Research Summary

The Alchemy Project concerns presenting live music-making as a site of knowledge production through the practice of a professional piano trio (Marmara Piano Trio: Mine Doğantan-Dack, piano; Pal Banda, cello; Philippa Mo, violin) in performances, workshops and open rehearsals. Shortly after the beginning of the project, The Marmara Piano Trio, which was specifically founded for this research undertaking, has become established as an ensemble regularly concertizing in the UK and abroad. In an age when the context for an overwhelming majority of musical experiences is provided by performances recorded and edited in the studio, which at the same time form the standard against which audiences judge and evaluate live performances, it is particularly important to highlight the special characteristics of live music-making and raise awareness of its status as the golden standard in the art of musical performance. This project provides the initial step towards counter-balancing the almost exclusive focus in contemporary performance studies on a 'musicology of recording' by emphasizing the importance of live performance in the chain of musical knowledge production.

The Alchemy Project is the first research project in contemporary performance studies to explore the nature of live performance from the perspective of professional performers in the Western classical style. During a live performance, the cognitive/affective world of the performers and consequently the interpretation of the music they perform often undergo certain qualitative transformations, which involve processes peculiar to live performance contexts as distinct from those involved in rehearsals and practice sessions. These qualitative transformations are related to such phenomena as increasing expressive freedom, increasing affective involvement, unplanned creative interpretative choices, and certain alterations in time-consciousness. The Alchemy project explores the conditions of emergence of such transformations in the context of a professional piano trio preparing and performing selected works from the Classical, Romantic and Contemporary repertoire; and compares and contrasts the processes that take place in rehearsals/practice sessions with those that unfold during a live performance. The project provides evidence that performers continue to learn on stage, working in a temporal environment that is driven by the double constraints of indeterminacy and the necessity of uninterrupted flow; and that the qualitative transformations they aim to achieve have both musical and social pre-conditions, intimately related to positive affective experiences. While contemporary music psychology has focused almost exclusively on performance anxiety, the Alchemy Project argues that for many performers, going on stage is a positive affective experience that drives their continual quest to aesthetically surpass their own past performances. By revealing the positive affective dynamics among the co-performers, which result in the successful channeling of individual affective states and thereby in a successful performance, the project also provides a valuable model for understanding other areas in life where emotional management of group dynamics is of high importance.

The Alchemy Project also challenges the ideology behind the dominant musicological discourse by elevating the way performers talk about and conceptualize musical experiences, which frequently rely on imagery and metaphors, to the status of an epistemological tool, yielding knowledge not only about performance psychology but also about the music performers perform. By documenting the discursive aspects of developing and evaluating performance interpretations by the performers in a piano trio, the project provides important data for further research in performance studies and in performance criticism.

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