Ethnography: Musical Performance

Music is an interesting thing. When musicians perform there are plenty of elements to be observed that are not recognized easily to an untrained person. Musical performances contain interactions going on between the performers, audience, music, and space. These come together to create a great performance. The vast majority of people in the audience do not even realize how much there is to be observed during a musical performance. While attending a concert by the Wentzville Holt High School Symphonic Band I was able to evaluate the musical sound, contexts of the performance, and interpretation of the performance.

When observing musical sound there’s plenty of different factors to notice during the performance. Some important things that someone can pay attention to are pitch, tone, timbre, scale, rhythm, melody, quality, and form. While I was listening to the Band play the pitch of the ensemble was varied. There were times during the performance the pitch was low sounding, this was when you heard the bass instruments. However, when the other instruments joined the pitch sounded higher. According to Corbin Patterson, who plays trumpet in the band, “Using a standard pitch makes it possible for a many instruments to play together without sounding bad or out of tune.” He went on to inform me that “In some musical traditions people don’t concern themselves with having a standard pitch, at each different occasion they tune their instruments to whoever they may be playing with at that point in time.” Another term associated with pitch is intervals. Intervals refers to how far apart two notes are from each other. One obvious example would be an octave, which contains two tones, the same note at different places in the sound spectrum, w...

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...rall the performance was entertaining and delightful and most of the audience obviously thought so too. Musically the sound was definitely there. There was not a lot of crowd involvement in this type of performance, but the music was very easy to interpret, and plenty enjoyable anyway.

There’s a lot going on during a musical performance. The average person can’t recognize most of it, but music is a very complex thing. Everything including tones, pitches, timbre, style, and much more make music distinct and interesting to listen to. Even music that is similar contains lost of variety. Some of the things that make a performance unique are the musical sound, the contexts of the performance, and the interpretation of the performance. Without music life would be dull, that’s why I always try to analyze music for all its worth, and take in all that makes it what it is.