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Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation and Composition edited by John A. Sloboda. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988. £35.00, 298 pp. John Paynter British Journal of Music Education / Volume 5 / Issue 02 / July 1988, pp 204 - 206 DOI: 10.1017/S0265051700006598, Published online: 18 December 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0265051700006598 How to cite this article: John Paynter (1988). British Journal of Music Education, 5, pp 204-206 doi:10.1017/ S0265051700006598 Request Permissions : Click here

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keyboard player in performance. Clarendon Press, 1988. Melodies are suitable for £35.00, 298 pp. junior school voices. A Was it Schumann who advised welcome addition to the pianists always to sight-read repertoire. through to the end as a first step The King's Emerald by Betty in tackling a new piece, because Roe and John Tully. Thames otherwise they would have little Music, 1986. Score £3.50, overall understanding of what libretto £1.50, 23 pp. they were embarking upon? I recall that, when I first heard The Pink Parakeet by Betty that story, it echoed immediately Roe and Marian Lines. with my own experience because Thames Music, 1986. Score in my teens I had concluded £8.75, libretto £2.50, 96 pp. that, notwithstanding the The Barnstormers by Betty multiplicity of errors along the Roe and Marian Lines. way, if I could not sight-read Thames Music, 1976. Score through a piece with some £2.20, libretto £1.10, 12 pp. semblance of how it should sound as a whole, I should Kookoojoo and the Magic never play it at all. Forest by Betty Roe and That was quite simply a Marian Lines. Thames Music, hunch: an emotional reaction to 1983. Score £3.50, libretto the task confronting me. £1.40, 31 pp. Within this group of pieces by Whether or not it was a sensible strategy to adopt at that point, I Betty Roe and her two cofind myself now drawn back to authors there is a wide variety it in reading the opening chapter of choice for schools. The of this fascinating symposium. Pink Parakeet is aimed at Dr Eric Clarke's penetrating secondary schools, whilst the analysis of how performers other three pieces are more perceive, understand and suited to junior school interpret musical structures performance. A range of 'an activity comparable in musical styles is adopted in cognitive complexity to speaking the song writing which should a language, and comparable in provide interest for all tastes. motor control to playing tennis' The music is predominantly reveals that, paramount in the keyboard-based (some of process, is the ability to grasp which will be beyond the the structural principles in any inexperienced player), but given piece of music and to there are opportunities for recognise significant two-part singing, choral relationships between the parts speaking and other and the whole. instrumental accompaniments. I am struck by the thought Without exception the lyrics that this is something which and narratives are delightful should occupy an important and are well matched by the place in the methodology of the music. Younger children early stages of instrumental especially will enjoy the study. Maybe it already does; skilful way in which the and perhaps we shall say it is authors play with words. only common sense that it GRAHAM WELCH should: it is not unusual for us to play down the findings of research in psychology by labelling them as little more Generative Processes in than common sense. Even so, we Music: The Psychology of have a tendency to take more Performance, notice of ideas once they have Improvisation and been subjected to rigorous Composition edited by John scientific investigation! And A. Sloboda. Oxford: The 204

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here, I think, is the peculiar value of this book, and possibly its special importance for those of us involved with music education. So often, on the basis of their careful research, the contributors appear to confirm the hunches upon which we have been operating for a good many years. And we do need that confirmation. Evidence of ' popular' musical creativity comes from Maria Sagi and Ivan Vitany, two researchers at the Cultural Institute in Budapest. They take up a point from Bartok's folksong studies: how it is that musically untrained people appear able to make up melodies? When Bartok recorded folk singers in the Hungarian countryside during the first decade of this century, he wondered whether such people had, at some stage, invented the songs or whether another process of musical structuring was at work. His classification of the melodic trends in more than three hundred tunes suggested that the songs had not been invented (in the sense in which a composer would invent musical ideas and develop them) but were generated from a common stock of melody fragments. Sagi and Vitanyi invited people without musical training to improvise tunes to given poems of varying verbal complexity. The results are convincing. They recorded 3420 tunes! Although it would seem that, at the start, their theory was greeted with scepticism by some musicologists, many school music teachers will not find it at all surprising that the experiment met with success. Classroom creative musicmaking in Britain and elsewhere may have approached this question from a different angle but it has also pointed (e.g. in the work of Piers Spencer and Robert Bunting) to the significance of familiar musical idioms within 'the common language of music'. This is not

