Abstract
In this paper, we advance the thesis that music-making can be advantageously understood as an exploratory phenomenon. While music-making is certainly about aesthetic expression, from a phenomenological, cognitive, and even evolutionary perspective, it more importantly concerns structured explorations of the world around us, our minds, and our bodies. Our thesis is based on an enactive and phenomenological analysis of three cases: the first concerns the study of infants involved in early musical activities, and the two latter are phenomenologically inspired interviews with an expert jazz improviser, and members of a prominent string quartet. Across these examples, we find that music-making involves a dual intentionality - one oriented towards the exploration of the sonic, material, and social environment, and one oriented toward the self, including the exploration of bodily awareness and reflective mental states. In enactivist terms, exploration is a fundamental way of making sense of oneself as coupled with the world. Understanding music-making as a pre-eminent case of exploration helps us explicate and appreciate the developmental, sensorimotor, and more advanced cognitive resources that exist in music-making activities.
Highlights
In this paper, we argue that music-making is an intrinsically explorative activity
As with Torben’s practice, we find a dual intentionality directed at these mental explorations as well as at the musical performances
We want to meet the objection that our exploratory account is trivial and not specific to music-making at all
Summary
We argue that music-making (i.e., performing, practicing, improvising, etc.) is an intrinsically explorative activity. Conceiving of music-making as an explorative activity is borne out of an enactivist framework in which action and perception compose a dynamic unity, and in which the mind is understood as a relational property of an organism coupled with its world (Varela et al 1991). On this paradigm, cognition means making sense, not primarily as a detached, reflective capacity, but as a bodily grasping of the social and physical environment in which the organism is embedded (Di Paolo et al 2017; Fuchs 2017; Thompson 2007). Music-making becomes a means to explore one’s own bodily and mental capacities, as well as one’s environmental couplings in more or less systematic ways
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