Defying the Conventional: Musical Performance, Embodied Cognition, and the Reconfiguration of Institutional Discourse (original) (raw)
Related papers
Embodied Cognition, Perception, and Performance in Music [Geeves & Sutton]
Empirical Musicology Review 9 (3/4), 2014, 247-253, 2014
In this response to Leman and Maes’s paper in this issue, we raise a couple of concerns about the authors’ particular approach to embodied music cognition, drawing selectively on their other writings to enrich our interpretation of this target article, while pointing to a few of the many other legitimate research paths that can also fall under this label. We explore two underlying dichotomies implicit in the research programme adumbrated by Leman and Maes – cognition/ embodiment and perception/ performance – and discuss the implications of these for their theory of embodied music cognition. We then examine research that has taken the perspective of the music performer into account in its examination of music performance.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2014
The agenda in music research that is broadly recognized as embodied music cognition has arrived hand-in-hand with a social interpretation of music, focusing on the real-world basis of its performance, and fostering an empirical approach to musician movement regarding the communicative function and potential of those movements. However, embodied cognition emerged from traditional cognitivism, which produced a body of scientific explanation of music-theoretic concepts. The analytical object of this corpus is based on the particular imagined encounter of a listener responding to an idealized "work." Although this problem of essentialism has been identified within mainstream musicology, the lingering effects may spill over into interdisciplinary, empirical research. This paper defines the situation according to its legacy of individualism, and offers an alternative sketch of musical activity as performance event, a model that highlights the social interaction processes at the heart of musical behavior. I describe some recent empirical work based on interactionoriented approaches, arguing that this particular focus-on the social interaction process itself-creates a distinctive and promising agenda for further research into embodied music cognition.
In this response to Leman and Maes's paper in this issue, we raise a couple of concerns about the authors' particular approach to embodied music cognition, drawing selectively on their other writings to enrich our interpretation of this target article, while pointing to a few of the many other legitimate research paths that can also fall under this label. We explore two underlying dichotomies implicit in the research programme adumbrated by Leman and Maes -cognition/embodiment and perception/performance -and implications for their theory of embodied music cognition. We then examine research that has focussed on the perspective of the music performer.
The Musical Body: Instrumental Performance and Bodily Intentionality
Music is in and of the body, or as Maurice Merleau-Ponty might put it, it is an accomplishment of the body. Yet this is also a body that must be recognised as giving expression to a situated, experiencing subjectivity. Musical performance speaks of a certain qualitative style of bodily movement and vocal articulation, a style that is rhythmic, fluent and animated. In short, music performance is the articulate expression of a bodily subject who listens, dances and sings. Further, musical skills generally require complex and intricate bodily coordinations, along with a developed conceptual understanding that encompasses repertoire and theory. How is the bodily subject able to meet the strenuous demands of instrumental and vocal performance, to organise the already animate body into a coherent, musically expressive force? This article argues that the Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945) provides a conceptual framework which enables us to articulate the relationship between the subjective bodily form and the musician's expressive capacities. In contrast to a behaviourist approach that could only interpret instrumental skill in terms of a material causality, or an intellectually oriented cognitivism that would posit it as the outcome of symbolic rules and representations, Merleau-Ponty presents the idea that the body itself is an expressive form of consciousness. Moreover, he outlines the underlying intentional structures that serve as the precondition for the cogent engagement of a bodily subject within their world. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology offers a rich resource for elaborating upon the complex and expressive capacities of the musical body.
Music Cognition and the Bodily Approach: Musical Instruments as Tools for Musical Semantics
"This article is about music cognition and the role the body plays in its acquisition. It argues for a processual approach to dealing with music rather than conceiving of music as an artefact. Leaning heavily on the older philosophical writings of Dewey, it tries to provide an operational approach to the musical experience, with a special focus on the sensory-motor interactions of the music user with the sonic world. As such, it is possible to conceive of the music user as an adaptive device, with natural perceptual and effector tools that can be modified at will. It is argued, further, that musical instruments can be considered as artificial extensions of these natural tools, allowing us to conceive of them in epistemological terms as tools for music knowledge acquisition."
Music Theory Online, 2019
In this article, I theorize a new conception of musical meaning, based on J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances in his treatise How to Do Things with Words. Austin theorizes language meaning pragmatically: he highlights the manifold ways language performs actions and is used to “do things” in praxis. Austin thereby suggests a new theoretic center for language meaning, an implication largely developed by others after his death. This article theorizes an analogous position that locates musical meaning in the use of music “to do things,” which may include performing actions such as reference and disclosure, but also includes, in a theoretically rigorous fashion, a manifold of other semiotic actions performed by music to apply pressure to its contexts of audition. I argue that while many questions have been asked about meanings of particular examples of music, a more fundamental question has not been addressed adequately: what does meaning mean? Studies of musical meaning, I argue, have systematically undertheorized the ways in which music, as interpretable utterance, can create, transform, maintain, and destroy aspects of the world in which it participates. They have largely presumed that the basic units of sense when it comes to questions of musical meaning consist of various messages, indexes, and references encoded into musical sound and signifiers. Instead, I argue that a considerably more robust analytic takes the basic units of sense to be the various acts that music (in being something interpretable) performs or enacts within its social/situational contexts of occurrence. Ultimately, this article exposes and challenges a deep-seated Western bias towards equating meaning with forms of reference, representation, and disclosure. Through the “performative” theory of musical utterance as efficacious action, it proposes a unified theory of musical meaning that eliminates the gap between musical reference, on the one hand, and musical effects, on the other. It offers a way to understand musical meaning in ways that are deeply contextual (both socially and structurally): imbricated with the human practices that not only produce music but are produced by it in the face of its communicative capacities. I build theoretically with the help of various examples drawn largely from tonal repertoires, and I follow with lengthier analytical vignettes focused on experimental twentieth and twenty-first century works.
A growing number of psychological and philosophical musicologists are becoming dissatisfied with the limitations of standard approaches to music cognition, which are often based on disembodied and de-contextualized appraisal processes. The activities and phenomena associated with the word ‘music’ span an incredibly wide range of human experience and as a result, many researchers are turning to embodied approaches in order to develop more nuanced ways of accounting for musical meaning and communication as it emerges at the intersection of biology, culture and lived experience. The practical implications of ‘embodied cognition’ are beginning to be developed across a range of areas, including music education. However, while the notion of ‘embodied ways of knowing’ is increasingly embraced by music and arts educators, the philosophical and scientific grounding for 'embodied music cognition' often receives less attention than it deserves. With this in mind, this paper examines embodied music cognition in the context of musical communication and meaning making; and it introduces related literature in human development, philosophy, and neuroscience. To conclude, the relevance of embodied music cognition is considered in the context of music education and practice.
Musical Bodies: Corporeality, Emergent Subjectivity, and Improvisational Spaces
M/C Journal, 2016
Interactive improvisational musical spaces (which is to say, nearly all musical spaces) involve affective relations among bodies: between the bodies of human performers, between performers and active listeners, between the sonic "bodies" that comprise the multiple overlapping events that constitute a musical performance's unfolding. Music scholarship tends to focus on either music's sonic materialities (the sensible; what can be heard) or the cultural resonances that locate in and through music (the political or hermeneutic; how meaning is inscribed in and for a listening subject).