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Digital Methods for the Study of the Nineteenth-Century Orchestra

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2020

Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey
Affiliation:
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford
Eric F. Clarke
Affiliation:
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford

Abstract

The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including changes in the size and nature of the orchestra and the rise of the modern conductor. The coordination and musical leadership of orchestras has taken a variety of forms historically, but from around the middle of the nineteenth century silent conducting gradually began to supplant other forms of time keeping and instrumental leadership in opera and concert orchestras. Little or no empirical work has attempted to investigate the musical, social and perceptual consequences of this development, largely due to the technical challenges that must be addressed. This article describes the development and implementation of innovative digital methods to provide a detailed and multifaceted picture of a large ensemble in action, investigating the consequences of different distributions of individual musical agency for: 1) musicians’ playing experiences; 2) ensemble coordination and expressive timing; and 3) listeners’ evaluations. These methods include a polling application, implemented on participants’ smartphones, to provide fast-turnaround feedback from orchestral musicians about their experiences of playing under different conditions; and the use of digital methods to analyse acoustical data from the individual instruments of an orchestral string section, to facilitate a quantitative analysis of orchestral togetherness. Analyses of the experiential, quantitative and listener data from a preliminary study with an orchestra of musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, London, are presented, together with a discussion of the insights that these methods provide. The article concludes by considering the prospects of these methods for investigating nineteenth-century rehearsal and performance practices.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2020

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References

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9 See Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, ‘Tracking Authorship and Creativity in Orchestral Performance’ (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2016).

10 Since the original submission of this article, we have used the suite of research methods detailed here to collect data from a professional orchestra of string players working on repertoire by Fuchs and Tchaikovsky. The ensemble, Accordes!, comprised performers specializing in nineteenth-century historical practices, drawn together by the ‘Transforming Nineteenth-Century Historically Informed Practice’ research project. Led by the project's Principal Investigator and violinist, Claire Holden, Accordes! explored expressive asynchrony alongside other late nineteenth-century stylistic features by experimenting with the distribution of individual agency within the group. The findings from that project will be published in forthcoming chapters and articles.

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19 For string instruments, for example, the gauge, mass, length and tension of the string will significantly affect its behaviour (violins and double basses, for example, have very different characteristics), as will different bow strokes and whether a note is defined by a finger change, a slide, a bow stroke or combinations of all three.

20 Polfreman, ‘Comparing Onset Detection'.

21 Matthew Wright proposes that perceptual attack time is better considered a probability density function, since the characteristics of specific sounds, such as the sharpness of their attacks, will mean that different individuals and even individuals making repeated judgments about the same note onset will find a range of values that sound equally correct. See Matthew Wright, ‘The Shape of an Instant: Measuring and Modeling Perceptual Attack Time with Probability Density Functions’, (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2008): iv.

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23 For example, Murnighan and Conlon, ‘The Dynamics of Intense Work Groups’.

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26 Davidson and Good, ‘Social and Musical Co-ordination’; Seddon, Frederick A. and Biasutti, Michele, ‘Modes of Communication Between Members of a String Quartet’, Small Group Research 40/2 (2009): 115–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. VSR has also been used in music research to investigate individuals’ experiences of creativity in one-to-one conservatoire music lessons (see James, Mirjam, Wise, Karen J. and Rink, John, ‘Exploring Creativity in Musical Performance Through Lesson Observation with Video-Recall Interviews’, Scientia Paedagogica Experimentalis 47/2 (2010): 219–50Google Scholar) and the creative thought processes of conductors and composers during composition or rehearsal (see Donin, Nicolas and Féron, François-Xavier, ‘Tracking the Composer's Cognition in the Course of a Creative Process: Stefano Gervasoni and the Beginning of Gramigna’, Musicae Scientiae 16/3 (2012): 262–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

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28 See, for example, Khodyakov, D.M., ‘The Complexity of Trust-Control Relationships in Creative Organizations: Insights from a Qualitative Analysis of a Conductorless Orchestra’, Social Forces 86/1 (2007): 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leslie Lewis, ‘The Incomplete Conductor: Theorizing the Conductor's Role in Orchestral Interpretation in the Light of Shared Leadership Practices’ (PhD diss., Royal Holloway University of London, 2012).

