Session Information
29 SES 03, Parallel Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
From curricula analysis and instrumental classes observation it is striking to notice that there are no explicit strategies to improve the students’ capacity to communicate musically. Since to be able to communicate musically is (or should be) the main goal of instrumental classes the lack of specific strategies to approach this issue has definitely dramatic consequences. In fact, as researchers have been noticing (Cf.: Pierce 1994; Davidson & Correia 2002 and others) ‘classic music’ is taught in music schools and conservatories mainly imposing to the students two authorities: the instructions of the score and the instructions of the teacher, leaving very little space to expand students creativity. In our view, students should have opportunities to explore not only how to be expressive but also how to communicate with the other; and the key to explore these two capacities is through coordinating their own movement in connection with the movement of the other, as many important pedagogues and researchers have been suggesting from more than one century ago. One, and perhaps the most important reference, is Dalcroze (1920), whose eurythmic approach prescribes that rhythm and music should be grounded on expressive body movement. Other pedagogues like Truslit (1938, in Repp 1993), who wrote that music is an invisible dance, Orff (1950-54) and, more recently, researchers like Choksy (2001), Correia (2003), Gordon (2007), Mark & Gary (2007), Alexandra Pierce (1994, 2010) and many others argued the relevance of working on expression of physical movement and gesture as fundament for musical expression.
However, the acceptation and implementation of these pedagogical perspectives has been struggling against, often unsuccessfully, more formalist perspectives, which privilege analytical discourse and conceptualization, where teachers use mainly verbal language in the interaction and communication with their students (cf.: Martínez & Anta 2008). This has been a problem, causing irreparable damage, since strategies, which make us become too conscious of the task that we have to perform with the body, are doomed to failure (cf.: Herrigel 1953; Green & Gallwey 1986, Paxton 1993 and José Gil: “To keep the balance of a Yoga posture – âsana – on one leg, having the other lifted and bent at waist level should be accomplished without effort; but to become conscious of the movements that we do or of the balance that we attain may corrupt abruptly the posture and cause an irremediable fall. The interference of the self-consciousness ruined the vulnerable stability of the âsana.” Gil 2001:158; my translation).
Based on the recent discoveries of neuroscience - specially on mirror neurons by which the subjective experience of feeling an emotion can be shared by other individual, activating the same cerebral areas – and the new understanding they brought on empathy, the research reported in this paper had two premises: first, musical communication depends on empathy; and, second, empathy is a capacity that, in spite of depending on multiple factors (cf.: Vignemont 2006) can and should be developed in educative contexts, namely in improving the capacity for musical communication in music students.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Choksy, L. (2001). Teaching music in the twenty-first century. Prentice Hall: Michigan University Dalcroze, E. J. (1920). Le Rythme, la Musique et L’Éducation. Lausanne: Editions Foetisch. Gordon, E. E. (2007). Awakening newborns, children, and adults to the world of audiation: A sequential guide. Chicago: GIA. Green, B. & Gallwey, W. T. (1986). The Inner Game of Music. New York: Doubleday Editors. Herrigel, E. (1953). Zen in the Art of Archery. New York: Random House Levitin, D. J. & Tirovolas, A. K. (2009). Current Advances in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Music. The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 2009. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1156: 211–231 Mark, M. & Gary, C. (2007). A History of American Music Education. Rowman & Littlefield Education. Martínez, I. C.; Anta, J. F. (2008). Cognición inactiva y pedagogía musical: lectura corporal y análisis declarativo de la estructura musical en una clase de instrumento. Estudios de Psicología, Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje, 29 (1), pp. 71-80. Paxton, S. (1993). Drafting interior techniques. Contact Quaterly, XVIII (1), Winter/Spring, pp. 43-69. Paxton, S. (1996). …To touch. Contact Quaterly, 21 (2), Summer/Autumn, pp. 45-57. Pierce, A. (2010). Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Repp, B. H. (1993). Music as motion: A synopsis of Alexander Truslit (1938) Gestaltung und Bewegung in der Musik. Psychology of Music, 21, 48-72. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 55–76 Vignemont, F. and Singer, T. (2006), The empathic brain – When and Why. Trends in Cognitive Science, 10(10):435–41. Watt, R. J. and Ash, R. L. (1998). A psychological investigation of meaning in music. Musicae Scientiae, vol. II, Spring, 33-53. Winter, S. (2000). Bailá! Vení! Volá! El tango como comunicación y juego. Michael Rossner (Ed). Bailá! Vení! Volá! El fenómeno tanguero y la literature. Iberoamericana, Madrid, pp. 193-203.
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