Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice

Series Editor John Rink

Volume 1
Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance
Edited by John Rink, Helena Gaunt and Aaron Williamon
Volume 2
Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in
Contemporary Music
Edited by Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman
Volume 3
Music and Shape
Edited by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Helen M. Prior
Volume 4
Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency
Edited by Tina K. Ramnarine
Volume 5
Music as Creative Practice
Nicholas Cook
PART 2

Creative processes
 7

Performers in the practice room

Karen Wise, Mirjam James and John Rink

Classical musicians generally spend long hours in practice rooms preparing

for performances. The fact that they tend to do this in solitude distinguishes
the practising of classical musicians not only from genres in which it is more
common to learn music and to prepare for performance by playing with oth-
ers rather than on one’s own, but also from activities such as sports, where
individuals typically train with coaches and/or in groups. Here we focus in par-
ticular on the more isolated practice experiences of classical musicians,1 with
a view to challenging current definitions of practice and seeking new ways of
understanding how it occurs and with what outcomes.
The private space of the practice room has a number of ambivalent asso-
ciations. On the one hand, many of the activities that musicians carry out in
the practice room are necessarily repetitive and can be dull—seemingly the
antithesis to creativity. On the other hand, practice rooms offer space for exper-
imentation, reflection and the development of interpretational ideas. Although
practice can be viewed and approached as a creative process (Klickstein 2009),
little is known about its role and significance in the development of the creative
musician, and how the activities in practice rooms might lead to performances
with creative qualities—whether the latter are defined in terms of their origi-
nality, interpretational insight, freshness, spontaneity, communication or other
aspects.
This chapter explores the creative processes that take place in the practice
room; although the focus is on classical musicians, the discussion is likely to be
relevant to any musician undertaking individual practice as part of performance
preparation. We begin by investigating perspectives on practice and creativity in
the scholarly research literature and in writing focused on practical advice and
pedagogy. Although the literature on practice from both practical and scholarly
standpoints is extensive (thus requiring a selective approach here), relatively lit-
tle direct attention has been given to creativity in relation to individual practice. 143
144 Musicians in the Making

In fact, creativity has rarely been the explicit focus of either research studies or
pedagogical advice, and the insights that do emerge are largely tangential. We
argue furthermore that the way in which practice has often been represented and
understood gives limited scope for creative dimensions to emerge.
At the same time, the solitary nature of classical musicians’ practice means
that the processes involved can remain opaque. In order to illuminate the crea-
tive dimensions of solitary practice, this chapter goes on to describe a research
project which investigated advanced student musicians in the practice room as
they prepared a piece for public performance. A key feature of the project was
that it engaged the musicians themselves in identifying aspects of their prac-
tice that they considered important to the creative development of their per-
formance.2 The project therefore explored creativity in classical music practice
through the lens of musicians’ experiences, mental processes and the meaning
that they attach to their activities, rather than imposing a predefined set of cri-
teria for what counts as creative. Drawing on primary data from this project, we
describe the creative processes that are in operation on a local level (moment-
by-moment practice strategies) and on a broader level (creative development of
an interpretation and a sense of ownership). We then explore a set of further
key insights, which have implications for our understanding not only of the
nature of creativity in classical music practice, but also of what practice itself
entails. These insights relate to:

• Individual differences in musicians’ creative ways of working

• The interrelationship and integration of technical and expressive
elements
• The nonlinear characteristics of creative processes
• The social dimensions of solitary practice, and a wider view of what
counts as practising.

The data yield a rich picture of individual practice as a creative process.

We argue that in order to understand how practice is related to the develop-
ment of musicians’ creative agency, both broader and deeper understanding of
what practice entails is required. As we demonstrate in what follows, a broader
understanding entails widening existing concepts of practice to include activ-
ities that are not necessarily seen by students, teachers and/or researchers as
‘proper’ practice, while a deeper understanding involves exploring how individ-
uals’ creative aims and outcomes are developed and realized in actual activities,
strategies and thought processes as practice unfolds.

Practice in scholarly research

The seminal work of the psychologists Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer

(1993) has shaped current understanding of practice and its role in the
 Performers in the practice room 145

development of expertise. They articulated the notion of deliberate practice

as a ‘highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve perfor-
mance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weakness, and performance
is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. …
Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance’
(ibid.: 368). The three main features of deliberate practice—setting goals,
developing effective practice strategies and being motivated—have been the
focus of practice research and literature ever since, and they can be seen
as essential for successful expert performances in music (Platz et al. 2014).
Evidence has been adduced to show that experts differ from novices not only
in the age when they started to learn an instrument or the sheer amount of
time they have devoted to deliberate practice, but also in the strategies that
they employ. Such strategies have been investigated by Hallam et al. (2012),
who asked 3,325 musicians ranging from beginners to professionals about
their practising strategies, the organization of their practice and their motiva-
tion. The results indicated that the key to success is not necessarily the devel-
opment of a wide variety of effective practice strategies; rather, it is more
important to avoid ineffective strategies such as only playing through entire
pieces or returning to the beginning of a piece after making a mistake. In
an observation and interview study including expert performers and novices,
Gruson (1988) too showed that practice strategies changed with increasing
levels of expertise. For example, the greater the players’ level of experience,
the more they tended to focus on repeating small sections as opposed to
playing through the music, and the shorter their repeated sections became
in average number of notes. Experience also resulted in the ability to concep-
tualize practice behaviour and to use a larger number of practice strategies of
increased cognitive complexity.

General advice on practice

Notions such as deliberate practice and developing practice strategies feature

not only in academic research but also in the form of more general guidelines
issued by musicians for musicians. These can be found in an array of litera-
ture ranging from philosophical treatises and blogs to step-by-step guides and
practice diary templates for individual use. In one sense, musicians looking for
advice on how to practise are spoiled for choice. While the exact content and
tone vary according to the intended audience, practice advice usually centres
on the core issues of structuring and regulating one’s time and of practising
efficiently. Guidance is readily available on strategies such as setting goals,
breaking down tasks, establishing routines, practising mindfully and motivat-
ing oneself to put in the time and carry out sometimes dull, repetitive tasks.
One online source, for example, advises young singers that ‘effective practice is
146 Musicians in the Making

often boring and repetitive, so it is important that you remain mindful of your
actions’.3 A passage from the blog of Noa Kageyama4—taken from just one of
many thought-provoking and well-informed articles on the site—typifies much
of the prevalent discourse around practice: ‘It doesn’t matter if we are talking
about perfecting technique, or experimenting with different musical ideas. Any
model which encourages smarter, more systematic, active thought and clearly
articulated goals will help cut down on wasted, ineffective practice time. After
all, who wants to spend all day in the practice room? Get in, get stuff done, and
get out!’
While it cannot be denied that an essential function of practice is to develop
the core technical and musical skills necessary for performance, it is striking
that many of these descriptions of practice do not move much beyond the
notion that its primary purpose is to give musicians the building blocks. That
is, the focus is generally on strategies to improve technical skills and fluency and
to increase the reliability of one’s musical output, with the relevance and appli-
cation of such strategies to creative aspects more or less tacitly implied rather
than explicitly articulated.

Creativity in existing practice literature

In the sources described so far, there is little explicit information about how one
might go about practising in order to become a more creative musician or to
maximize one’s chance of producing a performance perceived by audiences as
exciting and novel. It is therefore far from clear which practice strategies might
enable more creative aspects of performance, such as developing one’s own
interpretation of a piece, or how strategies in the practice phase might relate
to creative processes during performance, such as risk-taking and adjusting to
unforeseen circumstances.
In order to better understand the link between practice and creativity, we
need a broader conception of what practice entails and how that feeds into the
development of the ‘creative musician’. Some authors have explored practice
along these lines, and examples can be found in practical pedagogical litera-
ture as well as empirical research (e.g. Klickstein 2009; Sloboda 1985; Hallam
1995; Prior and Ginsborg 2011; Jørgensen 2004). What all of these contribu-
tions share is a view of practice as the process of preparing for a performance.
On the one hand, this seems unremarkable, given that one of the main activities
of musicians in the western classical tradition is to perform pieces they have
practised to an audience, and practice strategies are therefore used to improve
the next performance. On the other hand, research and general practice advice
often isolate the two.
Sloboda (1985) distinguishes between the acquisition of instrument-specific
skills and performance skills. With regard to the former, he refers to the three
 Performers in the practice room 147

