RMA Practice Research Prize 2023

Mine Doğantan-Dack has been awarded the RMA Practice Research Prize 2023 for her article titled “Senses and Sensibility: The Performer’s Intentions Between the Page and the Stage” published in Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale (27/1: 23-68). The RMA Practice Research Prize, which will be awarded annually, was established in 2023 to celebrate research where artistic practice is the significant method of enquiry. Mine notes that in her award-wining article, she puts “the processes involved in forming a performance interpretation and the lived experience of performing selected pieces from the western art music repertoire under a phenomenological microscope, in order to reveal the deeply situated embodied-affective, sensuous and multimodal knowledge, insights, judgments and skills that a performer brings to the creative space between ‘the page’ and ‘the stage’. Artistic pianistic practice forms the methodological heart of the research presented, and the article attests to the intimate co- shaping between embodied-affective and reflective-conceptual practices, as well as the continual emergence and complexity of the epistemology of practice (artistic) research. The meaning-making processes I explore from my situated perspective as a concert pianist are contextualised within, and set against, music analytical discourses that subscribe to a textualist agenda, which seeks the expressive meaning of pieces of music in the disembodied, ahistorical, essentialising relationships that are constructed from notated symbols on the page. The article includes three case studies that show a particular performer’s intentions between the page and the stage—case studies on my performance interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Corrente from his keyboard Partita in E minor (BWV 830), the 18th variation from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Op. 43, and Scarlatti’s keyboard sonata in F minor K. 481. My recorded performances of these pieces accompany the article as audio examples. Broadly, the article is a contribution to knowledge in the areas of music analysis and music performance studies. It should also be read as a contribution to the growing scrutiny of and resistance to the knowledge hierarchies, frames, and narratives that continue to centralize, naturalize, and prioritize certain subject positions and identities at the expense of others in music scholarship.”