Planning and performance

Performing music at a professional level is probably the most demanding of human accomplishments. Making music requires the integration of multimodal sensory and motor information and precise monitoring of the performance via auditory feedback. In the context of Western classical music, musicians have to reproduce highly controlled movements almost perfectly with a high reliability. These specialized sensorimotor skills require extensive training periods over many years, starting in early infancy and passing through stages of increasing physical and strategic complexities. The superior skills of musicians are mirrored in plastic adaptations of the brain on different timescales. In the fi rst section of this chapter we introduce essential general information for musical readers concerning the organization of cortical, subcortical and cerebellar motor systems in the brain. The electrophysiological correlates of motor planning and motor expectation will be briefly mentioned, as they provide a deeper understanding of the time course of anticipation and retrieval of motor programmes in music performance. In the second section, brain processes during acquisition of skilled movements in music-making will be addressed and the dynamics of neuronal networks will be demonstrated. Because these processes rely on plastic adaptations of brain networks and anatomical brain structures, the interplay of increasing precision of movements and plastic changes in the brain will be explained. In the third section, new fi ndings on practice strategies and performance quality will be reported. Brain imaging measures collected during mental practice or listening tasks suggest that both motor and auditory cortical areas are active during musical thought processes. Motor-based brain representations are found in behavioural studies on performers’ musical interpretations, transfer of learning from one musical task to another, mental practice effects, and anticipatory movements. Implications from these behavioural tasks suggest that an accurate auditory and motor representation underlies successful performance from memory. In the fourth section, the causes of degradation of skilled movements in professional musicians will be addressed. This disorder, termed focal dystonia, is due to maladaptive brain plasticity with fusion of brain representations of adjacent digits in somatosensory brain regions. Such a fusion and blurring of receptive fi elds of the digits results in a loss of control, because skilled motor actions are necessarily bound to intact somatosensory feedback input. Prolonged practice and pain syndromes due to overuse can precipitate dystonia, which is developed by about 1 per cent of professional musicians and usually ends their career. Finally, we will end the chapter with an outlook and add some comments concerning the signifi cance of results of brain research in order to improve practice habits and performance in musicians.