What is it about?
The perceived quality, expressiveness and individuality of a music performance largely depend on the performer’s attention and their actual feelings and thoughts while playing/singing. This paper defines for the first time key features of performers’ attentional strategies during playing, including the quick positioning into different temporal perspectives in real time during performance – in fact, a specific, musical way of positioning into the future, the past, and the present.
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Why is it important?
Despite the overwhelming theoretical and practical importance of this topic for music psychology, pedagogy, aesthetics and analysis it has never been investigated in depth but in a very few studies only. My paper intends to fill this gap: based on concepts taken from performance analysis, pedagogical practice and sports science, I define and discuss key features of performance virtuosity and expressivity as a kind of “mental dexterity” (rather than mere finger dexterity).
Perspectives
My model has a strong potential for applications in music pedagogy as it contributes to the development of a novel methodology of enhancing and practicing performing abilities – it brings a radically new, cognitive approach to performance pedagogy. I’ll be excited to see its further development to open the way for an innovative cognitive approach in music theory, analysis and aesthetics as well.
László Stachó
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mental virtuosity: A new theory of performers’ attentional processes and strategies, Musicae Scientiae, November 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1029864918798415.
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