phases of skill acquisition proposed by Fitts (1964): cognitive stage, associa-

tive stage and autonomous stage. For example, the first steps in holding a bow
in the right hand in order to produce a sound on a stringed instrument must
be taken consciously, whereas such actions are executed almost automatically
after a certain amount of practice even as the left hand carries out difficult
moves on the fingerboard. Sloboda regards performance as a continuum from
sight reading to expert performance, with rehearsal in between these extremes.
Noting that the rehearsal stage involves practice strategies such as those studied
by Gruson (1988), Sloboda observes that more is needed to perform music than
the ability simply to play through a piece. Performers must develop and inter-
nalize their mental representation of a piece on multiple levels: musical phras-
ing, dynamics, understanding of harmonic progressions and musical structure,
and so forth.
While Sloboda’s discussion of rehearsal is similar to that in some of the
practice literature, the fact that he contextualizes practice differently and
sees it as one stage of developing a performance helps to reconceptualize
it. A similar view of practice underpinned Hallam’s (1995) investigation of
musicians’ approaches to the learning and interpretation of music, in which
she interviewed twenty-two freelance professional musicians about their indi-
vidual approaches. Applying Pask’s (1976) model of learning styles, Hallam
found that some of the musicians adopted a holistic strategy by initially
undertaking an overview of the entire piece, whereas others adopted a serial
strategy by looking at a smaller section first before moving on to the next.
In addition, some musicians took an analytical approach to interpretation,
while others preferred an intuitive method. The majority of the musicians
in the study combined a preference for an intuitive approach with the serial
strategy. Using a theoretical framework by Perry (1970), Hallam argued
that the intuitive/serialist approach was likely to be associated with lower
levels of musical intellectual development (such as being concerned only
with playing correct notes). By contrast, musicians using an analytic/holis-
tic approach or a combination of approaches were more likely to achieve a
higher level of intellectual development (the highest level being represented
by those musicians who develop their own personal style of performance).
Individuals also differed in their preferences for the extent to which inter-
pretative decisions were made in advance or left to spontaneity during the
performance. Thus, Hallam’s study points to a combination of factors con-
necting the process of practice with an individual’s performance creativity
and artistic development.
While Hallam investigated what musicians said they did in general in their
practice, Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford (Chaffin and Imreh 2001; Chaffin, Imreh
and Crawford 2002; Chaffin et al. 2003) took a detailed case-study approach to
examine how an expert musician actually prepared for a recording. Focusing on
the work of the pianist Gabriela Imreh, Chaffin et al. outlined four stages of
148 Musicians in the Making

practice, from the first encounter to a ‘maintenance stage’: (1) establishing an

aural idea of the piece by playing through the music, analysing it or listening to
recordings; (2) developing an interpretation while working through the piece in
sections; (3) polishing sections, joining them together and refining interpreta-
tive details; and (4) maintaining the interpretation, which might involve making
slight modifications over an extended period of time.
In his research into instrumental practice and music education, Jørgensen
(2004) characterized four types of strategies: planning strategies, strategies
for the conduct (execution) of practice, strategies to evaluate practice, and
meta-strategies (Jørgensen and Hallam 2009). One important aspect of plan-
ning strategies is the musician’s plan for how to develop the interpretation.
According to Jørgensen, a number of approaches are possible, e.g. develop-
ing the interpretation alongside mastering the technical challenges, or mas-
tering the technical side first before developing interpretational ideas for a
performance. Practice execution strategies discussed include mental versus
actual playing strategies, practising smaller parts versus the whole piece, and
facing and combatting performance anxiety during the preparation period.
Jørgensen’s evaluation strategies focused strongly on correcting errors, but he
also suggested working with aural or visual models, preferably combined with
evaluating recordings of one’s own performances. The last group—meta-strat-
egies—deals with the knowledge of oneself, the process of practising or the
effectiveness of strategies. While the strategies in themselves are not explic-
itly described as creative (and indeed are not necessarily so), it is easy to see
how they could be employed as such, with a creative approach or intention.
The examples presented later in this chapter illustrate how the types of strate-
gies to which Jørgensen refers can be extended to accommodate more creative
approaches.
These holistic views of practice and musical advancement are not con-
fined to the scientific-empirical literature: they can also be found in a handful
of publications aimed at aspiring professional musicians. One such publi-
cation is Madeleine Bruser’s The Art of Practicing (1999), which combines
physiological and meditative principles (the latter deriving from mindfulness
meditation). Bruser’s book was one of the inspirations for Klickstein’s The
Musician’s Way, which argues that practising does more than develop tech-
nical and musical mastery: ‘the decisive aim of practice is to prepare perfor-
mances because, as an art form, music centers on the interaction between
performer and listener. In a few words[,] then, practice is the deliberate, crea-
tive process of improving musical ability and of mastering music for perfor-
mance’ (Klickstein 2009:  4; italics added). This introduces the notion that
practice itself can be a creative process. Moreover, Klickstein asserts that per-
formances reflect the manner of practice: only by engaging with practice as
a creative activity can one bring a sense of that creativity into performance,
however one defines it.
 Performers in the practice room 149

Creative processes in practice

It seems evident that multiple approaches, strategies and pathways can be

adopted in developing a creative performance, but much work remains to
be done to explore, identify and clearly articulate these. In the next sections,
we draw on some of the findings from our own work to develop a view of prac-
tising which potentially has theoretical validity, reflects what musicians actually
do (even if they do not always realize it), and might shed light on what creative
music-making entails and indeed requires.
In the study from which much of the following material in this chapter is drawn,5
we explored advanced students’ experience of creativity in the development of an
individual interpretation of a solo piece. Through this we were seeking a better
understanding of the relationship between creative processes in practice and in
performance, and the link between the two. Details of the five participants can be
seen in Table 7.1. These students kept practice diaries over a period of up to five
months and made audiovisual recordings of three consecutive practice sessions at
three stages during that process, i.e. at the beginning, in the middle and at the end
of the preparation period. This yielded a total of nine recorded practice sessions
for each participant. After performing their chosen piece in a public performance,
the individual participants reviewed the videos of these practice sessions and of the
filmed performance, and they identified passages that they considered important
to their creative development of the piece; these passages were then discussed in
an interview with one of the researchers.6 This allowed us to identify ‘creative epi-
sodes’7 in the students’ practice sessions and to analyse the interview data along-
side the video content, in order to characterize creative processes in their practice.
The thematic analysis of interview data took an inductive approach (follow-
ing Braun and Clarke 2006); this involved systematically coding similar state-
ments and recurrent ideas throughout the interviews and forming first-level
themes, which are the scaffolding for more interpretative second-level themes.
The aim in forming first-level themes is to stay close to the semantic content
of participants’ accounts, and in this case the themes represent moment-to-
moment strategies and processes described by the participants. The second-
level themes were arrived at by focusing the analysis on the broader functions

TABLE 7.1 Participants

Gender Instrument Stage of study

1 Male Horn Postgraduate (MMus)

2 Female Violin Postgraduate (MMus)
3 Male Percussion (vibraphone) Postgraduate (MMus)
4 Male Organ Postgraduate (MMus)
5 Female Double bass Undergraduate (BMus year 3 of 4)
150 Musicians in the Making

served by those strategies in participants’ development of their own interpre-

tation of their piece.8 This particular focus on one’s own interpretation was
chosen because a sense of ownership9 emerged as a key part of students’ expe-
riences of creativity in our earlier observations of one-to-one lessons (James
et al. 2010). In the following discussion, second-level themes are described first.
For all participants in our project, developing their own interpretation
seemed to involve making decisions about what they wanted to communicate,
deciding explicitly what their ideas were, and having a sense of that over the
whole piece as well as in shorter passages and sections. Three interactive pro-
cesses, expressed in the second-level themes in Figure 7.1, were fundamental to
the overall process:
1. Developing an overarching concept of the piece that makes sense
at different levels of structure, i.e. holistically as well as in shorter
passages and sections;
2. Establishing focused intentions which guide both the performer’s aims
at any one moment as well as for the whole piece, and the performer’s
conscious attention;
3. Making it ‘feel right’ in two respects, i.e. physical comfort (or at least
control) and making musical sense to the performer.

These elements, which can be understood as interactive processes, are under-

pinned by a number of smaller-scale processes represented by the first-level
themes, which were present across all participants’ interview data (see Figure
7.1). The most important themes are listed in Table 7.2 with illustrative quota-
tions from the interview data.
The majority of creative episodes identified by our participants involved
problem-solving on multiple levels, including integrating and negotiating ele-
ments of musical intention, emotional expression and technical realization. In
relation to the last example shown in Table 7.2, the participant later articulated
the technical and attention strategies that he eventually used to find a crea-
tive solution to the problem: focusing on the top note and treating the down-
ward notes like a string ‘ricochet’ which, according to the student, was both
novel (‘most people don’t do it that way’) and satisfying (‘the ricochet makes
it cool’). This involved deliberate effort to find and revise solutions rather than
resorting to mere intuition. Although the literature on musical practice has
noted the importance of problem-solving (see e.g. Chaffin and Imreh 1997),
its role in creative processes has not been explicitly acknowledged or system-
atically investigated. This is remarkable, given that problem-solving has else-
where been called the ‘most obvious function’ of creativity (Runco 2004: 658);
without problem-solving, solutions to challenges cannot be found (Mumford
et al. 1991; Torrance 1988; Wallas 1926). Equally important are locating and
identifying problems, i.e. the ability to notice a problem and then frame it in a
way that makes it approachable.
 Making it ‘your own’

Second-level themes

Developing
a concept

Making it Establishing
‘feel right’ intentions

First-level themes

Looking for and/or naming different characters in a piece

Finding and emphasizing contrast and variety
Experimenting and exploring
Clarifying own ideas and opinions
Identifying and solving problems
Revising ideas over time

FIGURE 7.1 Processes in forming one’s own interpretation and making it ‘your own’. The first-level
themes represent reported practice strategies that operate as micro processes in support of the macro
processes expressed in the second-level themes, which in turn are incorporated in the overarching
concept of ‘making it “your own” ’.

