For an analysis of performance in music videos, a “Visual Perfomance Map” and a “Visual Performance Edition”

One of the main trends in contemporary musicology, the analysis of recorded music is still mainly focused on audio recordings. Despite the potential of video recordings, analytical methodologies to appropriately explain the text-music-image relationship in song performance are still in its embryonic stage. In the present study, I propose a qualitative analysis of music performance elements in music videos departing from an adaptation of the methodology developed by Egil Haga (2008), which focuses in the correspondence between movement and music. It includes the analysis of five concepts/parameters: (1) Activation Contour, (2) Kinematics, (3) Dynamics, (4) Chunking and (5) Synch Points. This adaptation, previously employed by Borém and Taglianetti (Per Musi, n.29, 2014, p.53-69) is illustrated with the performances by Elis Regina (1973, 1973/2006) of the songs “Ladeira da Preguiça” [“Hill of Laziness”] by Gilberto Gil (1992) and “Atrás da porta” [“Behind the door”] by Chico Buarque and Edú Lobo (1999). The score (of concert music) and the lead sheet (of popular music) bring in its notational codes enormous restrictions as far as the representation in paper of the creative process of composers goes. But the gap between this graphic representation and the sounding results of its realization is still larger. In fact, conventional scores and lead sheets do not translate the performer’s various choices and changes in both aural and visual levels. Thus, after centuries of analytical exercises to help the comprehension of music encoded in paper, we have the possibility to add, to consolidated analytical methodologies and procedures, the view point of the realized music documented in audio and video recordings. Although Cook (2013, Beyond the score: music as performance, p.251-252) recognizes the “ethnographic turn” allowed by the analysis of recorded music, he agrees that there still is a great demand for ethnographic studies in popular music departing from traditional sound parameters, since most of them are usually focused more in contextual dimensions than in the act of performance itself (Cook, Beyond the score: music as performance, 2013, p.255). Moreover, most of the research done in recorded music employs only audio recordings as primary sources. In spite of the fact that video recording contain both sound and image data — many times in a tight relationship that is lost in the audio-only recording —, the initiatives departing from video recording are still rare (Chan, Coord., CHARM: AHRC Research Centre for the history and analysis of recorded music, 2014; Mawson, CMPCP: AHRC Research Centre for music performance as creative practice, 2014; Cook, Beyond the score: music as performance, 2013; Cook e Chan, Annals of CHARM RMA Annual Conference: Musicology and Recordings, 2007).¹ Therefore, the construction of two tools subjacent to the process of transcription and analysis of music video is proposed here, namely the “Performance Visual Map” (PVM) and the “Performance Audiovisual Score” (PAS), which yields four strata with notation of sound and visual elements from the original composition and respective performance in video. In order to illustrate these two analytical tools of qualitative nature, a historical 1973 video of Brazilian Elis Regina singing “Atrás da porta” (“Behind the door”, 1973) by Brazilian composers Chico Buarque and Edú Lobo, a performance in which stage elements (facial expressions, body gestures and lights) establish a “… genuine counterpoint with music” (Cook, Analyzing musical multimedia, 1998, p.263). Finally, further studies could be pursued in the direction of applying this methodology also to instrumental music.

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