Practice thoughts and performance action: Observing processes of musical decision-making

摘要

This study explores how a group of violinists make musical decisions by inducing a variety of decision-making processes in three conditions: sight-reading, practising, and performing. The study aimed to distinguish between intuitive and deliberate processes as defined by default-interventionist forms of dual process theories of cognition (Evans, 2011). The participants were seven Baroque violinists trained in historically informed performance to varying degrees. The task involved playing a short piece of solo Baroque violin music and included the providing of retrospective and concurrent think-aloud data. Comparison of score markings and verbal data made while sight-reading, practising and performing showed that decisions categorised as intuitive (not planned during practice) accounted for approximately 82% of the total decisions coded. The category of deliberate decisions (planned during practice) included a subset labelled ‘deliberate not executed’ to describe deliberate decisions that were not perceptible in the final performance. Decisions regarding musical features such as articulation, bowing, phrasing, note duration, ornamentation and tempo were more likely to be intuitive than deliberate, while decisions about dynamics and chord playing were often the product of deliberate processes. More experienced participants made significantly more decisions than less experienced participants, and the most experienced also made a greater proportion of deliberate decisions.