TABLE 7.2 First-level themes and select participant comments

Theme Participant comments

Looking for and/or nam- … then you’ve got other things you can work on in the bottom line,
ing different characters in and kind of giving them characters like ‘I’m not in a rush’, ‘cheeky’…
a piece (Vibraphonist)
The need to emphasize or I started working on … how to make it more interesting by
to find contrast and variety emphasizing the accents and the difference, because the music, as it’s
in the piece written[,] … actually does have different accents… (Horn player)
Experimenting with and … experimenting with different contact points and attacks of the
exploring ideas bow to achieve different characters… (Violinist)
Clarifying one’s own ideas … the way I viewed it was … I thought that’s the melody and this
and opinions right-hand thing is just something that’s kind of going along like a
machine… (Vibraphonist)
Revising ideas and deci- I had kind of a very focused sound which I ended up changing later
sions over time on… (Violinist)
Identifying and solving I started to realize that the arpeggios were very cool but … there
problems needed to be an emphasis on some, and, whether the beginning or
the end, there needed to be an emphasis on one of the points of each
one in order for it to make a musical phrase. I was thinking … how
you can link from one, I could link from that to the next with the
next one with the repeated notes, so that then the arpeggio … [is]
no longer … vertical but horizontal… (Horn player)
152 Musicians in the Making

MORE THAN ONE APPROACH

While the key elements of the creative process in forming an individual

interpretation—developing a concept, establishing intentions and making it feel
right—were common to all of our participants, we gained further insight into
their individual creative pathways by considering their specific ideas and inten-
tions, the language in which these were articulated, and how participants talked
about their interpretative decisions in relation to the sense of ‘feeling right’.
Taking all of this into account, we discerned initial themes related to individual
differences that we have broadly characterized as two ways of working, termed
‘musical parameters-led’ and ‘emotion/narrative-led’ (summarized in Table 7.3).
Participants whose predominant way of working was ‘musical parameters-
led’ tended to express their evolving ideas in terms of the musical structure as
gleaned from the score. Their intentions were characterized in terms of seeking
balance between, and an effective understanding of, different musical elements
in relation to the whole. In making interpretative decisions, these musicians were
also concerned with the immediate sound of a given feature, such as whether a
particular line or musical element might be perceived clearly. The vibraphonist
and the organist in our study showed the strongest tendency to work in this
way. In this interview excerpt, the organist describes a creative episode in his
practice when he experimented with registrations for the piece by Bach that he
was playing, and making an interpretative decision about which to use:
Before, I was using a different sort of trio sonata registration having the
right hand on an eight-foot on the lower manual and the left hand trans-
posing down an octave on the other manual at a four-foot—the four-foot
stop, so that the sound is very very similar, which is fun but … if there isn’t
enough interest in … both sounds, you can’t tell what part’s doing what…
[The different registration allowed me] to hear all the parts more clearly.

The vibraphonist also talked about developing a concept of the piece in terms
of the relationship between small structural details and the whole: ‘It’s just like
these panels of music that go on for quite a long time and then they just [clicks
fingers] change, and within those there are certain micro details that are quite

TABLE 7.3 Characteristics of ‘two ways of working’

Musical parameters-led Emotion/narrative-led

Concepts Expressed in musical structural terms Expressed in emotional terms,

stories, expressive images
Intentions Seeking/communicating clarity, form, Seeking/communicating emotional
balance of elements in relation to whole narrative or effect
Focus Immediate sound (what can be perceived) Emotional impact (what can be felt)
 Performers in the practice room 153

important but … it feels like there’s a big picture which is the most important
thing not to mess up’.
Participants whose predominant way of working was ‘emotion/narrative-led’
expressed their intentions in terms of seeking emotional meaning or effect. They
devised stories and conjured up expressive images to characterize a number of
musical elements as well as the whole piece, and their aim in doing so was to
heighten the emotional impact of the piece. The violinist, the double bassist and
the horn player typified this way of working. For example, this comment of the
horn player refers to a passage in his rehearsal footage where he is experiment-
ing with types of singing while conducting himself, using a specific cultural refer-
ence: ‘I thought, this was the kind of singing that you would do … in, um, like a
night time with a guitar—very … Spanish …, guitar and the moon’. Similarly,
the double bass player describes her evolving concept of the piece as an emo-
tional narrative: ‘What’s going on now [is] something incredibly weird and mad,
and then it starts slowly, slowly picking up a lot of tension growing somewhere,
somewhere really … intensively, but … with this steady pulse … it’s a scary piece.
The whole piece I felt was … very … scary and mad and … mentally not stable’.
These two ways of working reflect the participants’ tendencies rather than
mutually exclusive approaches. For example, emotional or narrative ideas were
sometimes used as part of a learning process primarily characterized by a musi-
cal parameters-led way of working; this can be seen in the explanation of the
organist in our study as to why he plays the opening of the piece as he does:
‘It is a happy piece!’ Equally, analytical work sometimes formed an important
part of an otherwise emotion/narrative-led way of working. For instance, the
double bass player was able to engage with her challenging contemporary piece
only after she had discovered a key feature of the piece’s melodic structure:

suddenly I  realized that the whole piece is build up on the intervallic

motive of BACH. A semitone down followed by a minor third up and a
semitone down again. This motive is hidden behind almost every passage
or element but taken from all other pitches. I feel that this is a great step-
ping stone, although I’m not sure how it will benefit my playing that I’ve
at least found a key foundation to this piece.

She then gradually developed her concept of the piece as an emotional narra-
tive, drawing on some powerfully resonant aspects of her personal history.
These two ways of working recall the styles—analytical and intuitive—to
which Hallam (1995) referred in her study of musicians’ approaches to interpre-
tation. They are also reminiscent of Bahle’s (1939) analysis of creative develop-
ments and principles in respect of composers. Bahle described two approaches to
recognizing and resolving musical problems, which he regarded as a key means
of generating new musical material. He referred to these in terms of ‘work-
ing’ (Arbeitstypus, literally ‘working-type’) and ‘inspiration’ (Inspirationstypus,
154 Musicians in the Making

i.e. ‘inspiration-type’), characterizing the handling of musical problems differ-

ently for each type. For the ‘working-type’, the musical problems emerge while
one is working with musical material, whether actively studying one’s own or
others’ compositions or experimenting with existing material. Conversely, for
the ‘inspiration-type’, the musical problems arise indirectly, e.g. through conver-
sation or listening to other compositions, amounting to a less deliberate form of
‘conception’ which might seem like sudden inspiration. The nature of the prob-
lems is also described differently for each type: the working-type focuses initially
on the form and content of compositions, whereas the inspiration-type is more
concerned with the emotional content or impact of a piece. In these respects too,
the parallels with our ‘two ways of working’ are striking.
Bahle showed how the two types serve to resolve compositional problems.
Although both involve experimentation, improvisation and building possibili-
ties, the working-type approach seems to feature a conscious, deliberate process
while composing a piece, whereas with the inspiration-type, material tends to
develop less directly (e.g. through improvising, drawing analogies and repro-
ducing existing material, whether one’s own or others’) and away from the
drawing board, which makes putting ideas on paper seem relatively effortless.
Both of Bahle’s types involve hard work, but the activities leading to specific
outcomes are different in each case.
The similarity between Bahle’s analysis of how composers work and the
pathways of developing individual interpretations as identified in our study is
obvious, suggesting that the creative processes involved in composing on the
one hand and developing a performance interpretation on the other might be
closely related. Of course, there might be other ‘ways of working’ in addition
to the two that we identified. What we cannot tell from our study is how far
these ways of working reflected individual preferences (consider in this respect
Hallam’s 1995 identification of individual differences in learning styles) and
how they were related to other factors such as instrument, piece, musical style
or participants’ unique backgrounds, knowledge and training. All of this
needs further investigation, as does the critical relationship between practising
approach and the quality of performance produced. What we do know is that
our participants followed a number of pathways to reach a common goal: an
individual and engaging performance.

CHALLENGING POLARITIES BETWEEN TECHNICAL

AND EXPRESSIVE ELEMENTS

The relationship between technical and expressive elements is of particular

interest when considering creativity and performance, not least because in
everyday discourse, as well as in the research literature, these are often pitted
against one another as competing priorities. In our own research, conservatoire
teachers were ambivalent about the status of technical excellence in relation
 Performers in the practice room 155

to expressivity—and indeed creativity—in performance.10 Some observed that

technique was fundamental, conferring on the performer the freedom and flex-
ibility to express his or her vision of a piece. From this standpoint, technical
fluency is a necessary condition for expressivity; it might even have to be estab-
lished before a performer can be expressive. However, a more cautionary view
was also articulated, namely that musical expression and creativity could be
‘hampered by the millstone of technical excellence’ (James and Wise n.d.) such
that the relentless pursuit of technical perfection could stifle musical explora-
tion and ideas. Both of these viewpoints position technical aspects as being
rather separate from expressivity, and this dichotomy is also seen in existing
research literature. Observational studies of instrumental teaching (e.g. Zhukov
2008; Young et al. 2003; McPhee 2011) tend to interpret and categorize activ-
ities or verbal exchanges in a way that separates the technical from the expres-
sive. Seen in this light, one-to-one teaching often appears to focus on technical
aspects and notation, with relatively little attention to expressive performance
(Karlsson and Juslin 2008). Looking through a creativity lens, by contrast,
reveals the ways in which technical and expressive elements are intercon-
nected. In our own research on one-to-one lessons (James et al. 2010), video-
recall interviews with students and teachers illustrated the constant interplay
among technical issues, creative problem-solving, and interpretational shaping
and reshaping. Commenting on important moments during one-to-one les-
sons, participants explained how overcoming a technical problem, such as stiff
shoulders, enabled musical expression. Conversely, examples also showed how
working on musical understanding or generating a particular interpretational
intention helped overcome a technical problem.
We were able to see the continuation of this interplay in the practice studio
as students developed their interpretations. The horn player’s goals for his prac-
tice, noted at the start of each of his recorded practice weeks, suggest a linear
progression from technique through interpretation to consolidation:

• Week 1: Technical issues—‘I am looking to begin solving some of the

technical issues (stopped ports, trills, and fingerings)’.
• Week 2: Finalize technical issues and define musical intentions—
‘Resolve finally all technical issues and define my musical
intentions’.
• Week 3: Resolve last technical issues and make sure not to lose the
musical side of things—‘I want to avoid a complete separation of
the two’.

