The London International Piano Symposium, 13th,14th & 15th February 2015 at the Royal College of Music
Welcome to The Art and Science of Piano Performance, an interdisciplinary symposium for the enhancement of teaching and performance in the twenty-first century.
We announce the call for papers for the second of the three, three-day London International Piano Symposium. It will be held at the Royal College of Music in London on the 13th, 14th, & 15th of February 2015. The deadline is July 15th 2014. For the first time these symposia will provide an opportunity to hear papers, lecture recitals and debates on piano performance by distinguished researchers and practitioners working at the shared boundaries of science and music. We warmly welcome everyone interested in the performance of piano music: performers, scientists, academics, teachers, young people, and all those who love just to listen.
Background:
All human beings, according to Oliver Sachs in Musicophilia (2007) ‘perceive music, perceive tones, timbre, pitch, intervals, melodic contours, harmony and (perhaps most elementally) of all rhythm’ (xi). The pianist however, not only takes all these elements to construct music in his or her mind using the auditory systems and the multi-layered neural systems in the brain, but also the motoric system to enact their performance. In an ideal performance, all the elements described here function in a unitary way, but all too often there is an emphasis on the mental rather than the physical activity. This symposium seeks hard evidence based on research at the interface between art and science which demonstrates the importance of a more unified approach to piano performance
Associations: The Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto
