Concertmasters’ leading-tone intonation: Do they perform as they assess?

Melodic intonation is generally considered a central expressive means in musical performance. In Western classical music, relationships between intonation in perception and performance have shown to be less straightforward than one might expect. In this study, we investigated leading-tone intonation for solo violin, as perceived and performed by six accomplished violinists. We selected excerpts from classical violin repertoire, each of which included ascending semitone intervals leading up to tonally stable tones. Each violinist performed the excerpts and participated in a listening study and a semi-structured interview. Prior recordings of the excerpts, manipulated in terms of the pitch of the leading tones, were used in the listening study to obtain information about each participant’s accepted perceptual range of leading-tone intonation. The violinists’ preferred semitone sizes were between 80 and 90 cents, on average, both in their perceptual preferences and their performance practice. This group average appeared to approximate the “standard” of leading-tone intonation that the participants consistently mentioned in their verbal protocols. However, the perceptual preferences and the performance intonation also varied both within and between individuals. Given the overall sharp standard of leading-tone intonation, even an equal-tempered leading tone might sometimes represent an expressive gesture in the violinists’ artistic practice.