However, his detailed diary entries and his interview commentary on creative
episodes tell another story, much like the expert performer in Chaffin et al.’s
studies, who was concerned with interpretational decisions from the start but
was not aware of the extent of this while concentrating on (as she thought)
more technical issues. Right from the first session, according to his diary,
156 Musicians in the Making

the horn player in our study was aware of, and was exploring, the ‘contrast
of lyricism vs. percussive music’ in the piece, and this had interpretative and
technical ramifications. At the start of the first practice session, he was work-
ing on the twenty-nine-bar opening section of the piece. His diary entry for
this section of the work refers to aiming for ‘a clear beginning that impacts
the listener’ and wanting the whole opening section to ‘make sense as a unity’.
He also wanted to attain a rhythm precisely as it was notated and to portray
the bell-like nature of the opening. There is no direction in the score that the
opening should be ‘bell-like’, however, and it is not clear whether the horn
player formed that image from his own interpretation of the score, from other
written or recorded sources, or from previously hearing others’ ideas about
the piece. But his diary states: ‘Bells from a church in my mind. I try to sing
first to get an idea of what I may strive to sing with my instrument. I try to
bring my inner Spanish musical feelings into the piece’. At the same time, he
reports working on technical execution in terms of breath support and trills.
His first creative episode emerged approximately five minutes into this sec-
tion of his practice, and it involved carrying out a breathing exercise without
the horn. The significance of this was that he had realized he was not joining
notes musically but instead was thinking of them as too separate, and this was
causing fatigue which in turn resulted in a technical problem towards the end
of the section (‘I know how to play trills, but every time when I  will get to
here, I wasn’t capable of doing it’). He also realized that his visualization of
the expressive image (‘it’s supposed to be someone hitting the bells of a church
in Spain’) was contributing to this lack of phrasing. So the task became one
of determining how to achieve this expressive element (‘pgong, pgong, very
percussive’) without wearing himself out—and the solution was support and
connected phrasing between notes.
As with many of the creative episodes that we identified, it is clear that
the process described here involved problem-solving in which the goal is the
balancing and integration of technical and expressive aspects. Furthermore,
closer examination reveals that this process of balancing and integration
often encompassed psychological dimensions too:  attentional focus, emo-
tions, self-efficacy, confidence and integrity are all important in find-
ing one’s own way to play a piece. The horn player’s reports of the local
problem-solving exhibited in his first creative episode—how to produce a
percussive sound without losing the line and getting tired—contained the
seeds of his eventual conceptualization of his ‘own’ piece. First, it was
the start of an ongoing concern with managing the expenditure of energy
through the piece for the sake of stamina. This meant that issues of breath-
ing, pacing and articulation had to be connected and integrated with the
horn player’s navigation through the whole piece, which is to say, his mental
representation of the piece’s structure and how its sections were related to
 Performers in the practice room 157

each other. Secondly, his ‘inner Spanish musical feelings’ were expanded
from the initial bells into a range of expressive images, such as a bullfighter
(a suggestion from his teacher) and a lover singing a serenade with a guitar
by the light of the moon. These enabled him both to feel a strong sense of
personal ownership and to find ways of uniting the percussive and lyrical
aspects of the piece that he identified in the diary record of his first practice
session.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS IS NOT LINEAR

The processes of problem-solving and the interplay and integration of mul-

tiple elements described above involve—and indeed require—cycling between
practice strategies and structural levels of a musical work. Other literature, by
contrast, suggests a progression in practice from ‘start’ to ‘finish’ (i.e. perfor-
mance)—e.g. Chaffin et  al.’s four stages (see discussion above). While these
stages might be represented in other dimensions of music learning, such as
familiarization, memorization and reliability of execution, the creative pro-
cesses that we describe are much less linear.
A number of examples in our data show that when solutions to a problem are
reached, they are for the moment and not final. For instance, the violinist com-
mented, ‘I had kind of a very focused sound which I ended up changing later
on’. The horn player, too, after describing a series of interpretative changes in
one section of his piece, observed, ‘That’s how I wanted to do it back then and
… now we change, it’s fine’. He also recorded ways in which his interpretation
evolved between the first performance of his piece in his end-of-year examina-
tion recital and a later public performance recorded for the research project. This
challenges any notion that a given performance is an end point or that an inter-
pretation is ‘finished’ and final at this point. In another study that we carried out
(James and Wise n.d.) to investigate conservatoire teachers’ concepts of creativ-
ity, one teacher talked about how students could be paralysed by the thought that
they had to establish ‘their’ version of a famous piece, and how as a teacher she
attempted to foster a more provisional approach—that an interpretation is ‘for
now’. She tried to encourage students to take the view that ‘this is how I’m look-
ing at it at the moment and in this particular context, and I will change, my ideas
will change, and then the production and the other people I'm working with, …
so [I am] not fixing things down as if it has to be my permanent opinion on these
pieces’. The modelling of the nonlinear aspects of creative practice therefore has
the potential to help free students from this kind of restrictive thinking. Indeed,
the horn player found that through recording and reflecting on how his interpre-
tation changed, he became more aware of the possibility of different versions:
‘watching these videos now I realize that [there are] so many things you can do,
… why not change things up a little bit maybe next time’.
158 Musicians in the Making

THE SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF SOLITARY PRACTICE

Throughout the period of practising given works, individual ideas are influ-
enced by a musician’s environment. One important influence that our partici-
pants mentioned during their interviews and in their diaries was other people
who had directly or indirectly shaped their decisions about how to develop an
interpretation of a piece. Given that we were working with conservatoire stu-
dents in our research, it is not surprising that ‘teachers’ were cited most often
in this respect, and indeed by all participants. Three of them referred to the
‘composer’ at various times of the recorded practice period, whereas only two
students described the influence of a ‘friend’, although these references were
nevertheless interesting.
Teachers were described as someone who either had given advice (e.g. ‘my
teacher’s few suggestions have definitely helped me to unfold the piece in my
head’) or could be approached for guidance (e.g. ‘I will ask my professor what
he thinks about the role of the grace notes’). They were seen as trustworthy
authorities, and when teachers suggested a particular solution students tended
to change their way of playing accordingly (e.g. ‘[I took a] consciously slower
performance speed, based on what my teacher had said to me in my lesson’).
The rejection of teachers’ suggestions was rare and in one case was even
described as ‘betraying the teacher’.
The second group of people referred to by participants as giving guidelines
was composers. Although they were really referring to the score, participants’
comments indicate that they invoke a sense of the composer’s presence and inten-
tionality when making interpretative decisions. For example, one participant
talked about ‘making a decision as to what the composer meant by lento’, and
another commented, ‘I am trying to reconcile the way [the composer] intended
this part with my own feeling’. In this respect, one participant’s decision to ‘fol-
low my own musicality’ in interpreting a passage in a manner different from its
appearance on the page felt to him like a violation of the composer’s wishes.
This chimes with our observation in previous research (James and Wise n.d.) that
there is a tension between, on the one hand, the respect that performers often feel
they must have for performance traditions and the score—as somehow enshrin-
ing the composer’s intentions—and, on the other hand, their own personality
and individuality, factors which can be seen as essential to creative performing.
Friends were mentioned in a working relationship, as pianist or as a con-
sultant, and they served as what might be called a ‘mirror’ or ‘witness’ (James
and Wise n.d.) to these students’ artistic communication. In that way, the other
person acts as a substitute audience and is used to test ideas. A similar func-
tion was described by Gabriela Imreh when playing passages to a friend dur-
ing her own practice period (Chaffin et al. 2002). Despite the fact that most
decisions are made by musicians during solitary practice, whether or not their
solutions work might be easier to establish when someone else is present, which
 Performers in the practice room 159

makes the practice session more like playing in front of an audience than play-
ing in isolation. Only one student in our project reported that he had actively
looked for someone other than his teacher to play to in order to gain feedback
on an interpretational idea. Seeking multiple performance opportunities in
order to build confidence for performances is suggested by Hallam and Gaunt
(2012: 66); however, playing to friends or in other informal situations was not a
practice tool effectively used by the students in our study. The benefits of such
a tool can only be surmised, as there is no current research indicating the extent
to which regular, informal performances help musicians form interpretational
ideas and learn to respond to performance situations.11

