The impact of a personal motivation upon forming a saxophone player’s professional image
The aim of the article is to describe the specifics of functioning of a saxophone player’s motivational consciousness. To attain the aim, the author points at characteristic psychological aspects of a musician’s emotionalmotivational sphere within the conditions of their professional activities. The research is novel as in Ukrainian Music Studies, the specifics of functioning of a saxophone player’s motivational consciousness has been first considered through the study of incentives as a component of psychology of a creative person. Core material. The author suggests using a notion “interpretive model” of a musical work as a bearer of some individually combined expressive means from the arsenal of a certain musician which are meant to realize the author’s conception. The interpretive approach helps to offer a more comprehensive description of the differences in psychology of thinking among musicians with certain specialisations. This notion also enables researchers to make a clearer distinction between the means of performers’ style when they play a musical work (“live text”). A person, who sets a goal to become a musician, has a rather different motivational reflection from that of a skilled player. Thus, a beginner’s a career choice can be determined by social and general-artistic ideas, such as a personal desire to selfexpress, a need in an aesthetical experience, a desire to improve their self-esteem by means of music. As for skilled musicians, when forming incentives, they set more profound and knowledge-based tasks. The author outlines several acquired factors related to the evolution of a professional saxophone player’s creative activity. These factors are: 1) a number of acquired life impressions, personal experience, well-developed imagination, ability to respond to changes of circumstances (psychology of a player’s personality); 2) a profound analysis of a composer’s style and music scores: sound nuances, ability to communicate the atmosphere of an epoch, awareness of subtle aspects of voice conduct, phrasing, and accentuation (musical thinking and intellectual thesaurus). Using expressive means of their musical instruments, saxophone solo performers, apart from overcoming a psychological barrier, have to mobilize their physiological resources to the maximum. It will enable them to communicate the author’s conception in the best possible way (specifics of the beat and intonation, a rhythmical structure, culmination moments and their connection into the whole dramaturgy). Artistic motivation is a combination of specific incentives which on the conscious level create a stable need for performance activities. As for the practical plane, a motivational focus as a mechanism of a professional control is distributed between several levels of competence, namely semantic, cognitive, and emotional ones. Thanks to that, a specific nature of a creative personality is getting formed depending on a person’s needs in interest and inclination characteristics. Thus, leading researchers believe these very characteristics make a system of the person’s motivational scales. In particularly: – artistic focus forms a stable strengthening of needs and interests kept on the subconscious level as a long-term motivational scales, which, further on, trigger a development of a creative self-consciousness; – the phenomenon of a creative focus is not steady, and can frequently change and expand during a musician’s life; – motivational pattern can be one- or multi-level, that is, it can consist of one or many targets; – a person can have several different focuses in their motivational plane. These focuses can be one-vector, or they can coincide with the terminal goal, or on the contrary. To create an interpretive model of a musical work, a performer should consider all the nuances of a composer’s technique in order to form a mental image. A great meaning has an ability to feel the audience. It has to do with the motivationalempathetic factor. Sympathizing activities of both a saxophone player and the audience make an essential element in a fruitful artistic development of a creative person. Musical empathy as a unique component of a saxophone player’s performing culture includes a great number of variants for development of the interpretive model of a musical work, which are caused by deep psychological differences of artists-interpreters. Conclusions. Competence serves as a mechanism which helps to form motivational centres and strategy for an artistic behaviour. Besides, it points at possible obstacles in the communication-play process. It also stimulates blocking of misunderstanding points between a performer and the audience. Moreover, competence unites in its activity both non-verbal and verbal means of influence, correcting on the subconscious level a performer’s psycho-emotional state and activating the psycho-emotional communication. Thus, a level of the motivationalemotional competence in a modern performer’s activity presents one of the basic elements of a creative activity. Further research perspectives lie in the consideration of other spheres of a saxophone player’s psychology (apart from the motivational one). It will facilitate more comprehensive studies of both conscious and subconscious scales of a performing activity. Among such scales there are performing reflection, suggestion, synaesthetic characteristics of a musical image, and ability to improvise with somebody