The Performer’s Voice: Performance and Analysis in Ravel’sConcerto pour la main gauche

Abstract

1] Janet Schmalfeldt, in her ground-breaking article "On the Relation of Analysis to Performance" (1985, 2), challenges analysts to develop "a comprehensive critique of the value and the limitations of analysis for performance."We wish to turn this goal on its head: to explore the value and limitations of performance for analysis.What can a performer's voice contribute to the analysis of a work?[2] We take the opening cadenza of Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand (Video 1) as a case study.(1) Certain performance considerations-technical, visual, and affective elements-comprise warp and weft not only of the Concerto's execution and interpretation, but also of its structure and meaning.In addition, we are able to speak both from personal experiences of having performed the Concerto and from insights provided by historical recordings of the work.[3] After a brief overview of literature on performance and analysis, we explore the cadenza: visual and kinesthetic aspects, rhetorical and tonal function, form and structure, rhythmic features and performance issues. * * *[4] The words "analysis" and "performance" have wide purviews: "performance" may refer to live performances, recordings, sight-reading, practice, memorization, improvisation, historical practices, events of performance, and to aesthetic, hermeneutic, social, psychological, cognitive, or motor aspects of the foregoing."Analysis" might examine style, score, performance, or historical figures, and might take approaches from domains of musicology, music theory, psychology, pedagogy, performance, and so on.Our discussion of "performance and analysis" centers on analysis and performance as related to particular works.[5] Since the time of Schmalfeldt's article, the literature on performance and analysis has burgeoned dramatically, in two primary directions.The first presents analyses and their implications for performance, and the second studies performances (usually sound or video recordings).[6] In the first category, the balance is weighted towards "analysis," with "analysis" coming prior to "performance" in both time and importance.The most common scenario features analysis of certain structural elements, followed by suggestions Volume 11, Number 3,

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