Widening concepts of practising

The last part of this chapter looks at specific types of practice or practice activ-
ities that are considered important for establishing an individual interpretation
and to prepare for creative performances.
The practice diaries and video-recall interviews used in our study shed light
on specific practice activities undertaken by participants to develop an individ-
ual interpretation. The most telling example is again the horn player. During
his video-recall interview, he discussed thirty-five creative episodes in total, of
which only twelve involved playing the instrument. Otherwise, he engaged in a
range of activities but without actually playing: most of these episodes featured
singing either the piece or other material, including improvising words to the
music. Other activities included playing the piano, conducting, tapping, snap-
ping fingers and self-talk. When comparing these creative episodes as revealed
in the video-recall interviews with the entries in the student’s practice diaries,
it is noticeable that singing is mentioned in only six out of forty diary entries,
whether as an image (six occasions) or as a practice activity (three occasions).
In three other passages, the student uses the phrase ‘singing on the instrument’.
The prevalence of practice ‘away from the instrument’ in the horn player’s
creative episodes suggests that this was very important in developing his own
interpretation. He recorded more of these nonplaying activities than any other
participant, yet it is interesting that he himself was apologetic about work that
might not be seen as ‘proper practice’. This suggests that time spent away from
the instrument is not a common or accepted practice feature. However, experi-
menting with ideas away from the instrument was also seen in the case of the
two string players, albeit to a lesser extent.
The double bassist, who recorded the fewest creative episodes, reported
undertaking much of her creative work outside the practice room altogether:
I’m not incredibly creative when I practise… I feel more creative when
I’m not playing … like actually thinking of the piece and then thinking,
160 Musicians in the Making

oh what I would like to achieve here, walking home and thinking, think-
ing of the melody and then trying … by just singing it in my head …
what might work … or at home before going to sleep or coming before
my practice for example before going to the practice room. … [N]ow I do
it more in my playing as well…

She realized that her practice had the potential to be more interesting and valu-
able if she brought that kind of work into the practice room instead of regard-
ing practice as necessarily dull and routine.
Whereas most participants chose an unaccompanied piece for the study, the
violinist worked with an accompanist,12 and some of her most significant activ-
ities ‘away from the instrument’ occurred through this collaboration:

we decided to come up with a story to help make it more fluid and give
each section kind of a very specific character, and all of a sudden it was
so much more fun to play and even though it was still hard and challeng-
ing and frightening to play some of those double stop bits, it didn’t really
matter because I’d kind of given them the character being really angry
and crazy, so if I  messed something up or didn’t quite play it the way
I wanted, it didn’t seem to matter as much.

Practising away from the instrument is not a new idea:  for example,
Jørgenson (2004:  88)  recommends that ‘playing practice’ should be balanced
with ‘nonplaying practice’ ‘in a single session or over a period of time’. He con-
tinues: ‘Focused, nonplaying practice will give more time for mental rehearsal
and reflection and prevent overuse of muscles’ (ibid.). Hallam et al. (2012) also
include in their inventory of practice strategies activities that can be carried
out away from the instrument, although most involve reading the score (with
no particular aims being specified). Hallam and Gaunt (2012: 50) do mention
‘improvisation’ as one route to enhancing aural skills, but in their ‘musical
practice checklist’—the focus of which is on setting goals, planning, mental
rehearsal and thinking about the interpretation of a piece (ibid.:  55)—there
is no mention of trying things out or of experimenting with different ideas or
ways of playing, either with or without the instrument.
The idea of practising away from the instrument raises the question of how
our findings fit with prevailing concepts of mental practice. In so far as men-
tal practice has been defined as ‘cognitive or imaginary rehearsal of a physical
skill without overt muscular movement’ (Connolly and Williamon 2004: 224),
mental practice might easily be seen as just mentally rehearsing aspects of
technique and execution. However, many researchers agree that mental prac-
tice involves several types of imagery (Clark, Williamon and Aksentijevic
2012; Lehmann 1997; Holmes 2005), including auditory imagery, visualiza-
tion (of the score or performance situation) and emotional imagery (of the
expressive aspects of performance), as well as motor and kinaesthetic imagery.
 Performers in the practice room 161

One recent study of performing musicians’ concepts of mental practice found

that as well as including all of these types of imagery, mental practice was
characterized by real-time imagining of both the music and the process of
performing it (Fine et al. 2015); the aims associated with mental practice nev-
ertheless seemed to be focused on execution and realization according to the
demands of the score. Like physical practice, mental practice is not necessarily
‘creative’. What our students reported perhaps broadens the notion of mental
practice, since in their away-from-the-instrument practice they were accessing
a number of routes to engaging with the music in order to develop aesthetic
ideas, personal integrity and fluency of execution. The integration of those
elements into a whole might in itself become a creative process, as Klickstein
(2009) has proposed.

Conclusions

This chapter has explored evidence for the ways in which creative processes are
manifested in musicians’ solitary practice, revealing insights that can challenge
some of the more restrictive received notions about practice and its purpose. We
suggest that practice—at least, practice that musicians identify as in some sense
serving creative aspects of their work—involves the dynamic and purposeful
integration of technical, musical, expressive, interpretative and psychological
dimensions, all of which are part and parcel of achieving a personal concept
of a piece and a sense of ownership. Performers, researchers and teachers alike
might benefit from thinking outside current dominant notions of practice to
include this broader notion.
There are some practical implications in adopting this view. Musicians
might want to experiment with various issues raised in this chapter while prac-
tising: these include integrating an analytical approach as suggested by Hallam
(1995), allowing time for experimenting with the piece in various ways away
from instrument, and using friends and colleagues as a ‘witness’ or practice
audience during the preparation period to test and reflect ideas. Teachers might
find that when helping students to access new pieces, different approaches and
a change of language would enable them to connect with a student’s preferred
way of working for a specific piece or at a particular time in their musical
development. Given students’ tendency to defer to their teachers, they might
need active encouragement to experiment with and develop their musical ideas
through a range of strategies and to explore new ideas when coming back to a
piece at a later stage.
In order to gain a better understanding of how these activities are linked
to performances that are individual and engaging, collaboration between per-
formers, teachers and researchers needs to be intensified so that the process of
practising—the mainstay of classical musicians’ development—is not primarily
162 Musicians in the Making

perceived as boring and repetitive, but instead is seen as purposeful, enjoyable

and constructive.

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 8

Small ensembles in rehearsal

Jane Ginsborg

In this chapter I consider the making of performances by musicians working

in groups over time, and the extent to which both the ‘making’ and the ‘perfor-
mances’ involve creative activity rather than the mere re-creation of the ideas of
others such as composers and conductors. For every musician, one of the most
crucial aspects of the context surrounding performances, and the most influen-
tial on the experience of performing, is preparation. Whereas solitary practice is
investigated in Chapter 7, the focus here is group (or ‘small ensemble’) rehearsal.
First, I look at a range of possible goals for performance, including the pleas-
ure of preparation for its own sake, without a performance before an audience
necessarily following. Second, I consider several kinds of small ensemble and
their lifetimes, from temporary pairings for the purpose of a single performance
to long-term partnerships. Third, I note that the time needed for a performance
to take shape inevitably varies with the lifetime of the group.1 Fourth, I look at
what groups actually do when they rehearse together, drawing on observations
of nonverbal and verbal communication between performers in single rehears-
als, and then, in more detail, over the course of a series of individual practice
sessions and joint rehearsals. Fifth, I compare the approaches to preparing for
performance revealed by the practice and rehearsal diaries, maintained over the
course of an academic year, of two student quartets and a quintet. Finally, the
implications of the findings for small ensembles are discussed.
I refer in the chapter to the outcomes of research by King and Ginsborg
(2011) with the participation of small ensembles, for the most part between two
and five musicians who on the whole perform western classical music. Where
appropriate, I  also draw on examples of research with performers of music
in other genres, since ‘classical’ musicians have much to learn about pathways
to creative performance from the rehearsal activities of pop, folk and jazz
musicians. Some of the performers were students when they took part in the
164 research, while others were professionals; some had worked together for many
 Small ensembles in rehearsal 165

years, whereas others had only just met each other; and some were observed
on a single occasion, while others agreed to the observation of their rehearsals
over extended periods of time.

Rehearsal goals

Not all practice and rehearsal leads to public performance: many people learn
to play instruments, practise regularly and make music for their own pleasure,
whether alone or in groups. Music offers the opportunity for social interaction
and a sense of ‘togetherness’ (Rabinowitch, Cross and Burnard 2012)—hence
the use of the French word ensemble for small groups of musicians. It has even
been shown to promote empathy (Cross, Laurence and Rabinowitch 2012). In
her research on amateurs’ experiences of music-making throughout the lifes-
pan, Lamont quotes informants for whom rehearsals are clearly more impor-
tant than performance: ‘I sing with my family for fun’; ‘I’ve met some brilliant
people. I think I needed the break from it in my late teens and early twenties
to come back to it purely for the love of it’; ‘Now I’m in four different choirs,
I’ve got some good friends and I’m very busy’ (2011: 379–80). Similarly, music
performance students may form groups not because chamber music is a com-
pulsory part of their studies but for the experience of playing together and
learning new repertoire. One student wind quintet enjoyed ‘learning to think
creatively and critically about the music that they are playing, and to express
these opinions to other musicians’ (Burt-Perkins and Mills 2008: 30). Once it
was decided that their performance should be assessed, however, and espe-
cially as the examination date approached, their goals and identities—initially
shared—began to diverge, and the group split up at the end of the academic
year. A similar rise and fall occurred in a study of school pop groups, one
respondent commenting: ‘the first three times it was excellent, it was just really
good cos it was just a major jamming session … and we sort of got together
through fun, like having a laugh… [G]radually now more people come, that’s
[the trust between us] sort of gone’ (MacDonald, Miell and Wilson 2005: 328).
Some professional musicians, too, describe their goals in terms of rehearsal
rather than performance. Two respondents to a survey of twenty professional
wind quintets said that they wanted to ‘work with friends who have honest
exacting standards’ and to ‘improve my ensemble playing by working with
other excellent musicians’ (Ford and Davidson 2003: 58). Musicians may hope
to improve not only their ensemble playing in the context of group perfor-
mance but also their individual expertise, which has the potential to enhance
creative performance. As one member of a regular jazz workshop explained,
When I first started and I, I wasn’t into it, I knew that it was a way for me
to become better on my instrument. So I thought ‘well I’ll stick with it
166 Musicians in the Making

because I could see that I can grow from this’. So I stayed with jazz, I was
a reluctant jazzer at the beginning, but I knew was a useful tool for me.
(MacDonald and Wilson 2006: 10)

