Study on the Expressiveness in the Performance of Children

Abstract

This work studies the characteristics of musical expressiveness in children’s performances through comparison of musical structures and behavioral patterns in executing music. The aim is to offer effective information useful in instrumental teaching, and elements of comparison with the performance of advanced students and mu-sicians. Three ten-year-old piano students learned a piece previously unknown from Bartok’s Mikrokosmos. During the learning process their teacher kept a log of the indications given to the children regarding musical content and performance practices. When the children could play the piece fluidly by memory, a video tape was made during a lesson. After about ten days during which the students received new indications, they performed the piece in a protected environment (private concert) and were video taped. A third videotaped performance in a non-protected context (public recital) ended the experiment. The analyses of the videotapes was done following two methods: one rigorously analytic, based on the presence of structural elements of the piece, the second one based on the interpretation of the expressive behavior in order to allow comparison with the structural aspects and with the teacher’s log. The presence of important evidence in proximity of the conjunction points between the principal parts which define the structure of the pieces performed - mistakes, omissions, acceleration, memory lapse - all induce one to think that in the absence of analytic training and of awareness of form, the performance of the three children pivoted on the fundamental musical structures of the piece.