Erkki Huovinen

• Professor at Royal College of Music in Stockholm

This study explored how professional conductors understand the role of individual (purposeful) practice and how they describe the contents of such practice. Twelve professional conductors were interviewed and content analysis was used to analyze the data. The results show that the participants understood conducting as a lifelong learning process. T...

In research on music conducting, there is a lack of studies concerning conductors’ score-reading. The present investigation explored the reading strategies of four Swedish choral conductors. Two interconnected studies addressed the conductors’ explicit conceptions about score reading and their silent-reading strategies in actual reading situations....

Challenges of intonation derive from discrepancies between justly tuned intervals. In theoretical literature, string intonation is depicted as a balancing act between melodic and harmonic ideals, or between distinct tuning systems. However, practical string teachers’ and empirical researchers’ accounts sometimes appear to bypass such theory, focusi...

ABSTRACT Studies on music reading have provided insights into the cognitive processes in sight singing. However, there has been limited research on sight singing in a group setting. This study aims to assess how choral singers approach music reading as they perform previously unfamiliar choral scores together. We addressed (1) how singers’ gaze dir...

The aspiring composer’s development is commonly described using the metaphor of finding one’s own composer voice. A central goal for teaching composition in higher music education is to guide students toward finding such a voice—toward personal expression and creativity. In order to shed light on the teaching strategies associated with this goal, w...

Studies of performance intonation and musicians' own statements suggest that classical string instrumentalists often deviate in their intonation from equal temperament for expressive purposes. However, it is not clear to what extent corresponding perceptual preferences for intonational deviations might rely on listeners' instrumental expertise or s...

This study concerns classical musicians' ability to recognize style periods from very brief visual exposure to musical notation. 25 professional pianists were shown nine 500-ms displays of musical excerpts from piano works by J. S. Bach, L. v. Beethoven, and F. Chopin. The pianists were told to describe what they saw and to assess the style period...

Improvisation is currently a hot topic, not only in various specialized disciplines of arts scholarship but also in philosophical aesthetics. Not long after the extensive, two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (Lewis and Piekut, 2016), we may now delve into an equally impressive collection, The Routledge Handbook of Philosoph...

In his book Music, Ideas, History: Texts 1990–2022 Matti Huttunen sheds light on the world of Western art music by showing how past historiographies of music have given it form and meaning. While grounded in Dahlhaus’ principles of structural history, Huttunen also challenges such models by allowing greater interpretive multidimensionality. In futu...

Music-reading research has not yet fully grasped the variety and roles of different cognitive mechanisms that underlie visual processing of music notation; instead, studies have often explored one factor at a time. Based on prior research, we identified three possible cognitive mechanisms regarding visual processing during music reading: symbol com...

Studies in musical improvisation show that musicians and even children are able to communicate intended emotions to listeners at will. To understand emotional expressivity in music as an art form, communicative success needs to be related to improvisers’ thought processes and listeners’ aesthetic judgments. In the present study, we used retrospecti...

In comparison with instrumental sight reading of musical notation, sight singing is typically characterized by the presence of lyrics. The purpose of this study was to explore how skilled sight singers divide their visual attention between written music and lyrics and how their eye-movement behavior is influenced by musical stimulus complexity. Fou...

The purpose of this study was to investigate how professional pianists practice music for a concert, and whether their individual cognitive orientations in such practice processes can be identified accurately from the resulting performances. In Study I, four pianists, previously found to be skilled music memorizers, practiced and performed a short...

Drawing on philosopher Richard Sennett’s view of craftsmanship, this chapter argues that music education should address human incompleteness and ambiguity—as especially evident in contexts involving vulnerability. Music has often been seen as an indicator, but also as a means of overcoming unwanted psychological or social vulnerabilities. From anot...

Most research on people's conceptions regarding creativity has concerned informal beliefs instead of more complex belief systems represented in scholarly theories of creativity. The relevance of general theories of creativity to the creative domain of music may also be unclear because of the mixed responses these theories have received from music r...

Multi-instrumental musicianship appears in various musical traditions, also frequently figuring in systems of music teacher education. Multi-instrumentalism covers forms of musical creativity and versatile professionalism that differ from ideologies of specialization often emphasized in instrumental music education. Thus, it is relevant to ask whet...

In order to promote children’s collaborative musical creativity in new digital environments, we need a better understanding not only of the sound production capabilities provided by the new digital tools, but also of the interaction affordances involved. This study focuses on the interactional patterns emerging in children’s musical creativity, com...

This article introduces the notion of pleasant musical imagery (PMI) for denoting everyday phenomena where people want to cherish music “in their heads.” This account differs from current paradigms for studying musical imagery in that it is not based a priori on (in)voluntariness of the experience. An empirical investigation of the structure and ex...

Musicians often use mental practice for enhancing performance, but individuals may have different preferences and skills in their characteristic, individually successful ways of carrying out such practice. In this study, we focus on the approaches to mental practice of four pianists who, according to the ratings of a panel of expert judges, showed...

Musicians use silent music reading for memorizing, and this includes different types of mental imagery and analytical functions. The aim of this mixed-methods study was to address the effects of musical expertise, general level cognitive traits, and situational strategies on pianists’ performances after silent memorizing of notated music. We also c...

