Over the last two decades, a bunch of researchers have looked at how professional musicians practise and prepare for performances.1–3 One of the findings of these studies is that musicians use performance cues in their practice sessions and performances. This article gives an overview of what performance cues are, how they can help musicians, and how you can explore your own performance cues.
What are performance cues?
Performance cues are “features of the music attended to during performance”.4(p342) They are aspects of the music that you think about while performing.
There are different types of performance cues, depending on what aspect of the music you focus on:
- Basic cues include notes, rhythms, patterns, technical challenges, and instrument-specific things like fingering, bowing, and/or breathing.
- Interpretative cues include dynamics, tempo, and phrasing.
- Expressive cues refer to the idea/emotion you want to convey (e.g. “mysterious”, “nostalgic”).
- Structural cues are related to the structure of the piece (e.g. new section, new phrase).
Performance cues can come from both your practice sessions and performances.5 You pay attention to various “aspects” of the music as you practise it, and you continue to pay attention to a small portion of these aspects even during performance. Performance cues can also arise from spontaneous thoughts that you have during performance. While performing, you may notice something you had never thought about, and pay attention to it in again future performances.5,6
How can they help?
Now that we know what performance cues are: how can they help musicians?
1. Memory
Performance cues serve as memory cues—they help you recall the music. A memory cue is something that helps you remember by triggering the memory that you are trying to recall.
When professional musicians are asked to remember a piece that they have not played for several months/years, they are more likely to remember the parts with a performance cue than those without.3 Studies have also found that expressive performance cues aid recall, while basic performance cues do not.2,4
Performance cues play an important role in memory because they are a form of declarative memory, which refers to memory that you can verbalise and explain. This contrasts with procedural memory, which involves memory for actions (like playing an instrument). Performing from memory requires both types of memory—we cannot rely solely on procedural memory (muscle memory) because it is unreliable.
2. Getting in the zone: Enhancing performances through focus
Research on focus of attention in performance has shown that performance is enhanced when you pay attention to an external focus (e.g. the sound that you are producing) rather than an internal focus (e.g. how your fingers are moving).7
Expressive performance cues are an example of external focus of attention. They allow you to concentrate on the idea or emotion that you want to express in the music, rather than thinking about your physical movements or technical difficulties, which can hinder your performance. They can also be a helpful way to minimise distracting thoughts such as worries about what the audience might think.
3. Achieving automaticity without staleness
There is a paradox in performance preparation: you want to practise pieces to the point that it is basically automatic before performing; yet at the same time, you don’t want your performance to sound automatic or stale.8 How can you prepare your pieces thoroughly but ensure that your performance sounds spontaneous and lively?
Expressive performance cues allow musicians to address this paradoxical issue. By practising these thoughts (expressive performance cues), you’re not only making sure that your actions are automatic but also that these thoughts are automatic. You allow your expressive intentions to be intertwined with your “automatic” actions.8
You also do not need to use the exact same performance cues for each performance. You can prepare several and use the ones you feel like on the day, to add a sense of spontaneity.8
Exploring your own performance cues
Much of the research on performance cues has come from studies of professional musicians.2,3,8 To study what these musicians were thinking as they learnt and performed pieces, they were asked to mark their thoughts on scores. The thing about this is that, by collecting data about their practice, you are somewhat “interfering” with their practice.
However, rather than hindering their practice, these professional musicians actually found the process useful. A professional cellist from one of these studies found that talking out loud her thought processes and marking the score helped her practise more effectively and memorise confidently. As a result, this cellist asked one of her students to employ a similar method, and found that it aided the students’ memorisation.9
Here is how you can try this method yourself:
- Get a clean copy of a score of your piece. (Why not be environmentally friendly and do it on a PDF scan of your score?)
- Choose four colours and assign them each to a type of performance cue (basic, interpretative, expressive, and structural).
- After a practice session, mark all the aspects that you paid attention to while practising with the appropriate colour, using arrows and short labels.
- Do this semi-regularly (perhaps every week or fortnight) to reflect on what you’re thinking about and how these thoughts evolve over time.
- Try doing the same thing after a performance to document the thoughts you had while performing.
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