While the goal of rehearsal is not necessarily performance, most rehearsals will
culminate in performances of some kind, even those involving only a complete
run-through of a piece of music before agreement is reached that it needs no
further rehearsal and the decision is taken to start working on a new piece.
Nevertheless, the goals of preparation for performance differ, from one individ-
ual to another, and between and even within groups of musicians. Sometimes
these differences are problematic and lead to the break-up of the group, but
in other cases they are inherent to the nature of the group and simply require
appropriate strategies to be adopted in rehearsal.

Groups and their lifetimes

The smallest group possible is the duo.2 At one extreme, a duo may consist of
two musicians committed to a long-term musical relationship. This does not
have to exclude musical partnerships with other performers, although it often
does: Paul Simon performed and recorded only with Art Garfunkel between
1965 and 1970; Peter Pears performed works for tenor and piano only with
Benjamin Britten, and for voice and lute only with Julian Bream; and despite
recording duets in 1986 with the guitarist John McLaughlin, her partner at
the time, Katia Labèque performs piano-duo repertoire only with her sister
Marielle. Such partnerships are informed by familiarity. Sometimes this happens
literally, i.e. through kinship, as in the many examples of sibling partnerships
besides the Labèques (e.g. the pianist Peter and the singer Meriel Dickinson,
and other piano duos such as Rosina and Josef Lhévinne and the Pekinel sis-
ters) and, more rarely, parent–child duos (such as the violinists David and Igor
Oistrakh, pianists Helen and Harvey Davies, or folk singers Norma Waterson
and Eliza Carthy). In other cases, familiarity develops through shared expe-
riences of music-making over many years. At the other extreme, a duo may
consist of two musicians who come together for a single performance such as
an audition. Such a short-lived partnership might be conceptualized as that of
soloist and accompanist, the former having done the bulk of their preparation
for performance alone or (more likely) with the support of other musicians
such as teachers and coaches, the latter perhaps being employed solely for the
purpose of playing ‘for’ a succession of applicants for a particular position,
role or prize. They might have quite different goals: the soloist to pass the audi-
tion, the accompanist to facilitate the soloist’s performance and, perhaps just as
importantly, to ensure future employment in the same capacity. Nevertheless,
during the actual performance, they are playing with each other as well as for
 Small ensembles in rehearsal 167

each other and attempting to create the impression, for the benefit of the audi-
tion panel, of unanimous agreement as to style, tempo, timing, intonation and
so on.

Preparation time

As I have noted, the performances of different ensembles and kinds of ensem-

ble take shape over varying lengths of time. In the case of the temporary,
short-lived duo described above, the creation of a convincing performance is
undertaken in a single rehearsal that can last from as little as a few minutes (if
that!) in the case of some auditions, to as long as three hours or more. Long-
established groups may prepare for the performance of some works over the
course of a lifetime. For example, in Blank and Davidson’s (2007) survey of
seventeen piano duos, 41 per cent (seven duos) reported rehearsing together
more than once a week, sometimes for six hours at a time; this proportion rose
to 70 per cent (twelve duos) as the day of the performance approached, and
several reported meeting daily in the run-up to a concert. Groups who perform
regularly together over extended periods of time—such as the Lindsays—may
prefer not to rehearse works with which they are very familiar, feeling that to
do so might in fact be counterproductive to creativity in performance (Robin
Ireland, personal communication, 8 December 2015).
In addition to differences between ensembles in terms of the frequency and
duration of rehearsals, there are also differences between the ways in which
they rehearse. The nature of rehearsal activities is likely to depend not only on
an ensemble’s goals for both rehearsal and performance, but also on the size
of the group, the genre of the music to be performed, the performers’ expertise
as musicians and ensemble players, and the length of rehearsal period available
to them.

Rehearsal activities

What do musicians actually do when they rehearse together? They play and/or
sing, of course, but their music-making serves a variety of purposes such as
warming-up, developing familiarity with the repertoire, making decisions as
to the way it should be performed and then communicating those decisions
to other members of the group, and developing a unanimity of approach that
could be described as cohesion or ‘attunement’ (Seddon 2005: 65). If they use a
joint warm-up routine, it might resemble that of the string quartet described by
Vikram Seth in his novel An Equal Music (1999).3 This fictional account reflects
what has been described as the ‘mutual tuning-in’ (Schutz 1951, 1976) that takes
place not only in the short term at the start of a rehearsal but also, ideally, over
168 Musicians in the Making

the course of the development of the relationship between co-performers. This

has been observed, particularly, among jazz musicians, since finding a ‘groove’
(Berliner 1994: 389) depends on players’ shared social as well as musical experi-
ences, assumptions and expectations (Bastien and Hostager 1988; Wilson and
MacDonald 2005); such a ‘groove’ also enables creative performance in pub-
lic as well as private (see Chapter 3 in this volume). Observing six rehearsals
undertaken by a jazz sextet, Seddon (2005) identified shifts between verbal and
nonverbal communication. At the outset, verbal instruction (when one player,
for example, suggested how the piece to be played could be divided into sec-
tions) was used most often. This gave way to verbal and nonverbal cooperation,
promoting cohesion between the players. Verbal communication was invalua-
ble when musical communication broke down, but when the groove was finally
struck and the musicians were at their most creative, their nonverbal commu-
nication represented ‘empathetic attunement’ (ibid.). Being perfectly ‘in tune’
involves listening, as Sicca (2000) has pointed out, and the ability to listen to
oneself and one’s fellow musicians simultaneously—which is as important in
classical music as in jazz—is a skill that can be developed only over time. Once
acquired, experienced musicians may well be able to use it even within single
rehearsals with new partners.

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION: THE DEVELOPMENT
OF FAMILIARITY

Evidence from observational research has shown that musicians playing together
move their bodies with increasing synchronicity (Goebl and Palmer 2009). For
example, two professional pianists with extensive experience of both accom-
panying and solo performance took part in research exploring co-performer
communication (Williamon and Davidson 2002: 63). Four rehearsals and the
ensuing performance were observed. The interaction between the musicians
was primarily nonverbal—they spent less than 10 per cent of their rehearsal
time actually talking—and the researchers noted that their ‘eye-contact and
gestural cues became gradually more synchronous over the rehearsal period,
with the performance itself reflecting the refinements that the rehearsal proc-
ess had brought’. Although the musicians who took part in this study were
acquainted with each other, they had not played together previously. A similar
observational study was undertaken with the participation of a student string
quartet, one member of which described the importance of being ‘conversa-
tional with the eyes’ (Davidson and Good 2002: 196)—the idea of ‘conversa-
tion’ emphasizing both the creative quality of their interaction, in that it was
unplanned, and the direction of gaze or glance. In addition, the researchers
noted not only the ways in which the performers used gesture to indicate exits,
entrances and dynamic changes, but also the use of circular body sway ‘to help
in establishing a wholeness in the music which was written in a manner that
 Small ensembles in rehearsal 169

could have been very fragmented’ (ibid.: 198). The use of nonverbal communi-
cation is likely to develop over time, of course: echoing the student in Davidson
and Good’s study, quoted above, one piano duo interviewed by Marilyn Blank
reported that ‘early on in their career together they would discuss where they
were going to give [nonverbal] cues. As time went by and familiarity with their
musical repertory grew, the cues often did not occur as they had done origi-
nally, and new ones emerged’ (quoted from Davidson and King 2004: 114; see
also Blank 2013).
Prior to undertaking our 2011 study, Elaine King and I wondered whether
members of singer–pianist duos with long experience of working together
would look at each other more or less than the members of newly formed part-
nerships, and whether social familiarity and expertise would also affect the
use of gesture. We recruited two established professional duos and two estab-
lished student duos, and we asked them to rehearse two songs that were new
to them—the first song in their regular duo, the second one with a new partner
from the other same-expertise duo. Finally, we asked the members of one pro-
fessional and one student duo to rehearse a third song with a new partner who
not only was unfamiliar but also had a different level of expertise.
The gestures made by the singers and pianists who took part in the study
clearly fulfilled a range of functions that illustrate some of the general pur-
poses of rehearsal. First, they did not warm up together in the way that
Seth describes, although other ensembles may well do so. Their main con-
cern, since they were classical musicians working from notated scores, was
developing familiarity with the repertoire, and this is perhaps the most
obvious purpose of rehearsal, at least in the early stages of preparation for
performance. In each single rehearsal of a new song all the duos began by
sight-reading, attempting a complete run-through without stopping. As they
rehearsed, the pianists made gestures such as nodding their heads just before
the singers were due to sing a new phrase, lifting their hands—sometimes
exaggeratedly—to indicate the end of one section and the start of the next,
and leaning forward to emphasize a climax in the music. These gestures com-
municated the compositional structure of the song and its expressive content
both to the singer and to the putative audience. The singers also used their
hands for underlining both the semantic meaning of the lyrics of the song,
as most people do when they talk, and the emotional charge provided by the
setting of the words to music. They made ‘pulsing’ movements too, to ensure
that they maintained a regular beat, and gestures that seemed to support the
physical process of singing, in the absence of an external instrument. Such
gestures included pointing downwards to show that they were aware of the
need to lower the pitch of the note they were singing, and moving their hands
upwards as though to mirror the production of a high note. Observation of
the nonverbal communication of the two performers as they familiarized
themselves with the songs in this first rehearsal together suggested that they
170 Musicians in the Making

