The Element of Play in Interpretation and Classical Piano Performance

“The stage is a playground, it’s not a serious place where you have to be at your best, ... it should be a playground.” Nir Ben Gal, choreographerDuring my years of study, and later as a performing artist, performance was never discussed conceptually and questions regarding audience interaction and stage fright were seldom raised. Further, musicians suffering from stage fright are most often referred to psychological research and solutions drawn from it, mainly as a way of coping with fear of performing and how to reduce it. They are rarely introduced or encouraged to artistic ways of approaching the act of performing in a salutogenic, proactive process, but rather as a reactive response to something dysfunctional. Pianists and musicians can benefit from experimenting, reflecting and widening their sense and conception of an audience and of performing on stage.This presentation is concerned with the psychological processes, neurological pheno- menon and sociological structures that are part of musical interpretation of classical music, but are rarely, if ever, addressed amongst musicians and that are to some extent incompatible with the performance demands of today. Can artistic research contribute to the exploration of these fields and also spark new approaches to musical performance?My research focuses on the traditions and ceremonies of classical performance, such as the piano recital, and how they affect me as a performer. What happens in the process of learning, interpreting and performing music and why do I experience a gap between preparing to perform and performing?My cooperation with composers Staffan Storm and Kent Olofsson revolves around the Sonata op. 11 by Schumann. The project aims at exploring the performance of classical iconic repertoire through theories and concepts of projective identification, mentaliza- tion, social responsiveness, werktreue and (AON) action-observation network.Storm’s piece Unbekanntes Blatt aus Endenicher Zeit – 5 Sätze für Klavier will create a musical reflection on Robert Schumann’s relation to life and art, the concept of “Werk- treue” as well as imaginary and real ghosts of the past, as seen through the lens of one of his last diary entries and some notes that he made during the time he spent in the mental asylum in Endenich.With Olofsson I explore the possibilities of working with sampled fragments of the, where the compositional process involves building a new instrument which allows me as performer to explore the performance situation and expand beyond the normative performance behaviour expected on stage