ABSTRACT

This chapter examines collaborative phenomena in the context of a professionally active, long-term, married piano duo. It explains people's interest in music performance research with recent ideas concerning the psychology of collaborative creativity. The chapter also examines interpretive issues within musical structure through a collaborative lens. It also suggests that a performance of notated music can also exhibit elements of Keith Sawyer's ideas regarding emergence and unpredictability, thanks partly to the limitations of notation, but also to the potential for indexicality in the performance of notated music. 'Piano Spheres' is a Los Angeles-based music series devoted to twentieth and twenty-first century keyboard music. Specifically, two-piano music is concerned with merging two individual artistic personalities into a unified and, most often, singular musical artefact, a meta-piano. John-Steiner uses the term complementary collaboration to describe those collaborations characterized by 'a division of labour based on complementary expertise, disciplinary knowledge, roles, and temperament'.