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Our age sees in Hummel the "transitional" figure par excellence. A pupil of Mozart, Haydn, Clementi, Al-brechtsberger and Salieri, he carried the Classical piano style to its limits, frequently trespassing on the Romantic, and his importance for the subsequent development of music in that era was considerable. His piano style was the result of the reciprocal influence of the composer and the performer in his make-up and these, in turn, were shaped to a great extent by external factors in the period. I have examined the general background, to the period in Section I, and the second Section is devoted to Hummel's own compositional and performance styles. Creator and executant fuse in improvisation, and its prevalence during, the period of Hummel’s life is well-known. He himself was possibly the greatest improviser of his time, and this extempore facility affected him both as composer and as performer, and I consider it to be the most important single musical factor in his piano style. Section III deals with improvisation generally and the final Section (IV) seeks to draw attention to the traces it has left in particular genres of his work.

This research proposes a theory of nonconscious motor representation which precedes mental representation of the outcome of motor actions in music performance. The music performer faces the problem of how to escape sedimented musical paradigms to produce novel configurations of dynamics, timing and tone colour. If the sound were mentally represented as an action goal prior to being produced, it would tend to be assimilated to a known action goal. The proposed theory is intended to account for creativity in music performance, but has implications in other areas for both creativity and motor actions. The investigation began with an ethnographic study of two 'posthardcore' rock bands in London and Bristol. Posthardcore musicians work with minimal explicit knowledge of music theory and cognitive involvement in performance is actively eschewed. Serendipitous musical felicities in performance are valued. Such felicities depend on adjustment and fine control of dynamics, timing and tone colour within the parameters of the given. A selective survey of music aesthetics shows that the defining qualities of music are the production of immanent rather than representational meaning; polysemy; and processuality. Taking an analytic philosophy and cognitive science approach, I argue that apprehensions of immanent meaning depend on relationships between proximal percepts within the specious present. A general argument for nonconceptual perceptual content as perception of relations between magnitudes within the specious present is extended to music and argued to account for both the polysemic richness of music and its processuality. Nonconceptual relational perception can account for novel apprehensions by music listeners, but not for the production of novel configurations by the performer. I argue that motor creativity in music performance is achieved through the nonconscious parameterization of inverse models without conscious representation of the goal of the action. Conscious representation for the performer occurs when they hear their own performance.

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No description available.

No description available.

The <I>General Computational Theory of Musical Structure (GCTMS) </I>is a theory that may be employed to obtain a structural description (or set of descriptions) of a musical surface. This theory is independent of any specific musical style of idiom, and can be applied to any musical surface. The musical work is presented to <I>GCTMS</I> as a sequence of discrete symbolically represented musical events (e.g. notes) without higher-level structural elements (e.g. articulation marks, time-signature etc.) - although such information may be used constructively to guide the analytic process. The aim of the application of the theory is to reach a structural description of the musical work that may be considered as 'plausible' or 'permissible' by a human music analyst. As style-dependent knowledge is not embodied in the general theory, highly sophisticated analyses (similar to those an expert analyst may provide) are not expected. The theory gives, however, higher rating to descriptions that may be considered more reasonable or acceptable by human analysts and lower to descriptions that are less plausible. As <I>GCTMS</I> is based on general cognitive and logical principles the analytic descriptions it provides have cognitive relevance at least as far as the output is concerned; this is not necessarily the case for the exact process by which the output is calculated. In this sense the analytic outcome may be said to relate to and may be compared to the intuitive 'understanding' a listener has when repeatedly exposed to a specific musical work. The proposed theory comprises two distinct but closely related stages of development: a) the development of a number of individual components that focus on specialised musical analytical tasks, and b) the development of an elaborate account of how these components relate to and interact with each other so that plausible structural descriptions of a given musical surface may be arrived at.

Between 1780 and 1820 the changes in the pianos built in the Viennese and South German traditions were rapid and extensive. These changes manifest themselves in the stringing, the scaling and, to a lesser degree, the pitch of the pianos of the firms of Johann Andreas Stein (1728-1792), his daughter Nannette Streicher (1769-1833), Anto Walter (1752-1826), Ferdinand Hofmann (1756-1829) and their pupils and followers. General trends can be observed. The compass was enlarged and the extent of both the triple stringing and the back-pinning was increased. Strings were made continually thicker, presumably to meet the demand for more volume. Because thicker strings are relatively weak compared to thinner ones the strings were shortened to avoid breakage. The case construction was strengthened to withstand the greater tension. Improvements were made in the tensile strength of music wire from about 1820 onwards allowing makers to lengthen the strings again. The gauge numbers, which indicate the makers' intentions for string thicknesses and which are found stamped or written on the instruments, probably do not refer to different gauge systems but to one single system. The gauge numbers refer to nominal diameters which, with considerable variation from one wire drawer to another, were gradually increased in actual diameter over time. This single gauge system sometimes contained half gauges, sometimes not. Many builders did not use the Pythagorean principle in which the lengths of the strings for two notes an octave apart are related in the ratio 1 : 2. Instead, many makers used the ratio 1 : 1.95, achieved in practice by giving the upper note of a pair of notes two octaves apart the Pythagorean length of the note a semitone lower than the upper note. The use of the tapered scaling may be related to the phenomenon known today as tensile pick-up in which thinner strings are relatively stronger than thicker strings.