Search Results

This chapter examines the communicative role of invented notation in children's experiences. It provides an overview of research in children's thinking as users of invented notation; examines the communicative role of invented notation as initiation into the use of conventional symbolic systems and/or externalization of musical thinking; and explores the potential relationship of invented notation to other forms of sign-making activity (drawing, writing, using mathematical symbols). To provide a context for the discussions some of the roles of notation in musical communication in the broader context of western music are briefly examined.

In his 1995 book Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education, David Elliott argues that music is a form of intelligent action and knowledge. More specifically, he considers music (and the other arts) as modes of thinking and knowing. This chapter examines Elliott's praxial philosophy on composition and improvisation in relation to two central themes: composing and improvising as intentional activities capable of engaging students in reflective musical thinking; and the processes and products of composing and improvising as inseparable from the contexts in which they are situated. The more promising conception of music in Elliott's praxial philosophy of music education is grounded in an awareness of the importance of critical reflection in (not merely about) human action. Elliott conceives music making (which, he insists, always involves listening) as unfolding “thoughtfully and knowingly” through the intentional actions of “selecting, deploying, directing, adjusting, and judging”. Elliott also contends that composing and improvising are “situated”, meaning that they should be taught in context.

Educational behaviorists once claimed that since it is impossible to know what happens in a student's mind, teachers should only be concerned with what students do “overtly” — that is, how they behave — their responses to educational acts. This chapter argues that the development of musicianship happens in action, through action, and within action. However, the human body plays a crucial but (unfortunately) a taken-for-granted and opaque role in the development of agency. In this chapter, the musical mind and body is considered within a naturalist framework of holistic duality, but without dualism. In this duality, a human organism is a functional whole; the mind and body are inseparable, though there are different aspects to this singleness. The feeling, sensing, and experiencing body is engaged with musical sounds and their consequences in many ways, whether we are aware of it or not. The chapter contends that the body is not only an instrument through which musical thinking takes place, but also can be taken as a conscious and explicit object of transformation.

At the time of Trinidad’s independence from England, the most popular and hotly contested carnival performance venue for steelbands was the “Bomb,” in which steelbands played arrangements of foreign repertoires performed in calypso style. Especially popular were carnival arrangements of European classical music. The projection of such colonial icons by the national instrument at the national festival brought together highly charged and seemingly incongruous symbols, and contributed to heated debates about the national culture that persist in important ways up to the present. This chapter outlines contrasting interpretations of the Bomb to analyze the aesthetics of the steelband’s diverse constituents and to sort out some differences between musical thinking and political thinking.

This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about the composer and the concept of pure music, serialism, the function of today's music, technique and musical thinking, contemporary music and institutions, and the music of today and traditions.

This chapter presents a faithful account of the musical thought that was present in the 1960s. It reflect the diverse ways in which some of the composers were searching for a new theoretical approach, motivated by a profound reaction against the attempts at explanation and the inflexible definitions that had been allowed to achieve the sanctity of divine law through the sheer inertia of almost everyone concerned with music. One can consider concept and percept as distinct from each other. The chapter examines the confusion between theorizing and creating instilled fear in “intuitive” composers, because they could think only in terms of one type of behavior arrogating the place of the other. It also put the practice of music criticism or of any writing on music in constant danger of being made too much of—that is, of being, used as an excuse to get rid of frustrated creative drives.

This chapter examines thinking that can’t be classified as verbal or visual and might better be described as bodily–kinesthetic, algorithmic, musical, or emotional. It depicts the mental worlds of flamenco dancer and choreographer Linda Richardson, multiagent software designer Nicholas Gessler, physicist David Finkelstein, and musician, photographer, and former Sister of St. Francis, Barbara Zettel. These creative thinkers’ insights engage philosophical and scientific explanations for thinking that do not involve the conscious use of visual mental images or verbal language. Richardson’s and Gessler’s insights resonate with philosopher Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge and neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti’s studies of mirror neurons. Finkelstein’s intuitions about physics address cognitive scientist Nancy Nersessian’s ethnographic studies of how scientists form mental models. The introspections of all four thinkers support Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein’s qualitative finding that creative thinking functions similarly in science and the arts, with ideas emerging as feelings difficult to capture through visual images or words.

The first translation chapter examines the Johann Gottfried Herder’s first major attempt to gather and publish the songs to which he referred as folk songs. Publication of the four parts of Alte Volkslieder (old folk songs) was planned for 1774, but remained incomplete, albeit an experiment that would provide the template for later anthologies. Two of the introductory essays from the four parts appear in translation in the present chapter. The “first book” critically raises questions about the ways in which song provides telling evidence for cultural and national history, especially that of Germany. The “fourth book” has the subtitle, “Approaching the Songs of Foreign Peoples,” and therefore contains the first essay by Herder to understand the meaning of music that forms from the encounter between self and other.