score. If I happen to play with some musicality while sight-reading, that is certainly an added bonus—but, in most circumstances, I find that trying to sight-read expressively is like using my non-dominant hand to write in neat cursive.
Given this train of thought, I think that the study lead by Higuchi, as discussed earlier, would apply to sight-reading because this cognitive-driven task typically diminishes in accuracy once we try to factor in musicality. Harkening back to my earlier posts on motor skills in performances, I also believe that building a familiarity—in the automated, implicit sense—with motor sequences, keyboard topography, and chunking of large musical gestures will add to the success of sight-reading expressively.
With Higuchi’s study in mind, I am now thinking back to an article by Dr. Noa Kageyama on The Bulletproof Musician—“8 things top practicers do differently.” The practice techniques discussed in this article are based off of a study led by Robert Duke at the University of Texas at Austin that involved seventeen student pianists learning a short passage from Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1. The students only had one day to work on the short passage (three measures long), and had to perform it fifteen times for the experiment on the next day. The researchers compared how the students practiced with the level of performance that was achieved the day after. This led to conclusions on what were the most popular strategies used by students who had the best-rated performances (on technical and musical spectrums) after their practice session.
For the purpose of this blog, I’ve decided to focus on three practice techniques that I found most effective—at least, in my own practice sessions—and, for the sake of discussion, I will point out how these practice techniques operate on a purely cognitive level. The first strategy is practicing hands together early on in the process of learning a new piano piece. To me, this strategy works because, ultimately, the piece must be played hands together; therefore, by using the hands simultaneously early on, the students build a long-term memory foundation sooner. Building this early foundation is important since it primes the brain right from the start; so, even though the material may feel weak and unfamiliar as students struggle to practice hands together, it builds an auditory preparation in their mind of how the piece should go, of how the piece will eventually feel in their hands.
The second practice strategy I found most compelling is the necessity to address errors immediately, and to rehearse these errors until they are corrected. The act of rehearsal keeps components of short-term memory active, which helps build correct associations and their relevant connections. Rehearsal also helps to sustain long-term memory retention of these associations. The key idea in addressing errors is not so much the quantity of practice time, but the percentage of how many times the mistake was practiced in its correct form. Robert Duke’s study found that the best-ranked students had high proportions of correct practice trials before they performed.
Another idea to keep in mind is the fact that the cognitive processes of recognition and reminding are both important in practice and performance settings. “Recognition” is when you see or hear something and you know exactly what it is, and “reminding” is when you come in contact with something that triggers a memory or a thought of something else. These terms tie in with the previous discussion on addressing errors immediately because quick error detection hones the ability to recognize what is on the score and with accuracy. It also hones the relationship of motor skills (in terms of the ability to remind) because exercising consistent motor patterns or gestures would trigger a series of mental associations to effectively produce the desired sound.
The third practice strategy that I found most effective is slowing down. Yes, slowing down. It seems a little too simple, maybe too hackneyed by swarms of music teachers. And yet, it is an excellent strategy because it enables better control of precise motor actions. It allows us to realize what we are physically doing. More importantly, slowing down makes it easier to process material in terms of realizing how our kinetic feel connects with what we see physically, and how that connect with the resulting sounds—again, this refers to my multi-modal take on performance as mentioned in other posts. On a basic level, slow practice allows us to have more correct practice trials. In my opinion, even if the tempo is slow, as long as we are playing the right notes, rhythms, finger technique, and even expressive elements, components to music-making will be better retained in memory.
Sources:
Duke, Robert A., and Carla Cash, et al. “It’s Not How Much; It’s How: Characteristics of Practice Behavior and Retention of Performance Skills.” Journal of Research in Music Education Vol. 56, No. 4 (January 2009).
Higuchi, Marcia K., and José Fornari, et al. “Reciprocal modulation of cognitive and emotional aspects in pianistic performances.” PLOS ONE Vol. 6, No. 9 (9 September 2011). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024437
Kageyama, Noa. “8 things top practicers do differently.” The Bulletproof Musician. Accessed December 1, 2014.
Wristen, Brenda. “Cognition and Motor Execution in Piano Sight-Reading: A Review of Literature.” Update: Application of Research in Music Education Vol. 24, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 2005).