Analysis and Performance

You can find lots of people—both choral directors and music theorists—who will insist that analysis is crucial for a good performance. When pressed, however, it can be very hard for people to define exactly which analytical insights are most important and what exactly they inspired in performance. Sometimes, people may simply feel more invested and effective when they have some level of understanding—even if they can’t name any specific changes that understanding inspired. But surely analysis has some effect on performance.

When considering how analysis might affect performance, it’s useful to think about the balance of inputs from the composer and the performers. Many choirs focus on scores, which means notation plays a big role. When composers are able to notate something with relative precision, we tend to assume that the composer will be the one primarily in charge of that parameter. For example, pitches and rhythms are pretty well defined—while we may drift a little sharp or slow down and speed up in performance, the basic pitch and rhythmic relationships are those of the composer. But other parameters are less precisely notated: there’s no specific decibel level associated with forte vs. piano, no single metronome marking associated with the indication “lively,” and no one meaning of a slur. As a result, we often think of composers as more in charge of dynamics, exact tempo, articulation, and micro-timing (slowing down and speeding up, rubato).

Many of these factors are particularly strongly related to musical form. We tend to slow down at the end of a section, and to get louder in a climactic phrase. As a result, formal analysis can be particularly useful in informing performance decisions.

Yet all of our analytical parameters can be useful, though this usefulness may be more or less depending on the piece. [Examples]

Finally, within music theory, there is a small but significant subfield called “Analysis and Performance.” When this subfield was new, its scholars tended to say things like, “This is the correct analysis, and therefore this is the correct performance, and anyone who doesn’t do that is performing wrong.” This approach fell out of favor pretty quickly, and over time scholarship has gotten a lot more nuanced. Here are some of the most interesting conclusions that I think a lot of people in this subfield now agree upon:

• Any given analysis can be reflected through performance in a number of different ways—that is, analysis is not “prescriptive.”
• Extremely detailed analyses tend to be difficult to translate into performance decisions.
• A performance is a kind of analysis, and an analysis is a kind of performance, and both rely on both knowledge and intuition.