Local and Global Performance Transformations

Summary

Performance includes a non-trivial transformation from the mental reality of a score to the physical reality of acoustic and, in the limit, gestural realization. We discuss a model of local and global transformation structures and present a preliminary discourse on the need to “shape mental reality” in performance. Local performance transformation structures, together with their syntactic combination to global structures, are formally developed. They involve extrapolation from discrete to continuous or differentiable data; the latter are induced by use of spline techniques. We give a justification of such a procedure from the musical and mathematical points of view, in particular with stress on expressive coherence.