This thesis views musical performance chiefly as a social environment. Sources of inspiration and reference for this combination of fields include, among others, a few of Philip Auslander's writings, namely "Musical Personae", which argues for focusing on the performers and their relationship with the audience, rather than on the musical content itself as the dominant part of a performance.7 This approach, where the music is not necessarily the main component of audiences' experience in concerts, is supported by diverse papers. Those show, for example, the significance of pre-performance interactions and created anticipation on the impact of a live music performance; the awareness of expert classical concert pianists to the performative and theatrical elements in their profession and the immense extent they use them to excite their audiences; and some insights into the effects of pianists' body movements on listeners' impressions.8 I focused, when possible, on articles I could find that related to pianists specifically as it is my own field, and indeed there are things that are specific to performing with this instrument.
A broad review by Sarah Izen et al. deals with varying degrees of participation in music or interacting with it, and the impacts these have on people's development of social skills, especially in young children.9 In my perspective, my aspirations as an artist and thus also the experiments I have conducted for this research have integral educational values and goals, and for this reason I did not shy away from material discussing the educational aspect of music making or music learning in relation to communication and social skills – such as an experiment by Eva Brand and Ora Bar-Gil resulting in significant improvement of interpersonal communication skills in children after a "musical intervention" compared to a control group.10
Another aspect of highlighting the performance's relationship with the audience in this thesis is their interaction and participation, with the performers and each other. Some experimental research that has been made in this field includes intriguing data about social interaction and interaction with the musical content (both using an app) as a tool for sustaining engagement in musical performance and for shaping creative engagement,11 and observations on audience-performer engagement from a live sound performance.12 These were helpful mostly by raising many questions and limitation on the nature of this kind of research – like the difficulty of gathering high-quality data from audience members about their experience, the complexity of the topics in question themselves, and unexpected variables that were overlooked then.
While discussing audience participation and interaction, searching for new ways of engagement, it is important to look back and review alternative positions on the roles of all the elements taking part in a musical performance. Leon Botstein has enlightening descriptions of the development of the audience's role specifically in western classical music throughout the past few hundred years.13 Contradicting opinions from music history's hall of fame C.P.E. Bach and Ezra Pound, and 18th century contemporary documentation of audience behavior are also included in this background, which goes as far as music in pre-historic painted caves and trying to decipher its context.14
An incredible contribution to the forming of this paper is the book by Roy Berko, Andrew Wolvin, Darlyn Wolvin, and Joan Aitken, Communicating, which describes at length practically every detail of human communication, not only interpersonal but also intra-personal and public communication.15 More than just exploring communication in performance, my goal is to find new ways of creating connection and bonding with and between audiences, so the concept of entitativity (the perception of a group as a group) and the related field of research appealed greatly to me. It covers how the level of entitativity affects behaviour,16 how to actively increase it,17 its influence on the emotional resonance of a musical performance on audiences,18 and more.
There are many aspects of interpersonal communication, too many to delve deep into all of them within the limits of this paper. I will mention some at times where they are relevant, but as I chose to shine a bit more light on eye contact – this is the part that I reviewed more thoroughly. First, eye contact in general communication – there is no shortage of studies on how eye contact is integral to our communication from the youngest age onwards.19 Abundant research is also extant on differences in gaze interactions between different cultures and societies.20 Some lay out specific functions and effects that different kinds of eye contact can create, related to affective neuroscience, awareness, and arousal.21
In relation to performance – there are of course studies that involve eye contact between performers, such as in string quartets or by conductors, and even in piano duos.22 But there is almost no research on the topic of eye contact between performer and audience. This is part of the gap I am trying to start filling with this thesis. The only person I found to be studying this is Satoshi Kawase – who did many inspiring and controlled albeit very limited experiments, on this exact topic and similar ones, and even with piano specifically. His most extensive paper investigates the reported importance of various communication cues between all three combinations of pairs of roles in a performance (performer-audience, performer-performer, audience-audience) and in every direction.23
Finally, there is the side of the actual musical content. While this paper will not focus heavily on the stylistic aspect of music making - when there is interaction and improvisation, mutual influence between the music and the ongoing activity and communication can be expected, and that is of interest to us because it is of course the playground on which I conduct my experiments. Relevant sources include Derek Bailey's "Improvisation – its nature and practice in music" which goes from an interesting historical review of some approaches towards improvisation in different times, genres, and cultures, through interviews with experts in each field, up to discussing contemporary free improvisation and recalling his own experiences as a prominent figure in the field;24 and others that try to chase the elusive definition of "free improvisation" and to get to the core of this practice, through different approaches. Those include, Michael T. Bullock's "Self-Idiomatic Music: an Introduction", which reviews stylistic and social characteristics and development of the genre; Matthew Sansom's "Imaging Music: Abstract Expressionism and Free Improvisation", which offers an interesting and deep analysis of similar topics with references to visual art and to many late-twentieth century composers and musical creators; and Cesar Grossman examines the interactive and discursive nature of the genre in "The Rhetorical Side on Free Improvisation".25