Blog 3 – Elements of Music Performance

As requested by our assignment I attended the UT Dallas Music Faculty Concert last Friday and was actually quite surprised to find it to be a performance of Latin music. Now while I did enjoy the entire concert this blog post is restricted to one song so after a bit a thought I’ve decided to discuss the Elements of Music Performance that took place during the Lamento.

Now these Elements of Music Performance consist of four parts (Music, Performers, Audience, and Time/Space) and so like any person attempting to appear sane I shall explain these in reverse order. As this performance took place in Conference Center during the evening the Time/Space of this event was a lot quieter as the audience didn’t have to deal with students needing to use the building or having to watch out for their next class.

Since the event was a passive performance the audience was much less active in the music’s creation than audiences in some other performances however I did notice some head bobbing during some of songs (Lamento included). However over for all the songs the audience maintained a passive roll during the song and gave appropriate applauds at the end (there might have been a few interactions with the audience members in the first row however due to my position and my lack of height compared to the people in front of me I was unable to get a good view of that).

Now while I would guess I would be wrong calling teachers who get paid to teach music folk performers since this concert was created for the community without any inclination of profit the performers would be folk instead professional (unless UTD is plotting to do something again with their subterranean forces of evil housed in the maintenance tunnels). Other than that one could tell these performers had experience with their parts and most of them handled themselves as if they had performed before.

Finally the music during Lamento had a jazzy feel and seemed to me to maintain a duple meter. It also consisted of multiple ornamentations such as syncopation and crescendos.