Expert Pianists’ Practice Perspectives: A Production and Listening Study

The purpose of this study was to investigate how professional pianists practice music for a concert, and whether their individual cognitive orientations in such practice processes can be identified accurately from the resulting performances. In Study I, four pianists, previously found to be skilled music memorizers, practiced and performed a short piece by André Jolivet over the course of two weeks, during which their practice strategies were studied using semi-structured interviews, and analyses of practice diaries, practice activities, and eye-movement data. The results indicate that the pianists used similar basic strategies but had different cognitive orientations, here called “practice perspectives,” consistent with each individual, in that they focused on different kinds of information while practicing. These practice perspectives may be related to skills and habits in using imagery and music analysis, as well as to professional and educational background. In Study II, 34 piano teachers listened to recordings of the concert performances and evaluated them against 12 statements representing the four practice perspectives identified in Study I. The results did not support the prediction that practice perspectives would be correctly detected by listeners. Nonetheless, practice perspectives can be used to highlight potentially vast differences between the ways in which individual professional classical musicians conceptualize music and make it meaningful to themselves and others. They could be used in the context of music education to increase musicians’ knowledge of different practice strategies and the ability to develop their own preferred working methods.

Post World War II—America Rising

Following World War II, thousands of returning servicemen and women enrolled in American colleges and universities with the financial assistance of the GI Bill. Colleges acted in response to the needs of these older students by offering career-oriented courses and by hiring new faculty to teach them. Music departments began hiring full-time percussion teachers and graduating classes of educated and skilled percussionists. Contemporary composers found these new graduates willing to play their works and responded by dramatically increasing the number of works written for percussion, both solo and ensemble. In the United States, Michael Colgrass, Alan Hovhaness, Henry Brant, and William Kraft created a variety of works ranging from chamber music to solos and even a symphony for percussion. As Europe and Asia recovered from the war, the arts there began a process of rebirth. In the late 1950s and 1960s, French composers André Jolivet, Marius Constant, and Maurice Ohana added a number of percussion works for the concert hall as well as for the dance. The years following World War II and the decades that immediately followed saw a resurgence of musical creativity and the schooled percussionist became sought after as both performer and teacher.

Pierre Reverdy et les musiciens

Recent scholarship on Pierre Reverdy has neglected to study the relationship between Reverdy's poetry and music. The union of the two arts was questioned after André Breton's rejection of it. However, in a tribute to Reverdy back in 1962, composer Henry Barraud shared memories of his encounters with the poet and disclosed the talks they had had on his radio show about transposing poems into music. This article sets out to explore the fragile and little-known connection between Reverdy and music, as documented by his aesthetic debates with musicians such as in the radio broadcast and the unpublished correspondence with Barraud, and through the evidence of musical works inspired by his poems by artists of different generations. Notable associations between Reverdy's poetry and music are, among others, a piece of 1927 by André Jolivet, an early example of influence on Olivier Messiaen, the successive compositions of Betsy Jolas from 1949 through to 2009, and, finally, the 1989 centenary of the poet as celebrated by five pieces for solo guitar, each written by a different composer, and based upon the 1919 collection La Guitare endormie.

MESSIAEN AND THE NOTION OF INFLUENCE

In 1989, I bought a CD in Paris of the early piano music of André Jolivet. Like many non-French musicians, I had read the name of Jolivet but heard little of his music. Jolivet's reputation as Varèse's leading pupil and the extreme avant-gardist of the pre-World War II group La Jeune France seemed completely at odds with his conventional post-War music occasionally broadcast on Radio 3, such as the Concertos for Trumpet, Piano or Ondes Martenot–music which suggested not fully assimilated influences of Honegger or Hindemith, with little obviously adventurous about it in its rhythmically conservative phrasing and standard formal shapes.

London, Royal Academy of Music: Philippe Hersant

Philippe Hersant (b. 1948 in Rome, graduated Paris Conservatoire, studied with André Jolivet), has been working with the French national radio station France-Musique since 1973 and has received many honours as composer in France. In February 2004 Radio France presented a ‘retrospective’ of his prolific output as well as the première of his Violin Concerto, a Radio France commission. His new opera, Le Maine Noir, based on Anton Chekov's story, will be premièred in May 2005.

Andre Jolivet (1905–1974)

Andre Jolivet died in Paris in December 1974 at the age of 69. His untimely death caused deep distress to his numerous friends. For the French musica world it meant the loss of an important, original and imaginative composer, and there was, at least, the usual acknowledgment from official quarters. Otherwise it hardly caused a stir; and the press, which had always been so responsive to his music, remained strangely silent. This is all the more surprising as Jolivet, during the last thirty years, had been a frequent guest at international and national festivals, had been widely performed and acclaimed in the Western world, and was considered representative of a certain kind of new French music (though overshadowed by his friend and near-contemporary Olivier Messiaen).

A Conversation with Andre Jolivet

In the drawing room there is the scent of hyacinth. Japanese lamps brought back from a distant journey alternate with subdued lighting from lace-covered lampshades in a characteristically French style. There is a grand piano, a leafy tapestry, like a wood at twilight, and on the walls a picture in red and black by Roger Bezombes inspired by the ballet Cinéma. A bust of Jolivet by Joseph Rivière stands on the mantelpiece. Both east and west have made their mark on this friendly apartment. Even before Jolivet took me into his study I felt the presence here of the African sun, and the memory of ritual songs. I knew that this great composer preferred lyricism to all other things.