Andrew Geeves

• Macquarie University

What is it like for a professional musician to perform music in front of a live audience? We use Strauss and Corbin's (1998) Grounded Theory to conduct qualitative research with 10 professional musicians to investigate their experience of music performance. We find performance to extend temporally beyond time spent before an audience and to include...

This study focuses in on a moment of live performance in which the entrainment amongst a musical quartet is threatened. Entrainment is asymmetric in so far as there is an ensemble leader who improvises and expands the structure of a last chorus of a piece of music beyond the limits tacitly negotiated during prior rehearsals and performances. Despit...

Seeking to expand on previous theories, this paper explores the AIR (Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes) approach to expert performance previously outlined by Geeves, Christensen, Sutton and McIlwain (2008). Data gathered from a semi-structured interview investigating the performance experience of Jeremy Kelshaw (JK), a professional musician, is...

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this ap...

In some musical genres, professional performers play live shows many times a week. Arduous touring schedules bring encounters with wildly diverse audiences across many different performance ecologies. We investigate the kinds of creativity involved in such repeated live performance, kinds of creativity that are quite unlike songwriting and recordin...

Negative emotions are usually avoided in daily life, yet often appreciated in artistic endeavours. The present study investigated emotional experiences induced by Death Metal music with extremely violent themes, and examined whether enjoyment of this genre of music is associated with personality traits. Fans (N=48) and non-fans (N=97) listened to 6...

We argue that a sense of agency has interpersonal origins and arises from a contingent coupling of the self and the social and material world. This perspective has implications for the assessment and conceptualization of a sense of agency in the empirical literature. We explore the development of a sense of agency as, in part, an implicit, embodied...

In this response to Leman and Maes's paper in this issue, we raise a couple of concerns about the authors' particular approach to embodied music cognition, drawing selectively on their other writings to enrich our interpretation of this target article, while pointing to a few of the many other legitimate research paths that can also fall under this...

“There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping”, writes Hubert Dreyfus, “for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body”.1 Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena...

This paper investigates the reciprocal nature of the relationship between the body of a professional musician (JK) and his music performance. The influence that the body has on performance and the influence that performance has on the body are both explored. The paradigms of Embodied Cognition (Hutchins, 1995; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) and Embodied M...

Inspired by the small amount of relevant past research available (Berger 1999, Berliner 1994, Monson 1996, Sudnow 1978), this paper focuses on the type of performance experience an individual musician views as worthy of striving toward (and avoiding) and the possible way(s) in which this can be accomplished. Using Strauss and Corbin's (1998) take o...

review of Roger Chaffin, Gabriela Imreh & Mary Crawford, Practicing Perfection: Memory and Piano Performance. New York: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. ISBN 0-80-582610-6 (hardcover) $180.00.