Reasons for Rhythm: Multimodal Perspectives on Musical Play

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.

Existing qualitative approaches within the field of music perception and embodied music cognition provide scientific models for the evaluation of physical gestures and their expressive impact in performance. This article examines the ways in which qualitative research methodologies and outcomes may be used as stimuli for new choreographic research, drawing upon the original performance ‘Woman=Music=Desire’. Beginning with an illustrated account of expressive features of piano performance by music researchers such as François Delalande and Mark Thompson, recent departures in choreographic and related artistic practice that indicate a growing interest in the expressive function of musical corporeity are discussed. Through exploring such work, the intersubjective and kinesthetic relationship occurring between musician and spectator is explored via an examination of gestural empathy. Thus, through re-appropriating instrumental gestures within practice-led research that interrogates the close relationship between corporeity and expressivity, the musician’s body emerges as a dancing body with the creative potential for a new and exciting departure in choreographic practice. A trailer to the performance ‘Woman=Music=Desire’ may be found at http://www.imogene-newland.co.uk/perf_women_md.php.

Questions of Quality, 2005

Human learning is inspired with the purposes and feelings of individuals who seek conscious, in-the-moment cooperation. It is social and co-created through mutual attunement of the movements of body and mind. In school, the interested learner needs to be encouraged by a skilled teacher sensitive to the rhythms of the child’s friendly, open vitality. They co-create shared projects in play, with movement and language, developing meaning and learning in sympathetic collaboration. From infancy, projects of imagination are expressed by the body and voice with the creative forms of 'communicative musicality' – gestural narratives created in rhythms of movement, felt, seen and heard. They anticipate being responded to with love and care. Learning within these embodied narratives incorporates affective, energetic, and intentional components to produce schemas of engagement that structure knowledge, and become meaningful habits held in memory. The rituals of culture and technical ski...

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.

This critical enquiry into co-construction of meaning in music play uses applied literacy practices to explore children's multimodal interactions. It shows evidence of cultural and social framing of their music making, their forms of organisation and ways of reinventing cultural knowledge during interaction. Using visual methodology and multimodal analysis, this study documents how children in diverse contexts intentionally transmit and redesign prior knowledge. Two case studies of diverse music activities, one in an early childhood rural setting and one in an inner-urban home setting, detail how two five-year-old children expanded communication with each other or with an adult using gestural, audio, spatial and visual modes as semiotic resources. These two multimodal experiences in music play are discussed to demonstrate how, in both situated events, young children demonstrated semiotic import of composing resources to transform prior knowledge in co-operative play. The activities illustrate how music play is a crucial element of everyday learning in early childhood settings. Teachers may promote learning by providing opportunities for children to co-construct and enact literacy in ways that transcend the curricular context. They expand literacy into larger worlds by recognising modes of gesture and spatial relations as students communicate life experiences through music play.

MUSICA movet : affectus, ludus, corpus, 2019

According to the theory of embodied cognition, gestures are at the very heart of human cognitive processes. The idea of embodied cognition is based on cognitive schemata and categories that emerge from the amassed experience of being and acting in the world. In human cognitive processes, many features of cognition are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism, so the physical domain serves as a source domain for understanding an idea or conceptual domain, using the tools of metaphor. As a basic element of the physical domain, the phenomenon of gesture has garnered particular attention and it has been recently studied in various fields such as phenomenology, EMT (Extended Mind Thesis), psychology, neuro-phenomenology, neo-cognitivism, robotics, critical theory, linguistics, neuroscience, constructivism, but also in music theory. In music, gestures encompass a large territory-from purely physical (bodily) on one side of the axis to mental (imagined) on the other. From a student's adopting of a teacher's posture, even facial expressions, to the syndrome of "watching" music, as in conductors' and players' gestures, both practical (sound producing) and expressive (auxiliary), to metaphorical concepts of up and down in intervals, scales, or as recognizable idioms of a composer's language (strategic) or style (stylistic), the phenomenon of gesture in music can be explored and perceived from many different viewpoints. In this paper, the issue of the inseparability of body and sound in musical practice will be explored, especially how these two basic types of gesture in music can intertwine and help deepen its performance. For this purpose, Alexandra Pierce's embodied analytical exercises will be used, those which enable the performer to explore gesturally the expressive meaning of a musical piece. It will be demonstrated that musical gesture supports performance-oriented analysis more than we think, know, or imagine.

