Critical Analysis and Reflection ~ 5pm on Friday 15 September (Week 8)

This assessment provides you with the opportunity to reflect on and articulate your
personal practice in performance as a form of research. The task comprises two parts: first,
you must critically analyse the stipulated key reading (400–500 words); and, second, you
must respond to the two questions below, providing examples with reference to the
development of your personal practice during the semester (400–500 words).

Questions to address:

How have you engaged in practice-led research? Provide an example.

Within creative practice, my first approach to every piece begins with practice-led research.
By sitting down with both the music and guitar, the first attempt is to slowly play the music
in its entirety. In doing so, my practice leads me to ‘diagnose the problems’ that get in the
way of my performance (Howard, 25). This form of practice-led research develops as I
continue to use slow practice as a method of performing in real-time. Engaging in this
routine allows myself to act accordingly to both the score and music at the same time and
practice in efficiency in familiarity of what is happening. Approaching music in an isolated
research only manner would not absolve issues I would find in performance. For example,
due to the different tunings of both Giovanni Zamboni and Fransesco Da Milano (both being
in F# compared to the standard E tuning) I have to physically adjust to different note
positions and chord shapes. Slow practice allows the space for me to engage in practicing
these shifts and anticipations of weird passages accurately. By playing along to a slow
metronome, I can reach the correct phrasing and understand the music in real-time as
opposed to just relying on muscle memory, which could result in memory gaps from not
understanding the music and losing control.

 How have you engaged in research-led practice? Provide an example.

One approach of my engagement in research-led practice is the idea of historically informed

practice. As my repertoire for my recital contains both works from the renaissance and
baroque period, part of my practice time is to research how to perform the music with detail
to the technology and performance conventions that were present when a piece of music
was composed. Although I do not own any period instruments, I can still attempt to
represent these musical styles based upon studying sources that reference what this would
be. By understanding how harmony is used within baroque compositions, one of my aims in
my practice to achieve accuracy in representation of the musical style. In approaching the
baroque style of how harmony interacts with one another, I attempt to express the tension
and relaxation between intervals. My aim in my practice is to place emphasis on the
dissonant notes to excite the phrase, which then lands and relaxes on the consonances to
soothe (Croton 2015, 46). Furthermore, this extra-musical knowledge on how baroque
composers perceive harmony affects my choice and experimentation with key. For both
pieces by Zamboni and Milano, I’ve decided to transpose the guitar up to F# with a capo on
the second fret. Additionally, for the Zamboni baroque suite I have also tuned the G down to
an F#. This decision has been made through research that keys held certain connotations
and characters (Croton 2015, 49). With application of this knowledge, my research-led
practice has led me to discover this tuning has made passages easier to perform due to the
changes of positions of notes.