From Necker Cubes to Polyrhythms: Fostering a Phenomenological Attitude in Music Education

Dylan Van Der Schyff

doi:10.29173/pandpr27998

Abstract

Phenomenology is explored as a way of helping students and educators open up to music as a creative and transformative experience. I begin by introducing a simple exercise in experimental phenomenology involving multi-stable visual phenomena that can be explored without the use of complex terminology. Here, I discuss how the “phenomenological attitude” may foster a deeper appreciation of the structure of consciousness, as well as the central role the body plays in how we experience and form understandings of the worlds we inhabit. I then explore how the phenomenological attitude may serve as a starting point for students and teachers as they begin to reflect on their involvement with music as co-investigators. Here I draw on my teaching practice as a percussion and drum kit instructor, with a special focus on multi-stable musical phenomena (e.g., African polyrhythm). To conclude, I briefly consider how the phenomenological approach might be developed beyond the practice room to examine music’s relationship to the experience of culture, imagination and “self.”

Highlights

The ability to perceive oneself during the process of participation is an essential quality of the aesthetic experience; the observer finds himself in a strange, halfway position: he is involved, and he watches himself being involved
Readers familiar with the phenomenological literature will note that I have basically adopted a simplified Husserlian/Merelau-Pontian approach––these core ideas offer a good place to begin phenomenology, even if eventually other approaches become more relevant to the inquiry at hand
A number of excellent introductory texts have appeared in recent years that may help readers gain a wider perspective of the relevance of phenomenology across a range of domains (e.g. Gallagher, 2012; van Manen, 2014)

Summary

Introduction

The ability to perceive oneself during the process of participation is an essential quality of the aesthetic experience; the observer finds himself in a strange, halfway position: he is involved, and he watches himself being involved. With this in mind, encouraging a deeper phenomenological awareness of the embodied and transformational processes and perceptions that allow us to make sense of the world may help raise our consciousness to see that experience need not be understood in terms of the mental recovery of a pre-given world out there––fixed ways of doing, thinking and perceiving––but rather as arising from our histories of interaction with the (physical, social, and cultural) environment.

Results

Conclusion