The purpose of this study was to investigate how professional pianists practice music for a concert, and whether their individual cognitive orientations in such practice processes can be identified accurately from the resulting performances. In Study I, four pianists, previously found to be skilled music memorizers, practiced and performed a short piece by André Jolivet over the course of two weeks, during which their practice strategies were studied using semi-structured interviews, and analyses of practice diaries, practice activities, and eye-movement data. The results indicate that the pianists used similar basic strategies but had different cognitive orientations, here called “practice perspectives,” consistent with each individual, in that they focused on different kinds of information while practicing. These practice perspectives may be related to skills and habits in using imagery and music analysis, as well as to professional and educational background. In Study II, 34 piano teachers listened to recordings of the concert performances and evaluated them against 12 statements representing the four practice perspectives identified in Study I. The results did not support the prediction that practice perspectives would be correctly detected by listeners. Nonetheless, practice perspectives can be used to highlight potentially vast differences between the ways in which individual professional classical musicians conceptualize music and make it meaningful to themselves and others. They could be used in the context of music education to increase musicians’ knowledge of different practice strategies and the ability to develop their own preferred working methods.

Studies of performance intonation and musicians’ own statements suggest that classical string instrumentalists often deviate in their intonation from equal temperament for expressive purposes. However, it is not clear to what extent corresponding perceptual preferences for intonational deviations might rely on listeners’ instrumental expertise or such contextual aspects as the metrical placement of tones. We investigated higher-education music students’ perceptual preferences for melodic intonation of local leading tones in unaccompanied classical violin performances. Recordings of 12 excerpts were manipulated in the size of ascending semitones (110, 90, or 70 cents) leading to tones that were more stable in the tonal context. Groups of violin students and music education students listened to pairs of excerpts differing only in the size of semitones and chose the intonation variant that they preferred. In the comparison between 90- and 110-cent semitones, violin students showed a stronger group consensus for preferring 90 cents. However, greater instrumental expertise did not result in a stronger overall preference for the sharpest 70-cent variant. Instead, the violin students showed an expertise-related connection between intonation preference and meter, which was not observed for the music education students. In particular, the violin students more often preferred 70-cent intonation (i.e., the sharpest leading tones) in metrically unaccented than in accented positions. In effect, this is to prefer an expressive intonation that colors the music while not challenging the harmonic structure at metrically salient tones. It is argued that understanding expressive intonation in musical performance requires consideration of the metrical context.