Narrative in Music and Interaction Editorial (original) (raw)

This special issue is based on the presentations and rich discussions held during two symposia at the joint conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) and of the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), which took place in Bologna, Italy, in August 2006. The themes of the two symposia were centred on the question of the origins of human musicality, especially through the notions of gesture, intersubjective communication and narrative. The following texts develop these notions through careful argumentation and empirical demonstration. In some sense this special issue can also be seen as a follow-up to the one entitled Rhythm, musical narrative, and origins of human communication, published in the same journal in 1999. The idea of an innate "communicative musicality" was first developed by Stephen Malloch (1999) and Colwyn Trevarthen (1999), (see Malloch & Trevarthen, in press). Musicality is rooted in a human capacity to partake in forms of communication with close others giving rise to both local intersubjective experiences and broader socio-cultural affiliations. Musicality is thus primarily an interactive and communicative process; one that puts into play not only the human voice and its musical inflections but also the whole body, its gestures and orientations. The temporal and dynamic profiles of the embodied gestures involved in interaction shape both individual expression and forms of interpersonal sharing, whether in the context of musical performance, conversation, child play or, most obviously perhaps, affectionate communication between adults and preverbal infants. Based on their observations of mothers and infants in diverse contexts, Malloch, Trevarthen, and also Gratier (1999, 2003) and Devouche and Gratier (2001) show that this temporal profile presents three fairly steady qualities. All interactive musical communication has a regular implicit rhythm that has been called the pulse of the interaction. It presents also a sequential organisation whose units are most often shapes or melodic contours. Finally it transmits something like a content that can be described as narrative. Malloch (1999) defines narrative as fundamentally temporal and intersubjective: "Narratives are the very essence of human companionship and communication. Narratives allow two persons to share a sense of passing time, and to create and share the emotional envelopes that evolve through this shared time" (1999, p. 45). Daniel Stern (1985) called this sequential profile that unfolds in time with a beginning, a development and an end a proto-narrative envelope. It is what gives unity to shared experience within the "present moment" (Stern, 2004), which is cut out against the continuity of time and interpersonal exchange. The idea of a human musicality then subsumes the concepts of gesture, 3