ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some aspects of the role of the body in performance, focusing on the case study of two performances by the same pianist of a single piece of music. In common with the dominant trend in modern cognitive psychology, a great deal of the psychology of music has adopted an almost entirely 'disembodied' approach to its matter. As a physical skill, musical performance has attracted the interest of cognitive psychologists studying complex spatial and temporal skills. Within the small number of existing empirical studies explicitly focusing on body movement in musical performance, Davidson, 1995 has demonstrated that information about both structural features and expressive intentions is communicated to observers through body movement. Finally there is an issue of causality: we neither want to assert that body movement determines the interpretation of structure, nor that a performer's conception of musical structure determines body movement.
