Musical Performance As Embodied Socio Emotional Meaning Construction

Theoretical inquiries into musical performance and meaning have given very limited attention to date to the music performers' working procedures when developing a personal interpretation. This book presents the foundation of a model of music meaning that explores the process of creating a performance as embodied socio-emotional meaning construction within flute playing and teaching and learning. The first part of this book is a theoretical inquiry into performance and musical meaning, reviewing the existing empirical and theoretical research and building up the theoretical hypothesis that supports the four components of the model. Since the discussion reveals that, despite the evidence pointing to the importance of considering the role of performance in the understanding of musical meaning, virtually no empirical work has addressed the issue directly, the second part of the book presents three experiments that constitute a preliminary attempt so to do. This book argues that the proposed model is robust, constituting an effective methodology both for performing and teaching and a new framework for empirical research on performance and music meaning issues.