were responding creatively to the music and that an element of creativity is

therefore likely to be a feature of rehearsal generally.
In addition to meeting the technical challenges of performing, the members
of small ensembles must know their own and each other’s roles, since they take
it in turns, as soloists and accompanists, to support and be supportive of the
other. As they refine their initial responses to the music, it is important for them
to articulate and communicate to each other their understanding of the com-
positional structure and the composer’s expressive intentions, filtered through
their own individual interpretations; later in performance, they must communi-
cate their shared interpretation to the audience.
As for our comparison of duos that were more and less socially familiar with
each other, our findings echoed those of Williamon and Davidson (2002) in
that the behaviour of the newly formed same-expertise duos also became more
synchronous as they ‘[learned] to predict, read and respond to each other’s
auditory and motor imagery’ (King and Ginsborg 2011: 198). We also found
that the established duos used more gestures, and a wider range of them, when
rehearsing together than when rehearsing with new partners, and one profes-
sional duo exhibited what we called ‘something of a “combined rhetoric” of
gestures’ (ibid.). We were surprised, however, by how rarely the musicians—
other than the members of the newly formed student duo—were observed
looking at each other, but this may have been because the pianists were in a
position to use their peripheral vision to see the singers breathe, while the sing-
ers tended either to focus on the sheet music or to look out at an imaginary
audience. An alternative explanation that remains to be explored empirically is
that this is a function of familiarity, both between ensemble members and with
the repertoire. The Borodin Quartet, for example, two of whose members have
played together since 1996 while the others joined in 2007 and 2011 respec-
tively, is described as ‘so tightly knit … it is little wonder that in performance
they seem to listen to each other more intently—and look at each other less
obviously—than most quartets. Not so much four string players, the Borodins
are 16 living, breathing strings’ (Allison 2015).
Throughout this section I have referred to nonverbal ‘communication’. In his
study of performers’ phenomenological experiences of ensemble performance,
McCaleb (2014) is critical of the use of this term because of its language-like
connotations: it may be perceived to imply that information is conveyed from
one performer to another as though in speech.4 He proposes an ecological
model of ensemble rehearsal (Gibson 1977)  informed by procedural rather
than propositional knowledge (Ryle 1949), supported by evidence from action
research with a string quartet and an ensemble of improvising musicians. Space
precludes a more detailed account of his study, but it is worth noting the range
of ‘modes of representation’ observed in ensemble rehearsal, from the linguis-
tic modes (explicit and referential) discussed in the next section to vocalized,
performed and integrated modes (McCaleb 2014: 56).
 Small ensembles in rehearsal 171

VERBAL COMMUNICATION: SOCIAL FAMILIARITY REVISITED

King (2012) revisited the impact of social familiarity on preparation for per-
formance by comparing verbal as well as nonverbal interactions within single
rehearsals undertaken by seven newly formed, ‘temporary’ cellist–pianist duos
(first studied by Goodman in 2000) and the four established singer–pianist duos
who had participated in the study outlined above (King and Ginsborg 2011;
Ginsborg and King 2012). The comparison confirmed the findings of previous
researchers on small-group behaviour:  typically, when small groups develop
working relationships, they form, storm, norm, perform and adjourn (Tuckman
1965; Tuckman and Jensen 1977; see also Chapter 3 in this volume). As they
formed their new partnerships, the cellists and pianists were likely to make
polite suggestions to each other; no ‘storming’ was observed, but ‘norming’
and ‘performing’ were exemplified by lack of disagreement and by what might
be described as recapitulative and permeable discourse (Fogel 2009)  through
the sharing of ‘preconceived “familiar” tactics about rehearsal as they worked
together for the first time’ (King 2012: 262). In the early stages of each session,
once each duo had run through the music to be performed all the way through
without stopping, both talk and playing took place in short bursts character-
ized by the author as ‘hesitant’; gradually, these became more ‘flowing’. The
content of the talk was mostly related to the task at hand, focusing on the inter-
pretation of the score—tempo, dynamics, rubato—as the two players recon-
ciled their individual insights with the composer’s expressive intentions. There
seemed to be more talking at the beginning, when the musicians were least
familiar, and therefore least comfortable, with each other; progress was not
necessarily smooth, and the duos who seemed the most content to adjourn at
the end of the session were those whose rehearsal remained hesitant for longest.
By contrast, the members of the established duos did not need to ‘form’, since
they were already bonded; they moved straight to norming and performing,
frequently expressing solidarity by offering each other praise. Their sessions
were flowing from the start as well as recapitulative, as the musicians drew on
their long, shared experience of rehearsing together.

REHEARSAL TALK

Musicians’ shared experiences are, of course, not confined to music-making. As

we have already seen, bonds may well be familial; for example, one of the duos
that took part in King and Ginsborg’s study was a married couple. Another
duo in the study was a singer and a pianist whose verbal interactions and musi-
cal behaviours in rehearsing for a public performance over twenty-eight days
were analysed and discussed by Ginsborg, Chaffin and Nicholson (2006a) and
by Ginsborg and Chaffin (2011). This was a rare opportunity to consider how
a performance takes shape over time, given the length of the rehearsal period.
172 Musicians in the Making

The work performed was Stravinsky’s Cantata for soprano, tenor, women’s
choir and instrumental ensemble. The musicians’ preparation for performance
was investigated, however, for just one movement: the first Ricercar for soprano
and ensemble. The conductor also fulfilled the role of rehearsal accompanist
for the singer, playing from the vocal score arranged by Stravinsky for soprano
and piano.
Both the singer and the pianist provided verbal commentaries as they prac-
tised alone; each of their first practice sessions was observed, on the first and
fifth days of the rehearsal period for the singer and the pianist respectively.
Their discussions during two rehearsals were also observed, the first being their
first joint rehearsal, which took place on the thirteenth day, midway through
the preparation period, and the second being their final joint rehearsal on the
day of the performance itself. Content analyses were made of the musicians’
verbal utterances. These were coded using a framework derived from the find-
ings of research undertaken by Chaffin and colleagues (e.g. Chaffin, Imreh and
Crawford 2002) which suggested that the decisions taken during practice inform
a musician’s thoughts during performance (see Table 8.1).5 Furthermore, a sub-
set of these decisions—namely, those that are not implemented automatically,
without conscious awareness—serve as retrieval or ‘performance’ cues when the
musician plays from memory. In this study of the development of shared per-
formance cues, the singer and the pianist annotated multiple copies of the score
after they had given the public performance of the Cantata to indicate what
they were thinking while they were performing, and at which specific beat(s)
in the piece each thought occurred. This permitted a subsequent analysis to

TABLE 8.1 Coding of utterances

Code Topic

Basic (references to Dynamics, tempo, pauses, commas, phrases and phrasing, errors in score,
score, printed and duration of notes and rests, entries; word underlay, stress, pronunciation and
annotated) meaning; (singer’s) pitch, intonation, technical difficulties and location of
breaths; instrumentation, awareness of harmony and counterpoint,
maintenance of steady pulse (conductor only)
Structural Section boundaries and ‘switches’: repetitions or near-repetitions of musical
phrases at boundaries that might cause confusion such that the singer was
in danger of jumping, erroneously, from one location in the work to another
Interpretive Interpretation of the composer’s intentions, particularly sound quality (often
in relation to the poetic meaning of the words) and phrasing; relative lengths
of specific pauses and commas; shaping of rubato, and changes in tempo and
dynamics
Expressive How to convey interpretation to audience, e.g. making the music ‘dance’ or
sound ‘yearning’
Memory Memorizing strategies; remembering and forgetting
Metacognitive Evaluations, requests for evaluation, goals, plans, reflections on rehearsal and
research process
Shared Need for and ways of achieving unanimity in performance
 Small ensembles in rehearsal 173

TABLE 8.2 Utterances in each practice and rehearsal session (by number and percentage)

Session First practice First rehearsal Final rehearsal

Performer Singer Pianist Singer Pianist Singer Pianist

Utterances (no.) 93 131 159 97 81 83
Basic/structural 45 (48.3%) 97 (74%) 37 (23.3%) 36 (37.1%) 15 (18.5%) 14 (16.8%)
Interpretive 5 (5.4%) 14 (10.8%) 17 (10.7%) 24 (24.7%) 16 (19.7%) 30 (36.1%)
Expressive 4 (4.3%) 1 (0.8%) 2 (1.3%) 0 0 3 (3.6%)
Metacognitive 36 (38.7%) 19 (14.5%) 86 (54.1%) 30 (30.9%) 44 (54.3%) 35 (42.2%)
Memory 3 (3.2%) 0 12 (7.5%) 0 3 (3.7%) 0
Shared N/A N/A 5 (3.1%) 7 (7.2%) 3 (3.7%) 1 (1.2%)

be made of the relationship between their practice behaviours—starts, stops

and repetitions of musical material—and their mental representations of the
Ricercar by the time they came to perform it (Ginsborg et al. 2006b).
As shown in Table 8.2, both musicians were largely concerned at the start
with basic and structural aspects of the music and its performance. As they
became more familiar with the work, so they grew more concerned with its
interpretation and, to a lesser extent, how this would be conveyed to the audi-
ence. The degree to which their rehearsals were creative was reflected most
clearly by the utterances they made that were categorized as interpretive and
expressive; these utterances also predicted creativity in performance. In addi-
tion, the singer needed to ensure that she would be able to perform confidently
from memory, and both referred in their joint rehearsals to shared performance
cues. Nevertheless, a high proportion of their talk—just over half, in the case
of the singer during the joint rehearsals—was directly related not to the music
itself but rather to plans, goals, strategies, evaluations (i.e. statements express-
ing opinions) and requests for evaluations.

