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Concertmaster: Mastering the Concert (last edited: 2017)

Marijke Schaap
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This research has been conducted between 2014 and 2016 during my master’s degree studies in violin/viola at Codarts. At the beginning of my studies I asked myself the question: what do I want or need to learn in the two years that are lying ahead? It didn’t take very long to find the answer. The first objective I wanted to achieve was more physical and mental relaxation in performance: I wanted to feel more relaxed on stage in both ways, and I wanted to be more secure about myself and my musical decisions. I decided I wanted to improve this because I had noticed my tendency to put myself down. This negative self-talk created physical tension and had a negative effect on my performance, especially during auditions. I wanted to get rid of the negative thoughts and to learn to focus on what was really important, namely, the music. I believed this would help me to not only improve my playing but also display a more visually present personality during performing. In addition, I wanted to be able to give a deeper exposure of the music I played. I wanted to enlarge the musical contrasts and to pass on the musical expressions as deeply as I had in mind. Until then it had happened to me that my dynamic range, musical decisions, colors, and musical lines were received in a different way by my audience than I thought I had communicated, i.e., played them, so I wanted to be able to play bigger musical contrasts and thus expand my musical horizon and be able to share this with the audience. How could I put these two goals into a valid research project? Many of the goals that I had wanted to reach could be found in the work of a concertmaster. Since 2008, I had been the concertmaster of several orchestras, one of which I had played with for many years. However, the tasks related to concertmastership I’d only learned on the job. I’d already discovered that being an orchestra member asked for responsibility of both the individual and the section and that concertmastership meant much more than that: concertmasters need not only to take care of musical and physical/leading aspects of the group, but also of mental and social aspects. I found that a concertmaster shouldn’t show low self-confidence, because this could have a negative effect on the first violins and would possibly spread to the rest of the orchestra. Besides this, I knew that the physical leading of a concertmaster needed to be very clearly visible and interpretable by the orchestra. However, when I watched old videos of myself leading, I saw I led in a timid way, even when I didn’t feel timid. I felt that I could improve my skills by gaining a more informed background and profound knowledge of the topic by doing research about the physical/communicative, social, musical, and the many other, often subtle aspects of concertmastership. All of these considerations led to my research question: How do I improve my skills as a concertmaster by developing the physical, mental, social and musical aspects required of the job?
typeresearch exposition
date12/08/2017
last modified15/08/2017
statusin progress
share statuspublic
affiliationCodarts, University of the Arts
licenseAll rights reserved
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/383815/383816
external linkwww.codarts.nl


Simple Media

id name copyright license
383819 Schaap Artistic Research_publish (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
383825 Reference recording 1 Dvorak (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
383829 Valerius at Ut Haags Notuh Festival (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
383836 Reference recording 2 long version (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
383840 Reference recording 2 small video (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384141 Rehearsal Valerius 13th of October 2015 (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384164 Beethoven Wiener Philharmoniker and Bernstein (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384166 Beethoven Philadelphia Orchestra and Muti (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384168 Beethoven Gothenborg Symphony and Dudamel (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384170 Dvorak Oslo Filharmoniske Orkester and Mork (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384172 Dvorak Orquesta Sinfonica Rostropovich (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384174 Dvorak Warshaw Philharmonic Orchestra and Maisky (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384176 Mozart Wiener Philharmoniker and Harnoncourt 1 (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384178 Mozart Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Harnoncourt (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384180 Mozart Norwegian Chamber Orchestra (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384193 Tuning the Codarts Symphony Orchestra (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384199 Codarts Symphony Orchestra first example (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384269 Codarts Symphony Orchestra second example (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384271 Codarts Symphony Orchestra third example (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384274 Reference recording 3 part 1 (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384276 Reference recording 3 part 2 (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384280 Reference recording 3 part 3 (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384283 cm1 (video) (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384285 cm2b (video) (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384411 cm3a (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384413 cm3c (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384415 cm4b (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384417 cm5a (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384419 cm5b (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384421 cm6d (mooi!) (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384423 denkproces2 (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved
384425 denkproces4 (c) Marijke Schaap All rights reserved

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