29 Dobson, Melissa and Gaunt, Helen, ‘Musical and Social Communication in Expert Orchestral Performance’, Psychology Of Music 43/1 (2015): 2442CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Clarke, Doffman and Lim, ‘Distributed Creativity and Ecological Dynamics’.

31 Ponchione-Bailey, ‘Tracking Authorship and Creativity’.

32 Langer, Ellen, Russell, Timothy and Eisenkraft, Noah, ‘Orchestral Performance and the Footprint of Mindfulness’, Psychology of Music 37/2 (2008): 125–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Ponchione-Bailey, Cayenna, ‘The Body Orchestral: The Embodied Process of Orchestral Performance’, in Collaborative and Distributed Processes in Contemporary Music-Making, ed. Redhead, Lauren and Glover, Richard (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018): 6683Google Scholar.

34 Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, ‘Tracking Authorship and Creativity’.

35 www.socrative.com/. The Socrative app allowed us to capitalize on mobile phone technology and the ease and speed at which our student participants were able to type on internet-connected smart phones. Participants logged into Socrative anonymously, but identified their orchestral position (e.g. Violin II-3, indicating outside player of second desk of second violins), thus preserving their anonymity while allowing the analysis of their data to be sensitive to orchestral position.

36 Players who did not have a smartphone with them at the workshop gave their responses using hard copy equivalents. 90 per cent of responses were collected via the smartphone app.

37 There are three reasons for this focus: 1) the central role of string sections within orchestras; 2) the lack of research on string section sound; and 3) the number of inputs in the audio interfaces available for us to use for this pilot study.

38 The annotator for the data reported in this article was the first author, who has 20 years of experience as an orchestral percussionist and conductor.

39 The authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Graeme Bailey in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University for writing the program necessary to process the data set.

40 The calculation deliberately takes no account of which instruments are first and last. Thus, the first onset could be a violin I and the last a viola (at a metrical position where violins and violas are playing); or at other positions (where only one instrumental section happens to have a note) the first and last onsets could be from within the same instrumental section.

41 These differences are only indicative since an analysis shows that there is no statistical difference between the average ranges of the conditions.

42 The standard deviation captures the variability of the values within the data set.

43 Rasch, ‘Synchronization’.

44 As a comparison, the semiquaver played at metrical position (d) in C2 has a theoretical duration of approximately 200msec.

45 Six-point scales prevent respondents from using a non-committal middle value.

46 In technical terms, Wilks’ lambda (the MANOVA test statistic) had a value of 0.283 (indicating that 72% of the variance was due to the four conditions), which corresponds to F (23, 66) = 3.77; p<0.0001 (an F-ratio of 3.77 with 23 and 66 degrees of freedom, and a probability [significance level] of less than 0.0001 – i.e. highly significant).

47 Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is a standard statistical method for evaluating the changes caused by three or more conditions on the value of a variable.

48 Care needs to be taken in attributing too much to the size of the F-ratio, which is influenced by a number of factors. However, since we are dealing with a within-subjects design (all participants in the study evaluated all conditions), with no missing data, it is reasonable to make heuristic use of the size of the F-ratio to indicate broadly stronger and weaker effects.

49 Dobson and Gaunt, ‘Musical and Social Communication’; Ponchione-Bailey ‘Tracking Authorship and Creativity’.

50 There are some interesting consequences here for the development of orchestral players – to be explored elsewhere. In brief, the players’ perception that C1 was ‘orchestra as usual’ and that C3 presented greater ensemble challenges because it required listening to colleagues and playing more like a chamber ensemble illuminates a gap between students’ experiences of playing in youth or conservatoire orchestras and the demands of professional orchestral performance.

51 See Clarke, ‘The Impact of Recording’.

52 Langer, Russell and Eisenkraft, ‘Orchestral Performance’.

53 MERID (Media Enabled Research Interface and Database) was developed by students at Cornell University. See Ponchione-Bailey, ‘Tracking Authorship and Creativity’.

54 The Schulich and Max Planck facilities allow audience members to send continuous responses on a considerable range of dimensions, and in response to all manner of performance features, via tablet technology wired into the auditorium.

55 Shaffer, ‘Performances of Chopin, Bach, and Bartok’.