To find out how and how much I can manipulate as a performer, I carried out two activities, which were quite similar but had to be differentiated, because in one of them I wanted to test a music-knowledgeable public and in the other one a non-expert audience, similar to the experiment explained in the third section. I have just used the word 'test' absolutely consciously since it was what I did. I wanted to explore which mechanisms could stimulate the engagement of the listeners and which ones are not so helpful. For that, I experimented with a few parameters. First, with the philosophical approaches (which become also introspective while experiencing the music) of Kivy, Levinson, and Davies. Secondly, by adding 'extramusical modifications' while listening to a musical passage. And lastly –these only with an audience of musicians– playing with the set-up and also with manipulations of the music or pieces itself. I will explain later why I did not try these two with both publics.
I have attached PDFs (at the right) with the outlines I used during both sessions, where I detail how I performed each fragment, and the guidelines I distributed for one of the sessions with musicians.
HOW TO GET USEFUL RESULTS. With these activities, I tried to make an abstraction of emotional ideas that could be manipulated in brief musical passages, whereas the goal of a performer would usually be radically different (playing whole pieces). However, to get more useful results in this phase of the development, I thought that it would work much better like this, especially because if we are asked to give feedback after a whole performance, it would be extremely complicated for us to reply to specific questions about moments of it without being influenced by the general feeling after the activity.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES. For the hearing of the musical passages, sometimes I asked the listeners to follow one of the ‘emotion theories’, and sometimes I let them choose one of the three. Finally, I also let them create their own path, mixing or forgetting about the ideas explained. How I explained them varied for both activities. For musicians, I risked and tried to give more details about the philosophers and their beliefs elaborating therefore more complex explanations, which I wrote for the first group, but not for the second and third (see Chapter 5.C, Musicians Sessions). For the normal audience, I tried to give very clear input, focusing on the three main elements of each approach: Levinson's imagination, Davies' contagion, and Kivy's beauty of music.
EXTRAMUSICAL ITEMS, SET-UPS and MANIPULATIONS. Another element I played with was the extramusical component, considering extramusical everything that is beyond the piece or the music itself, like differences of light, pictures, other sounds, or even other music. With the musicians' audience, I could also explore different set-ups, which was not possible in the other sessions because of the resources of the room/space, and which could have also been problematic, since asking unknown listeners to change the seating could have been viewed with disfavor, as well as the sessions for non-musicians were shorter than the other ones. I also tried with the more connoisseur public to change versions of the pieces, doing musical manipulations, sometimes compared with my previous interpretation, or sometimes just with the ‘canonical’ one. In this case, I thought that the effects caused by these changes on a non-musician audience would not be truly noteworthy. To balance this, I incorporated a new element into the sessions for non-musicians: giving information about the context of a piece. I tried to figure out if the emotional reception of a piece was affected by knowing about the composer and/or the composition.
My main goal was to receive the forms filled in by the audience, which would give me the keys to develop the best ideas. The questions asked are present in these forms:
