ABSTRACT
This chapter was born in part of an unlikely interdisciplinary research study, a comparison of ice hockey coaches and orchestral conductors.1 The study took mental preparedness in expert performance – the process and results of preparation for competition and concert – as its object. The author worked in collaboration with human kinetics experts whose scholarly interests lay in competitive sport – in particular mental focus under competitive duress.2 The study had its successes, notably the transfer of qualitative aesthetic modes of assessment from music to sport and the adaptation of quantitative social science models to the study of musical performance. But it foundered on one principal problem – the lack of clear-cut outcomes in orchestral performance like those in competitive sport. Winning and losing in competition are consistent measures against which all aspects of performance, including gesture, can be measured both quantitatively and qualitatively. No such consistency of outcomes is to be observed in orchestral performance (at least not to the same degree or in a manner as clear cut), and this made the comparison of music and sport difficult.3
