Friday, January 1, 2010

Musical pedagogy

Musical pedagogy, particularly within classical traditions, is embodiment. There is a bodily understanding of a musical tradition as a structure of feeling that is transmitted from one body to another. This is of course one reason why classical traditions are threatened with extinction, the inability to allow those embodied pedagogical processes to be properly mediated by technology. Perhaps the “rock-band” type video games are also examples of embodied pedagogical processes, but where the transmitting body is a cybernetic robotic one. One could imagine the apologetics of these games (if one still needed apologetics) that in them machines work to impart a feeling for music. But it is the opposite that is in fact the case, the music works to impart a feeling for the machine.

The embodiment of musicians is also a good subject to examine the relationship between consciousness and bodily action. The bodily movements of classical musicians are among the most subtle, most complex known to man, and by definition they are not under conscious control. Another term of resonance, perhaps, between the modulation of emotional affect and what it is that your body is doing. What does it mean as a performer to say that you must “feel the music,” it means you must experience in an emotional way what your body is doing on its own. It is this moment of mediation that technology looks to enter into.

No comments: