The concert hall was silent. When the words came, they came almost reluctantly. “Here I am, having to give a lecture,” said Prof Piet Koornhof, a violinist. “I would much rather perform music. So, I shall do both.”

With that, Prof Koornhof from the North-West University’s (NWU’s) School of Music set the tone for an inaugural lecture that merged scholarship with stagecraft.

Held at the Potchefstroom Campus on 25 June 2025, his lecture traced the anatomy of expressive musical performance, not just as a technical exercise, but as a deeply human act.

The evening unfolded in two movements: first, a rigorous yet heartfelt exploration of how music lives beyond the black dots on a page. Then, a live performance of César Franck’s Violin sonata in A major, with colleague Prof Tinus Botha at the piano.

“Music is not on paper,” Prof Koornhof said, quoting Russian maestro Mikhail Pletnev. “It’s born in your head. If not, you might as well play it on a computer … and it would be complete rubbish.”

Drawing on philosophers, conductors and cognitive science, Prof Koornhof made a compelling argument that expressive performance is not merely about playing with feeling, nor is it just mechanical precision. “It is neither a cold compliance with musical notation and rules, nor an unbridled outpouring of raw emotion,” he explained. “It is a balance between the cognitive and the visceral, the head and the heart.”

Inside the performer’s mind

He took the audience inside the performer’s mind, outlining how musicians make decisions, when to stretch time, where to place emphasis and how to let silence speak. Referencing metaphors common in musical thought, music as movement, language, architecture, even sex, he described how performers breathe life into sound by manipulating its two most fundamental elements: time and tone.

“Expressive performance happens,” Prof Koornhof said, “when a performer follows the score, while conveying emotional involvement by applying the full panoply of subtle expressive elements of sound and time.”

In a striking metaphor, he likened the performer to three people: one who imagines the ideal sound (person A), one who plays (person B), and one who listens critically and gives feedback (person C). “When it works,” he smiled, “it’s a state of ecstasy.”

But it seldom works easily. The path to mastery, he said, requires between 15 000 and 25 000 hours of practice, working out at “more than 3,5 hours every day for 15 years”.

Prof Koornhof’s final message was personal. “What is offered to an audience, when all is said and done, is a personal experience of the music,” he said. “In effect, the performer is saying: this is what it means to me, and this is how much I value it.”

Prof Piet Koornhof