Embodying Music

Abstract

Part I: Introduction[1] This essay describes a hypothesis of how music becomes internalized into the bodies and minds of listeners. The hypothesis underlies a larger theory of musical meaning, concerning affect, metaphoric reasoning, gender, and other areas of inquiry related to bodily experience, but the implications for these larger areas of meaning must wait until the details of the hypothesis have been made plain. Accordingly, this essay focuses on these details and is only suggestive of some of the implications.[2] The attention to embodiment situates this essay amid other writings, within and beyond music, that are concerned with the role of the body in the construction of meaning. Within music this includes work by Suzanne Cusick on gender (Cusick 1994), Naomi Cumming on subjectivity (Cumming 1997, 2000), and several scholars who have applied ideas from cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson (1987) on metaphor (Saslaw 1996, 1997-98; Zbikowski 1997, 1997-98, 1998; Brower 1997-98; Larson 1997-98). These and other scholars are exploring a lacuna left by the largely disembodied objectivity of our discipline (at least as practiced in the USA), which helps perpetuate, as Cusick puts it, the mind-body problem.(1) The hypothesis addresses the matter of embodiment by showing how musical imagery-recalling, planning, or otherwise thinking about music-is partly motor imagery. Motor imagery is imagery related to the exertions and movements of our skeletal-motor system, and in the case of music this involves the various exertions enacted in musical performance. The hypothesis details how this might play out and suggests how it might underlie conceptualization and meaning.(2)[3] The initial premise of the hypothesis is that part of how we comprehend music is by way of a kind of physical empathy that involves imagining making the sounds we are listening to. This is a special case of the general human proclivity to understand one another via imitation, which we can refer to as cognition or comprehension, where is used in the manner specified below; hence, the mimetic hypothesis.[4] The role of imitation in human cognition has received a good deal of interest recently, and, as demonstrated by the references below, this has now begun to make its way into the field of music theory. For this vein of inquiry to produce good results, however, we need to be precise about how imitation actually plays out in music perception and cognition, and this is the purpose of the hypothesis.Relevance of the Mimetic Hypothesis[5] The hypothesis is relevant to any area of musical inquiry related to embodiment. This includes basic music perception and cognition as well as higher-level areas of meaning mentioned above. It is also relevant to pedagogy because it concerns the nature of the mental representation of pitches and rhythms, which bears not only on auditory imagery and aural skills instruction but also on the relationship between sound and musical meaning in the music theory classroom. I will consider briefly some of the implications of this claim, but the primary purpose at this stage is to establish and clarify the essential role of the skeletal-motor system and its neurological representation in everyday music perception and conceptualization.Some Preliminaries[6] I want to note that my use of in this context is not the same as classical mimesis, which, roughly speaking, is more about art imitating life. The hypothesis is much more concerned with the perceptual and cognitive processes whereby music gets into the flesh, blood, and minds of listeners.(3)[7] Understanding through overt imitation is plainly evident in children, but one of the principles here is that this continues throughout our lives and becomes more subtle and covert as we mature. The covert form is imagery, and since it involves imagined actions it is motor imagery, and since these actions are imitative it is motor imagery (MMI). …