References

In 2017, when I had to prepare my final bachelor recital, I played the Viola Sonata by Shostakovich that he wrote in 1975 in Moscow just before he died. During the preparation of this Sonata, I read books about the Soviet Union, Stalin and Shostakovich himself. Shostakovich was living in a period of uncertainty and fear of being taken by the police at any time. I was amazed by how much there is written about Shostakovich, not only biographical facts but also speculations about his psychological/mental status. In Shostakovich: A life, Laurel E. Fay describes some behavioral characteristics of Shostakovich that could be interpreted as signs of neuroticism.[1] I wondered how scared Shostakovich must have felt, how this affected his mental state and subsequently his music. When I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich written by Solzhenitsyn, I had to stop reading because I started to have nightmares. I started to wonder what I was aiming for in doing all this reading. There was something in this way of ‘studying’ that I enjoyed, however, because it gave me insights and ideas of how to interpret and play this piece. With the biographical information I created imaginary characters that played a certain role in the piece that I had to perform. In this way, I felt like an actor who would play the various roles I had created. 

When practicing and performing or listening to a composition from a composer, we usually want to know more about their life: where they were born, where they travelled, who they loved and what kind of person they were. Why do we actually want to know about these stories? We want to get beyond the technical building blocks of a composition and create a thorough and holistic interpretation of a piece. As performing artists, we want to transfer something to the audience that will affect them. Reading about the life of a composer is one method we use to make the music more alive. Another way of finding expression in a piece, is to think about words, metaphors or characters that we create ourselves. How do these self-created tools help us in our interpretation, practice or performance of a piece? In an article about the use of metaphors in performance, Robert H. Woody examined existing theories of emotion, imagery and metaphor in musical performance. He cites Keith Swanwick who claims that a lively impression in the mind helps to construe expressiveness in performance,[2] but he also concludes that even advanced musicians have a limited vocabulary to achieve expressive performance.[3] How might we expand that vocabulary?

Besides my degree at the Royal Conservatoire, I have been doing a masters degree in medicine and graduated in April 2019. Since psychiatry is my main interest, I did a four-month internship at the closed psychiatric ward at the Academic Medical Centre of Amsterdam. During this internship I saw patients with a great variety of symptoms: acoustic, visual or even tactile hallucinations, slowness of thoughts, suicidal thoughts, abnormally elevated arousal and energy, and so on. Every day, I had to write a Mental State Examination (MSE) of my patients in order to see if there was any change in their mental state. This mental state examination is a fixed format that evaluates the patient’s current state of mind, structured by the domains of appearance, attitude, behavior, mood, affect, speech, thought process, thought content, perception, cognition and insight.[4]

Living between two worlds - music and medicine - sometimes made me feel I was living a schizophrenic life myself. Both worlds are so different from each other in almost every kind of way. In order to make it easier to combine both studies, I tried to create connections between both worlds: when I was practicing a piece, I tried to find the right character by imagining the mental characteristics of a certain patient. Vice versa, I tried to learn more about mental illnesses by reading about composers about whom it was speculated that they had a psychiatric disease. I became fascinated by how many books and articles have been written about various composers in which speculations about their psychiatric or mental status are exposed.[5] For example: there are assumptions that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had manic-depressive tendencies, while others say that his behavior could also match the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder (ADHD).[6] About Robert Schumann it is speculated that he suffered from various psychotic episodes or/and bipolar disease.[7] Regarding Béla Bartók, it is speculated that his troubles during social interaction and his tendency to isolate himself were symptoms of a pervasive developmental disorder.[8]

With this research, I wanted to take a closer look at my artistic working process and to become more aware of the steps that I –automatically- take in creating my own interpretation when practicing and performing a piece. Usually, I imagine fictional characters for different sections in the piece and translate this into music. However, these fictional characters usually remain a rough sketch. I wondered what would happen if I describe a character in more detail. Therefore, I included the experiences that I gained during my internship in psychiatry and used the MSE in the description of the characters that I create. 

Finally, I investigated to what extent I could incorporate these descriptions of my fictional characters in my playing. For this research paper I explored two pieces from two different composers: Märchenbilder (Op. 113) written by Robert Schumann and the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (Op. posthumous, Tibor Serly Edition) written by Béla Bartók. I choose these two pieces since I am fond of both pieces and because I performed them in my final master recital. 

ARTISTIC RELEVANCE

I hope to shed a new light on my psycho-artistic interpretation of a musical piece. I want to see what happens when I reach further with the aim of getting a more holistic sense and understanding of the music I play. Using experiences from another world, such as medicine, could give new insights into musical interpretation, practice and performance. Finally, I hope to inspire other musicians to use a different approach when interpreting/analyzing/performing music.