A music reader has to “look ahead” from the notes currently being played—this has usually been called the Eye-Hand Span. Given the restrictions on processing time due to tempo and meter, the Early Attraction Hypothesis suggests that sight readers are likely to locally increase the span of looking ahead in the face of complex upcoming symbols (or sy...

THE ARTICLE INTRODUCES AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH to studying music's extrinsic meanings, based on the idea of musical topos as a set of musical entities that is delimited and furnished with meaning by extramusical associations in a listener population. The proposed methodology involves free, associative responses as well as responses on semantic variab...

In the present study, education majors minoring in music education (n = 24) and music performance majors (n =14) read and performed the original version and melodically altered versions of a simple melody in a given tempo. Eye movements during music reading and piano performances were recorded. Errorless trials were analyzed to explore the adjustme...

abstract This article discusses Jerrold Levinson's theory of concatenationism, which emphasizes the moment-by-moment character of musical listeners’ basic musical understanding, and the related project of anti-architectonicism, which denies the influence of large-scale music-structural information on basic musical understanding. A reconstruction of...

This article addresses the silent reading of music notation, combining eye-movement measures with a semantic analysis of readers’ verbal descriptions of the notated music. A group of musical novices (n = 16) and two groups of musical amateurs (less experienced n = 11 and more experienced n = 10) participated in three separate measurement sessions d...

This article describes a project in which undergraduate students of beginning drawing were brought together with free improvising musicians to explore interaction in collective real-time art-making. Following a series of guided rehearsals, the students were free to choose their own strategies for interactive group projects. We discuss these strateg...

Two studies examined the eye-movement effects of unexpected melodic events during music reading. Simple melodic variants of a familiar tune were performed in a temporally controlled setting. In a pilot study with five university students, unexpected alterations of the familiar melody were found to increase the number of incoming saccades to the alt...

This essay develops an account of artistic creativity based on Martin Buber’s theory of dialogue. Crucially, Buber distinguishes between the It that is objectified in experience and use and the You whom we meet as a whole person in dialogical relationships. Buber’s emphasis on dialogue as the core of what it means to be human suggests that the huma...

A central method within analytic philosophy has been to construct thought experiments in order to subject philosophical theories to intuitive evaluation. According to a widely held view, philosophical intuitions provide an evidential basis for arguments against such theories, thus rendering the discussion rational. This method has been the predomin...

In this study the effects of skill development on the eye movements of beginning adult sight-readers were examined, focusing on changes in the allocation of visual attention within metrical units as well as in the processing of larger melodic intervals. The participants were future elementary school teachers, taking part in a 9-month-long music tra...

The aim of this article is to assess the relative merits of two approaches to teaching musical improvisation: a music-theoretical approach, focusing on chords and scales, and a ‘dramaturgical’ one, emphasizing questions of balance, variation and tension. Adult students of music pedagogy, with limited previous experience in improvisation, took part...

This article argues that conceptions of artistic creativity and thus the practices of the artworld are centrally regulated by an ideal of an artist who personally undergoes experiences of novelty, originality, uniqueness, or surprise. Such subjective creativity responses arise largely due to the artistic media that invariably defy complete control...

This study concerns the processes of eye movements during simple sight-reading tasks, concentrating on the processing of melodic groups separated by larger intervals and the effects of metrical placement of such groups. Thirty-two participants with varying musical background sight-read eight short melodies in two separate sessions. Eye movements du...

This study presents a series of methods for the analysis of the average characteristics of pitch-class material on the surface level of musical works. The methods rely on so-called tail segmentation, the partitioning of a musical work into a large number of overlapping pitch-class sets of equal cardinality. The resulting data can be used as a means...

This article examines an account of the listener’s musical understanding put forward by Stephen Davies. I begin by discussing Davies’s ‘expressibility requirement’, according to which a musical listener should be able to express his understanding in sentences that are truth-apt. This is followed by a reconstruction of Davies’s argument for the idea...

The article addresses the justification of music-structural claims, that is, any statements that assign a structure to a musical passage or a work. It is suggested that a theorist T is justified in making such a claim to the extent that (i) T is able to specify a rule that takes a given musical passage as its input and produces the claim as its out...

ABSTRACT This study presents a series of methods for the analysis of the average characteristics of pitch-class material on the surface level of musical works. The methods rely on so-called tail segmentation, the partitioning of a musical work into a large number of overlapping pitch-class sets of equal cardinality. The resulting data can be used a...

Empiricism should not be seen to provide an overarching criterion of meaningfulness for musicological concepts nor a single comprehensive methodology for music research. Understood as methodological concern with observation (perception, experience, etc.), it is rather a possible orientation that may receive various degrees of emphasis. Empiricism i...

Background in microtonal research. Regardless of the method of evaluation used, the 19-tone equal temperament (19-tet) has frequently emerged as one of the most plausible candidates for an alternative equally tempered tuning system (e.g. Krantz & Douthett, 1994). Speculations on consonance within the 19-tet have been presented by Yasser (1975/1932)...