Special Evening Lecture and Piano Performance

Guerino Mazzola

Multimedia Lab
Institut für Informatik
University of Zurich
(guerino@mazzola.ch)

jointly with the
Institute of Contemporary Music
Hochschule der Künste
Berlin

Shaping Musical Performance by Genealogical Trees of Vector Fields

Friday, Aug 06 1999, 20:30

Main concert hall of the "Hochschule der Künste"
Bundesallee 1-12


In contrast to the quasi-digital notation of music in European standard scores, performance involves infinitesimal deformations in time, pitch, durations, loudness, articulation and tuning. How can this shaping process - which Theodor W. Adorno termed "micrologic of infinite precision" - be controlled? Generalizing the well-known tempo curve, it is seen that special vector fields, the performance fields, adequately conceptualize Adorno's infinitesimals of micrologic. However, developing performance fields is not a one-time action, it must be built in a genealogical way from coarse to more and more refined performances. Performance grammars have to describe this continuous refinement process of shaping artistic performance. We describe and illustrate the genealogical stemma theory of performance, its implementation in the analysis and performance software RUBATO and present examples of performances which have been generated by such software on MIDI grand pianos.


The concert hall is within 5 min walking distance from the U-Bahn station ``Spichernstraße''. When leaving the station, follow Bundesallee north. You will see the concert hall, a large classical style building on the left.

Although part of the official conference program, the evening lecture will be accessible to a general audience with interest in music. Practical demonstrations both of the computer program and at the piano will be presented.

The lecture is free of charge.


equadiff@math.fu-berlin.de    Jul 14 1999