Human Arenas, 2018

This article explores how a musical awareness of natural bodily form as an expression of receptive-responsive relationship between stillness and movement can contribute to co-creative dialogue and deep learning that reaches beyond the often superficial knowledge and praxis of intellectually constituted thought and language. It will draw especially on findings from research on the Kokas pedagogy an experiential extension of the Kodaly method of music education combining improvised movement and collective reflection. These findings highlight how the physical dimensions of this pedagogy cultivated new, embodied modes of creative ideation and connectivity, presenting unique challenges and opportunities in the observed educational contexts.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2008

This article explores young children's rhythmic, musical, aesthetic and playful creative communication in an early childhood education centre. Young children's communication is musically rhythmic and social. The data, presented as 'events', formed part of an ethnographic-inspired study conducted by the researcher as a participant observer. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framed the methodology, with mediated activity as the unit of analysis. Critical and related aesthetic theory inform the data analyses, providing open ways of appreciating diversity in young children's aesthetic experience. The collaborative nature of young children's rhythmic musicality is explored and the article suggests that rhythm pervades young children's creative and communicative playfulness. Introduction This article explores links across play and culture as represented and expressed in the temporal arts and children's aesthetically rhythmic playful communication. The 'events' presented in this article are examples of musically aesthetic narratives, full of moving bodies, rhythm, noise, and sometimes word sounds. The 'events' functioned as units of activity inviting further analysis using aspects of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) as the research methodology. The complexity and underlying themes in these 'events' have implications for how learning, teaching, the arts, aesthetics, and play are positioned in early childhood education. The arts are cultural, communicative and social languages that involve diverse ways of representing and experiencing images and relationships. They include a wide range of different ways of knowing, and of representing thoughts and feelings, culturally, critically and discursively (Grierson & Mansfield, 2003). In his classic overview of play, Homo ludens: a study of the play element in culture, Huizinga (1949) proposed that art is like play. Both connect people with culture and involve making meaning. Furthermore, socio-cultural theorists such as El'konin (1972, 2000) and Vygotsky (1978) have suggested that young children recreate their cultures in their play. All three termsculture, play and art-defy neat definitions. They all have aesthetic dimensions which Guss (2005, p. 234) describes from an early childhood perspective as 'the sensory, sensual, mind-body connection that goes into imagining, forming and enacting roles and dramatic situations'. Aesthetics can involve seeing and feeling the mundane in new ways. This article focuses on those temporal arts which are encapsulated in the ancient Greek word for music, musike, which includes poetry, dance, drama, and music. These temporal arts involve time and movement experienced and represented aesthetically in musical pulse-the rhythm which underpins musike (Alcock et al, 2008). Culture as used in this article refers to 'a shared way of life' (Eisner, 2002, p. 3), with a specific focus on the aesthetic dimensions in this sharing. As Lindqvist (1995, p. 53) points out, 'Play has an aesthetic form and it is largely the aesthetic emotions which influence its course.' 'Playfulness' is also an attitude-a disposition-that frees up thinking and feeling by fostering open-mindedness; such dispositions are integral to creativity and

2016

The association between human speech, language and communication and music is manifest in music education and psychology literature in a number of ways. For example, research has shown that a developing foetus can discriminate sounds in the womb from 22 weeks gestation and that early sound discrimination helps to promote later phonic and vocabulary development (Hepper, 1992). In addition, during early social interaction between caregivers and infants there are noticeable patterns of timing, pulse, voice timbre, and gesture that follow many of the rules of musical performance, including rhythm and timing conceptualised by Malloch and Trevarthen (2010) as ‘communicative musicality’. Powers and Trevarthen (2009) noted the significance of daily patterns and rhythms that occur in family social patterns and practices in children’s musicality and communication, stressing that ‘long before they can speak, infants begin adapting to the parental culture and the family responds, giving objects...

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Imitation, both gestural and vocal, has been acknowledged to be at the origin of human communication (Donald, 1991). Music is often considered to be the first means of communication of emotion via both vocal and gestural synchronization (Malloch, 1999; Malloch and Trevarthen, 2009). Instrumental music is part of the human heritage for more than 35,000 years before our era (Aimé et al., 2020). However, very little is known about the acquisition of gestures that produce sounds (i.e., musical gestures) and their role in the development of music and musicality. In the present paper, we propose that studying early synchronous imitation of musical gestures is essential both for investigating the development of the early action-perception system and for outlining early music interventions during infancy. We designed double musical objects which can be used in preschool music education for prompting synchronic imitation of musical gestures between adult and child, and between dyads of infants. We conclude by proposing a novel pedagogical perspective in music education for the early years which links the privileged orientation of infants and children towards sound discoveries with the development of perception-action coupling via imitation of musical gestures.

In this article I consider implications for the body inherent in two aspects of contemporary musical practice: normative and computer-assisted. I separate music into bodily action and resulting vibration, or the act of sounding and the material of sound. From this ground, I examine the field for an understanding of music that questions the exclusive role of listening in musical experience.

2012

This report explores the musical activities of young children in the home in England.