This thesis addresses two principal questions: How can notions of dark and deep play be used to construct performance material? How can that material then be used to investigate dark and deep play in performance? In order to address these principal questions I conceived, composed and performed in three performances where participants were invited to become players in a one-to-one or two-to-two scenario. The conception and composition of each performance considered notions of dark and deep play that involved both a live and recorded practice where the participants also performed. Each project also responds to a subsidiary research question that relates to both the methodological design of each separate performance and hence to the ways in which participants experienced them. The overarching subsidiary research question for the entire project is: How does shifting the contract for participants' engagement in an intimate performance inform the principal research questions? trz v Each chapter discusses the ways in which data was collected and offers up an interpretation based upon that data. This research pays particular attention to play theory and specifically to Roger Caillois' game categories. These categories are expanded upon significantly through this research into new and original findings about potential routes into play and play attitudes. The work relates to my own experiences of the Catholic sacrament of penance, and explores the notion of adaptation and projection in performance. This work argues for a conceptual adaptation in practice whilst uncovering a repetitive process in both confession and adaptation that I argue relates to a Freudian and Lacanian notion of Death drive. This work also unpicks Lacan's notion of the 'unsent letter' (Zizek, 2006: 10) and Zizek's perspective on Lacan's Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real (Zizek, 2006: 9). Freudian and Lacanian philosophy critically supports the observations on my own artistic drives and the thinking on the players' journeys into slippage. This work unfolds and concludes with a list of original and complex play- strategies that permit the experience of deep play through dark play. The strategies discuss the processes of making performance in dark and deep contexts and are named in the research findings in relation to the two principal questions and to the subsidiary research question.

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Research in musical performance anxiety so far has mainly focused on adult professional musicians. Additionally, studies have mostly maintained a `clinical approach' to musical performance anxiety, focusing on the diagnosis, assessment and treatment of maladaptive performance anxiety and its effects on selected groups of musicians. The aim of this thesis was to fill some of these gaps by exploring the experience of musical performance anxiety from the perspective of adolescent musicians. 410 students aged 12-19, all attending junior conservatoires and / or youth orchestras in the UK and Cyprus, responded to a self-report questionnaire. The questionnaire dealt with a range of learning and performance issues and yielded both quantitative and qualitative data. Performance anxiety was measured with the Adolescent Musicians' Performance Anxiety Scale (AMPAS), designed specifically for the needs of this study. Results revealed that performance anxiety was an issue for a significant percentage of students. Differences in performance anxiety level intensity were related to nationality and gender, but not to age. Susceptibility to experiencing performance anxiety, task efficacy and quality of performance environment were important factors in determining the intensity of experienced performance anxiety. Performance anxiety was found to be a multi-faceted construct, influenced by a variety of factors relating to self-perceptions, situational parameters, identity and culture, and family environment. Student attainment was influenced by performance anxiety. Achievement of higher Grades was related to the experience of higher levels of performance anxiety and perceptions of receiving positive feedback were associated with lower perceived levels of anxiety. Performance anxiety influenced students' approaches to instrumental learning and performance, particularly in terms of susceptibility to maladaptive performance anxiety and negative perceptions of the impact of anxiety. Three types of students were identified in the data, each possessing different characteristics and experiencing anxiety and physiological arousal in musical performance in a distinctive way.

This thesis explores a performance practice within free improvisation. This is not a theory based improvisation – performances do not require specific preparation and the music refrains from repetition of musical structures. It engages in investigative and experimental approaches emerging from holistic considerations of acoustics, interaction and instrument, and also philosophy, psychology, sociopolitics and technology. The performance practice explores modes and approaches to working with the given potentiality of an electronically augmented acoustic instrument and involves the development of a suitably flexible computerised performance system, the piano+, combining extended techniques and real-time electroacoustic processes, which has the acoustic piano at its core. Contingencies of acoustic events and performance gestures – captured by audio analysis and sensors and combined to control the parameter space of computer processes – manipulate the fundamental properties of sound, timbre and time. Spherical abstractions, developed under consideration of Agamben’s potentiality and Sloterdijk’s philosophical theory of spheres, allow a shared metaphor for technical, instrumental, personal, and interpersonal concerns. This facilitates a theoretical approach for heuristic and investigative improvisation where performance is considered ‘Ereignis’ (an event) for sociopolitically aware activities that draw on the situational potentiality and present themselves in fragile and context dependent forms. Ever new relationships can be found and developed, but can equally be lost. Sloterdijk supplied the concept of knowledge resulting from equipping our ‘inner space’, an image suiting non-linearity of thought that transpires from Kuhl’s psychological PSI-theory to explain human motivation and behaviour. The role of technology – diversion and subversion of sound and activity – creates a space between performer and instrument that retains a fundamental pianism but defies expectation and anticipation. Responsibility for one’s actions is required to deal with the unexpected without resorting to preliminary strategies restricting potential discourses, particularly within ensemble situations. This type of performance embraces the ‘Ereignis’.

L’étude de la musique mixte est caractérisée par un dualisme d’approches, ceux qui étudient les dispositifs et ceux qui utilisent les stratégies analytiques perceptives issues de la musique électroacoustique. Pour surmonter ce dualisme, cette thèse esquisse une typologie à partir de la perception de l’interaction des composantes instrumentale et électronique : les œuvres mixtes sont considérées comme des «œuvres hybrides» juxtapositionnelles, synthétiques et transformationnelles. Afin de conjuguer les aspects de la perception et de la prescription dans la musique mixte, les notions de geste et texture s’avèrent pertinentes. Une approche analytique holistique est proposée. La définition d’un objet spécifique, le « son mixte », nous permet d’interpréter d’une manière originale la spectromorphologie de Denis Smalley et d’examiner ses fondements épistémologiques. Les critères perceptifs de la typologie s’avèrent fondés sur une répartition fonctionnelle des débuts, entretiens et extinctions sonores des « sons mixtes » entre la partie instrumentale et électronique. Cette perspective est validée par l’analyse comparative de cinq cas d’étude : Sopiana et Aulodie de François-Bernard Mâche, Pluton de Philippe Manoury, Traiettoria de Marco Stroppa et Mixtur de Karlheinz Stockhausen. / The study of mixed music is characterized by a dualist approach: on the one hand, an analysis that merely focuses on technical meansand, on the other hand, research resorting to perceptive strategies in the analysis of electroacoustic music. In order to overcome thistraditional dualism, this work sketches a perceptive typology of the interaction between instrumental and electronic components, mixedmusic works are considered juxtapositionals, synthetics and transformationals. In doing so, the thesis advances an analytical holisticapproach in order to combine the concepts of perception and prescription in mixed music, where the notions of gesture and texture areparticularly relevant. The definition of a specific objet, i.e. the “mixed sound”, allows for an original interpretation of Denis Smalley’sspectromorphology and its epistemological framework. As a result, the typological perceptive criteria here proposed are based on thefunctional distribution of the attacks, sustains and decays of “mixed sounds” between the instrumental and the electronic parts. Thishypothesis is illustrated through the detailed analysis of five case studies: François-Bernard Mâche’s Sopiana and Aulodie, PhilippeManoury’s Pluton, Marco Stroppa’s Traiettoria and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mixtur.