to dismiss or diminish the work of Sagi and Vitanyi but rather to applaud their efforts and to acknowledge our debt to John Sloboda for bringing their work to our attention. In addition to this kind of helpful confirmation, we find elsewhere in the book fresh and challenging thinking about things we may too easily take for granted. Rudolf Rasch, in a research project based at the University of Utrecht, has asked fundamental questions about ensemble performance: how do players make sense of the music, for themselves and for listeners ? How important is it, for the clear perception of musical textures, that players in an ensemble should keep precisely together? When are they likely to need a conductor? Is it easier to synchronise parts in fast music or in slow music ? We may be surprised to discover that some things are more clearly heard when the ensemble is not exactly synchronised. Similarly, we may discover that our views on pulse and timing are unrealistic and that meaningful musical activity calls for quite considerable degrees of flexibility. Alf Gabrielsson (Uppsala University, Sweden) reminds us of the importance of studying the sounding music: scores are only indications of potential music, and to understand the links between the performer's experience and the listener's experience between motion and emotion: between timing and what is presented and received - we must take into account the complex and ever-changing interaction of tempo, duration, articulation and deviations from mechanical regularity, which in turn depend upon the instrument, the performer, and the situation of the performance. Further study of music communication and of what makes an 'acceptable' performance is described by Johan Sunberg (also from Sweden) in an account of a

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project which applied speech research techniques to the analysis of computer-synthesised performances of music; analysis which 'is beginning to reveal what exactly it is that musicians add to written music'. Jeff Pressing, from La Trobe University in Australia, offers a new theory of improvisation; and from Canada, in a paper by Linda Gruson, comes evidence of how musicians at different levels of expertise set about rehearsing, and of the implications this has for the generating of coherent performances. Research from Harvard University's 'Project Zero' will give teachers much food for thought; especially those of us who tend to think that reading and writing music should become part of musical education at a relatively late stage and only after 'a mass of sense impressions has been acquired' (cf. John Horton, A Report on Music Education in

England. UNESCO, 1955: 136-139). Lyle Davidson and Lawrence Scripp point out that, soon after children start to speak, they begin to make marks on paper; and very quickly the scribbles take on the status of 'writing'. Subsequently schools capitalise upon this pre-literate symbolisation of the written language so that development of writing is able to keep pace with speech and reading. Why, then, do we not encourage children's musical scribble which similarly, could be developed into formal notation alongside the experience of music in singing and playing? Apart from any other considerations, this would have one very important advantage: it would indicate what children understand about music, giving us a 'window on music cognition', just as written language becomes 'a sign of understanding, an index of intellectual ability'.

harder, about music education. Twenty-five years ago and more we took inspiration from writers in the field of aesthetic philosophy who stirred us to visions of what music education might become. I believe we have reached a point where our work can similarly benefit from the objective view of the psychologist. Until now this has hardly been possible. For although research in the psychology of music has a long history, the emphasis has largely been upon understanding the processes by which we receive music - as listeners. The eleven papers in this excellent symposium explore the other side of the equation: the processes by which music is made: that is to say, the mental processes of those who generate music - performers, improvisers and composers. The contributors represent a range of interests in psychology and allied sciences, in music and in sociology; and throughout, the excitement of discovery - of being in at the start of something important - is strongly present, in that much of what appears is theorising of a pioneering nature. The writers are taking risks and, as John Sloboda points out, ' It is not clear which of these approaches and ideas have a future.' Be that as it may, there is no lack of clarity in his editorial summary of the principal findings of his collaborators; and - although obviously not intended to do so-it seems to me that the five 'core assumptions' identified towards the end of the Preface elegantly support the criteria for Music in the GCSE. Whether or not every idea presented here has a future, as well as being a much needed extension to the Psychology of Music literature this is surely a most important book for Music Education. JOHN PAYNTER

These are a few examples of ways in which this exciting book stimulates us to think again, and

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