PRACTICE AND REHEARSAL BEHAVIOURS

Having looked at how a performance takes shape over time in terms of the chang-
ing importance of the various aspects of music-making as revealed by rehearsal
talk, I now turn to practice behaviour: the way music is segmented for rehearsal.
This will inevitably depend on the piece, performer and purpose of preparation.
As a follow-up to the study discussed above, Ginsborg (2011) investigated the rela-
tionship of practice behaviour to performance cues and the sequencing of work on
different parts of the music by observing the singer’s individual practice sessions
1–3, 5 and 8, and her joint rehearsals with the pianist in sessions 6, 9, 12 and 15.6
The Ricercar is in three main sections: two verses with three refrains, a mid-
dle section that could be characterized as a fanfare, and a coda. In the first ses-
sion, the singer began with the first phrase and then worked her way through
174 Musicians in the Making

the piece phrase by phrase without much evident movement until she reached
the beginning of the fanfare. The second half of the first session was largely
devoted to work on the coda, broken into yet smaller segments, and the session
ended with a run-through of both fanfare and coda without a break. After
a brief attempt on the verse sections of the opening of the piece, the bulk of
the second session was again spent to a large extent on the fanfare; the coda
was once more practised in shorter sections, and the session ended with a final
attempt on the coda only.
The purpose of the third session was memorization: the singer started from
the beginning of the fanfare, then worked on the coda before singing from the
beginning of the fanfare to the end of the piece. Then she worked on the section
of verse before the fanfare and ‘backward-chained’, singing forward from the
beginning of each previous section as she gained confidence. It was not until
the very end of the session that she tried to sing the whole Ricercar from begin-
ning to end, and she did not succeed in doing so continuously.
Session 5 was a short individual practice session in which the singer checked
that she had memorized the whole Ricercar securely; after singing it through
once from beginning to end, she worked systematically on the first verse. When
the pianist joined her, they started at the beginning and worked through to the
end, phrase by phrase. They repeated both the beginning of the fanfare and
the beginning of the coda several times. Towards the end of the session they
attempted two run-throughs of the whole Ricercar, but the longest uninter-
rupted run lasted only until the beginning of the fanfare.
Session 8 was another individual practice session undertaken for the pur-
pose of solving technical challenges that had emerged in the joint rehearsal
and while rememorizing. Again, the singer worked on small segments, focusing
for most of the first half of the rehearsal on the end and the beginning of the
fanfare, combining them before starting work on the first half of the coda and
then the second half. Midway through the session, she returned to the begin-
ning of the piece, working systematically on the verses and singing through
the refrains. Session 9 began with more detailed work on the fanfare and coda,
but the second half was devoted to an attempt to sing the first long phrase of
the Ricercar in one breath, before working through the whole piece with fewer
and fewer interruptions. Session 12 began with an almost uninterrupted run-
through followed by a number of repetitions of the first part of the fanfare as
the musicians discussed the words that the singer would emphasize and why;
it ended with another—again, almost uninterrupted—run of the whole piece.
The final session was intended as a single run-through, but trouble-shooting
was required to solve an unexpected problem that arose midway; once this had
been addressed, a complete ‘practice performance’ could be given—and indeed
both musicians reported being satisfied with the final, hitch-free performance
in public that evening, in which they were both able to make unexpected dis-
coveries about the music. For example, reflecting on the performance of the
 Small ensembles in rehearsal 175

final bars of the Ricercar that he had just conducted, the pianist remarked, ‘I
found that this rit[ardando] happens because of the weight of “eternally”, the
fact that [Stravinsky] placed the octave jump in the voice at that point, “eter-
nal-ly”, the “ly” goes down, and the upbeat “eternal” goes to the two cello open
strings at the bottom of the instruments—there’s a real point of emphasis on
the barline.’ ‘It’s binding it down into the earth’, replied the singer, ‘it becomes
earth-bound.’
In this study of a performance taking shape over the course of four weeks,
I have combined information from a range of sources—talk, musical behav-
iour, self-reports by the musicians obtained after the performance, and anal-
yses of the relationships between them—to provide a sketch of the process.
It would be unwise to try to generalize from this observation of one duo
to the approaches of all small ensembles to the task of preparing for per-
formance, but it nevertheless has the potential for outlining some possible
approaches that may or may not be adopted by other performers. In this
instance, the musicians’ priorities shifted from basic learning to interpre-
tation and expression within their individual practice; all of these needed
to be rethought when they came together in their first joint rehearsal, and
although interpretive decisions and their implementation in performance
became more important in the last rehearsals, opportunities were still taken
to improve even the smallest details. The analysis of practice behaviour
revealed two strategies that the performers clearly found useful: the identi-
fication of compositional sections and subsections, and working backwards
when appropriate. In other words, the strategies involved not always starting
from the beginning of the piece, and focusing on passages requiring partic-
ular attention. These underpinned both effective coordination between the
musicians and the freedom to respond creatively to what they heard and felt
during the public performance.

Approaches to rehearsal and performance: students’ diaries

I now turn from the analysis of one duo’s performance taking shape over time
to a comparison of the approaches to rehearsal and performance used by
groups of students at a conservatoire (Ginsborg 2010): two string quartets (one
newly formed by first-year students, the other made up of third-year students
who had been working together since the beginning of their first year) and a
newly formed wind quintet (comprising four students in the first year of their
course, and one in the second year). The students agreed to keep diaries for
two terms in the form of templates to be completed with brief entries after
each individual practice session and group rehearsal, although the first-year
string quartet actually kept them for all three terms of the academic year. The
members of the established quartet were clearly much more familiar with each
176 Musicians in the Making

other socially than the two newly formed ensembles were. They were also more
experienced not only as performers but also as ensemble musicians.
Retrospectively, it is possible to gauge the effectiveness (or otherwise) of
some of their strategies. The established quartet and the newly formed quintet
can be described as ‘successful’ groups, in that they won many prizes and gave
numerous concerts together during their years at the conservatoire. Although
the established quartet subsequently split up, all of the players are making
careers in new chamber ensembles. At the time of writing, the wind quintet
was still together, performing professionally and still winning prizes; we may
assume, therefore, that their approaches to rehearsal and performance worked
well for them. By contrast, the approaches of the newly formed string quartet
worked less well for its members:  they became increasingly dissatisfied with
their own and each other’s contributions to the group and agreed to disband at
the end of the academic year.
One factor that might well be associated with both social familiarity and
level of success is time spent on individual practice and group rehearsal. The
members of the established quartet reported, in total, more than 14 hours of
individual practice on the six works that they rehearsed as a group over the
course of twenty-two rehearsals including one coaching session (38 hours in
all). Although the newly formed quartet and quintet were rehearsing only
two and three works respectively, the quartet reported individual practice
time of just over 9 hours—more than the quintet’s 6.5 hours—but only eight
rehearsals including two coaching sessions with tutors (around 11 hours),
in comparison with the eight rehearsals plus nine coaching sessions (around
23 hours) undertaken by the quintet. This may of course be attributable to
the nature of the works that were to be performed (respectively, a Mozart
quartet and a piece of music written by a student composer to accompany
a dance project, versus quintets by Nielsen, Reicha and Verdi), or indeed
the relative difficulty of the music for string and wind players. Nevertheless,
evidence from the ratings that the students were asked to make of their own
and the other players’ focus, effort and enjoyment in practice sessions and
rehearsals suggests that the members of the quartet found rehearsals less
rewarding than individual practice, while the reverse was the case for the
quintet.
The diary templates required the students to state the work or works prac-
tised, coached or rehearsed in each session and to specify up to five goals (on
the whole, no more than three or four were reported per session) along with cor-
responding strategies for achieving them and plans for the next session. They
were asked to rate each goal and strategy for ‘effectiveness’ on a scale of 1 to
10, and to reflect, when appropriate, on both ‘one thing that I was really happy
about in our performance today’ and ‘one thing I would like us to do better in
our next performance’. The members of the three ensembles submitted a total
of 1,044 goals, strategies, plans and comments on their performances in mas-
terclasses and concerts. A preliminary analysis suggested differences between