Ethnography of Performance During a musical performance many elements to be looked are not easily recognized by the average critic. A musical performance has multiple interactions taking place between the music, text, performers, audience, and space that all can contribute to a great performance. Overwhelming majority of the audience does not realize so much can be looked at during a single performance. At a performance by the University of Maryland Marching Band I was able to analyze the Musical Sound, Contexts of the Performance, and Interpretation of the Performance. When analyzing musical sound there are many factors to pay attention to during the performance. Important things to listen for are the pitch, scale, timbre, tone quality, rhythm, melody, and form. While listening to the Marching Band the pitch of the performance varied. At some moments during the performance the pitch would sound low and that is when the bass instruments are heard. The pitch sounded high when the other instruments joined. Using a standard pitch enables a large number of instruments to be played together with out sounding out of tune. In many musical traditions people are not concerned with a standard pitch, and they tune instruments to sound well with other instruments for a specific occasion or even to suit the convenient level for a singer (Kaemmer:58). A pitch also contains intervals, which refers to the difference between tones of two different pitches. An example would be the octave, it represents two tones the bands performance had an octave. The marching band used a chromatic scale because of all the instruments and in a chromatic scale there are twelve notes within an octave. This allows the other members of the band to join in the middle of a piece and still sound the same and in tune. When dealing with a large number of instruments very general and basic scales and pitches should be used. During the performance there were many overtones and o...
