Dr. Ben Duiker (MMus'09, MA'11, PhD'20) is a Montreal-based music researcher, percussionist, educator, and choral singer with a PhD in Music Theory and an MMus in Percussion Performance from the Schulich School of Music (SSoM). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the (Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration) Project.
Ben's journey at the SSoM was transformative, broadening his understanding beyond theĚýperceived dichotomy of performance and research. His engagement with the interdisciplinary nature of the SSoM, particularly withĚý (Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology), led him to realize that performance itself can be a form of music research. Ben believes the SSoM's unique integration of research and performance is unparalleled in Canadian post-secondary music education.ĚýIn a conversation with the SSoM, he said, "Being a creative professional doesn’t necessarily preclude doing research," which encapsulates his cross-disciplinary research interests.ĚýHis dedication to teaching at Schulich, where he received the 2018-19 Teaching Award, highlights his commitment to teaching music, analysis, and performance (read further on his teaching ideology). Ben's diverse experiences, including joiningĚý have significantly contributed to his innovative approach to music education.Ěý
Leading to his upcoming lecture-recital Performance is/as Analysis as part of the Research Alive series, we asked Ben about his innovative research in this In Conversation.Ěý
Research Alive | Performance is/as AnalysisĚý
February 12, 2025 at 5:00pm
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Discover the Research Alive series
How has your background as a PhD student in Music Theory and an MMus student in Percussion Performance at the Schulich School of Music influenced your research with the ACTOR (Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration) project?Ěý
In a sense, it hasn’t “directly” influenced my present research with ACTOR. My MMus was focused largely on contemporary music performance, and my PhD focused entirely on hip-hop music. While I have returned to several hip-hop topics while working at ACTOR, I have in large part been continuing performance/analysis research I undertook while working at the University of Toronto in 2020–2022. But while the topics I’m presently investigating at ACTOR may not directly stem from my previous research undertaken at ş«ąúÂăÎč, my interest in relating my research to my teaching, and undertaking collaborative, cross-discipline research, has continued at ACTOR, and these were things that had been initially appealing to me as a ş«ąúÂăÎč student.Ěý
What might performance as analysis look like for two different musicians learning and performing the same piece of music?Ěý
To me, it’s what explains interpretive divergence between two performances of the same piece! If we accept the idea that a performance is an analytical output, then variance in performance simply encompasses manifold analytical interpretations of a musical work.Ěý
What implications does your research have for how musicians approach learning and performing contemporary works of music?Ěý
I hope it has many, and I try to stress these in my teaching!Ěý
- Some of the best work a musician can do in preparing to learn and perform a piece can happen away from their instrument, but with the score (and perhaps some recordings) in front of them.Ěý
- That theory class doesn’t have to be an experience far removed from own’s performance practice- And perhaps most importantly; that analysis can be an intensely personal and idiosyncratic pursuit, when it is coupled with learning to perform music. I find that in this context, analysis becomes its most personally satisfying to me. Ěý
You mention Daphne Leong’s writings on divergent types of knowledge produced through analysing and performing music. What do these different forms of knowledge look like in the context of music learning and performance?Ěý
In my experience, these different types of knowledge coalesce nicely in the context of learning and performing music. The German language has three verbs that variously mean “to know”: wissen, kennen, and können. Leong writes that wissen knowledge (knowing “that” something is the way it is) is normally the type of knowledge generated when theorists analyze music, while and können knowledge (knowing “how” to do something, or being able to do something) is primarily what musicians generate as knowledge when they learn and perform music. By contrast, I believe the musicians generate both these types of knowledge when learning and performing music, and the interesting thing here is what type of knowledge they communicate through their expressive musicality. Sometimes, when we watch a performance, we are drawn to the “how” aspect, like when we marvel at a musician’s ability or virtuosity. At other times we might be drawn to the “that” aspect, like when it becomes clear to us what sort of musical ideas the musician is communicating. For me, all of this arises because of the analysis musicians do—regardless of whether they see it as such—which is what I’ll argue in my talk.Ěý
You assert that the process of learning a new, challenging piece of music generates analytical knowledge about the work. What does this process look like for you? What sort of information or learning can be gained from learning a new work?Ěý
By and large this process is unconscious, it’s usually only after I’ve spent a lot of time with a work that I begin to think about it analytically, at least, in the sense of how analysis has helped me learn and (hopefully eventually) master it. But in other cases, I do a lot of analytical work so that I can understand how to mentally “chunk” a piece into sections that make sense to me when learning. Sometimes this can be due to my desire (or obligation) to memorize a work, which is a lot more difficult for me when it is scored for instruments with unfixed pitches (such as drums, woodblocks, etc.). It’s a lot easier to memorize music on pitched instruments such as the marimba or vibraphone, because those compositions often accord, to some extent, to a tonal logic that engages with schema we already well know from a lifetime of listening to pitched music. By contrast, a piece scored entirely for drums cannot express this logic in the same way, and I often resort to conscious formal analysis to aid my learning and memorization process. Not all of that understanding of form is expressed in my outcome (performance), but it is essential to my learning process, and thus is indispensable analytical knowledge in my ongoing relationship with the piece. When analysis in general focuses on polished, near-flawless performances, it risks overlooking the importance of such knowledge in musicians’ relationships with their repertoire.Ěý
Do you find that contemporary compositions call upon the musician to play a larger interpretive role than other/earlier genres? Does this theory apply to non-contemporary works?Ěý
No, not necessarily, I think there’s substantial room for interpretive latitude in all idioms, genres, and historical eras of notated music, but I do think performers of contemporary music can enjoy harnessing this latitude due to the sheer diversity of repertoire idioms, and the increasing demands composers create on them with regards to the limits of playability, the instrument, and so on. But it is perhaps also more incumbent on performers of contemporary music to diligently shape their interpretations to be as analytically communicative as possible, because much contemporary music is not as well understood by audiences as, say, common practice era music. This doesn’t mean audiences are ill-equipped to respond or appreciate contemporary music, but there are often elements of it that are quite new to them, and this can occasionally be overwhelming. Therefore, the performer has perhaps a heightened responsibility to be a conduit of analytical / interpretive understanding when they play contemporary repertoire. Others may disagree with me here, but this has been my personal experience from 20 years of performing the music of today.Ěý
Yes, I believe this theory can apply to all performed music, though I haven’t had any experience verifying this, and there might be some barriers to dismantle. Firstly, there are large swaths of European Art music that I have no personal experience performing, so my insight there would be rather limited. Secondly, so much of the analytical literature of the past 50-100 years that has focused on analysis and performance has done so in the context of common-practice-era art music and is often troublingly unidirectional—it effectively reads as theorists doing analysis and explaining to performers how they can communicate the findings of that analysis.
