Categorical Cognition: A Psychological Model of Categories and Identification in Decision Making

This paper introduces a psychological notion of categorization into economics and derives its implications for economic decision making. We show, using a tractable model of social cognition, that a decision maker in (efficiently) assigning past experiences to categories, will sort experiences of interaction with larger (majority) groups more finely than experiences with smaller (minority) groups. We then apply the model to understand simple forms of discrimination and social identity. It is shown that discrimination in hiring can result from such cognitive processes even when there is no malevolent taste to do so and workers' qualifications are fully observable. The model also provides a framework that is equipped to investigate the social psychologicalcategorization, discrimination, bounded rationality,

Realizing the Continuo in Monteverdi\u27s Lamento della ninfa and Its Implications for Early-Seventeenth-Century Italian Continuo Practice

Monteverdi’s “Amor, dicea” (Lamento della ninfa), appearing in his Eighth Book of Madrigals published in 1638, is regarded as among his most emotionally moving works, Denis Arnold (for one) calling it “unforgettable” and “almost unbearably intense.” Nonetheless, our full sense of it and of its expressive potential, remains uncertain in that its accompaniment has come down to us in incomplete form, consisting of but a single bass line on a descending fourth, A – G – F – E, repeated throughout. How this line is to be interpreted has not been agreed upon among scholars or performers, despite its critical bearing on the effect of the piece—especially in respect to the kinds of dissonances Monteverdi would have intended to be heard as a result of it..

Performance Practice: Criticism, Summary, Discovery

Promising new directions for performance research include: (1) firsthand experience with historical instruments; (2) reexamining musical sources; (3) exploring archival and literary material; and (4) establishing links with ethnic research

Correspondence: June 23, 2010

The recent article by Dorottya Fabian and Eitan Ornoy, “Identity in Violin Playing on Records: Interpretation Profiles in Recordings of Solo Bach” (PPR 2009)—which considers mainly the twentieth-century violinists Heifetz and Milstein (with reference as well to Szigeti, Menuhin, and others)—is unusual in that it generally avoids any discussion of Bach’s original performance practice. As the authors state at the outset, “when studying the performances, we are not concerned primarily with how they may relate to historically-informed performance and Bach’s intentions or presumed intentions.” In this they depart from all the studies that have appeared thus far in PPR from its first issue (1988), where it was stipulated that contributions are to be based on evidence from the time of a composer or group of composers, such evidence throwing light on the performance of their music..

Correspondence: February 5, 2008

Roland Jackson responds to Peter Holman\u27s review in the 2007 volume of Performance Practice Review

Pathfinder in Performance Practice: Howard Mayer Brown, 1930-1993

Jackson discusses Brown\u27s contributions to the field of Performance Practice in Musicology

Performance Practice and Its Critics - The Debate Goes On

Jackson discusses the various views of the field of historical performance practice

Invoking a Past or Imposing a Present? Two Views of Performance Practice

RILM abstract: Richard Taruskin has characterized performance practice or historical performance as not truly historical, but rather as a reflection of a mid-20th-c. Zeitgeist dominated by Stravinsky. In contrast with this presentist view, wherein spontaneous performance, the act, is deemed the highest value, the historicist view affirms that music (along with art works generally) is endowed with a quality of permanent value independent of how it was regarded in its own time or how people react to it now. Historicist performance practice holds that a composer\u27s intention (the autonomous work) is rediscoverable, at least in part, and that the manner of realization (performance practice) is also a part of a composer\u27s original conception

Performance Practice and Musical Expressivity

Musical expressivity is intimately associated with subtle dynamic changes--slight variations in volume between one note and the next--which help shape and make meaningful the phrases. Daniel Gottlob Turk was among the few theorists who recognized and described this subtlety

Authenticity or Authenticities?--Performance Practice and the Mainstream

RILM abstract: A critique of Peter Kivy\u27s book Authenticities: Philosophical reflections on musical performance (RILM 1995-1431). Kivy proposes that performance involves four authenticities: composer (the composer\u27s original conception), sonic (the restoring of original sound materials), personal (the performer\u27s interpretation), and sensible (the meaning attached by an audience). The first two are furthered by performance practice, the last two by the mainstream. A reconciliation is proposed in that performance practice can encompass personalized Expression and the mainstream can profit from greater awareness of the details of historical performance