At first glance, this book edited by Martin Clayton, Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante appears as a collection of chapters dedicated to specific studies of popular, ethno, and world music (Indian classical music, Afro-Brazilian congado, alternative rock bands, jazz, Manitoban aboriginal music), linked circumstantially with meaning, experience, and performance, fashionable terms widely used in current academic writing. But upon finishing the reading of the book, the impression is quite different. The particular cases are only pretexts to talk about general problems, concepts, and phenomena concerning all kinds of music, and could easily be extrapolated to them. Discourse, metaphor, embodiment, entrainment, gesture, performance, experience, ideology, and meaning—all issues of the cognitive sciences agenda—are the main topics the book deals with. It is a product of the Experience and Meaning in Music Performance Project (EMMP), born as an Open University 2005 project on North Indian music, led by Clayton and Leante and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It expanded later to other kinds of music experience. The project was developed around a core question: how does the immediate experience of musical sound relate to processes of meaning construction and discursive mediation?
The book’s contributors are of course editors Martin Clayton (Durham University), Byron Dueck (Open University), and Laura Leante (Durham University), with the collaboration of Mark Doffman (University of Oxford), Glaura Lucas (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Andy McGuiness (performer), and Nikki Moran (University of Edinburgh). An interesting feature of the publication is that the audiovisual content referred to in the chapters can be consulted online at the website that Oxford University Press has specially created for this purpose, where these materials can be found, including audio and video files, and color versions of some illustrations.
The book begins with an introduction written by Clayton, Dueck, and Leante, where the EMMP is described. The research combines traditional empirical methods, fieldwork, ethnographic work, psychology, participant observation, ethology, discourse analysis, and communication studies, offering diverse perspectives on music-making. The main terms used in the chapters are defined as follows: “performance” is understood primarily as collective action, the moment of music instantiation, which includes all participants, not only musicians, but also audiences; “experience” emphasizes the corporeal nature of musical performance, socially and culturally mediated; “meaning” deals with embodied ideas, tied to physical experiences, and the communication of these ideas; and “embodiment” is taken to be the physical expression of ideology. Many of the chapters deal with “entrainment,” a theory that seeks to explain socio-musical synchronism and how it arises from bodily interactions, playing a crucial role in the experience of collectivity. The project aims at developing special methodologies for the study of musical performance, especially the nonverbal aspects of musical behavior, employing them for digital audio and video recording as a main tool for research.
In the second chapter, “Entrainment, Ethnography and Musical Interaction,” Clayton studies the relationship among these things with the dynamical system theory perspective as a baseline. He conceives entrainment as a model to describe the process and classes of rhythmic interaction: intra-individual, inter-individual, and inter-group. The feeling of synchronization reinforces group identity and arises from patterns of social behavior. Collective expression needs a minimum of order and coordination, such as occurs in songs and dances, where regular movements of bodies, gestures, and sounds take place.
Moran’s chapter is titled “Social Co-regulation and Communication in North Indian Duo Performances.” Observation of the interpersonal behavior of performing musicians (gestures and glances) offers a clue to understanding the pragmatics of musical communication and, furthermore, many other aspects of everyday social interaction. He applies nonverbal communication research techniques to describe the complexity of performers’ movements during the act of playing music. Through video coding and statistical techniques, musicians’ behavior patterns can be firmly associated with aspects of the performance structure, the musical time structure, and socio-musical variables such as roles and context.
“Temporality, Awareness and the Feeling of Entrainment in Jazz Performance” is the title of the fourth chapter of this book. Doffman studies here the experience of “being in the groove.” “Groove” is a relational phenomenon that occurs among musicians, particularly important in certain music cultures, such as Black Atlantic music, that point out the importance of relatively small asynchronies between players. Doffman tries to clarify the ineffable and elusive nature of groove through the study of a jazz trio’s performance, combining quantitative data with the testimony of performers and with entrainment theory. To explain groove technically is a challenge, as its cognitive features are hard to grasp. But understanding it as a very remarkable aspect of entrainment provides us the tools to elucidate the phenomenon.
Lucas devotes her chapter, “Performing the Rosary: Meanings of Time in Afro-Brazilian Congado Music,” to Brazilian music. Her aim is to study music as ritual time, the organization of space-time in this environment, and the role brotherhoods of congadeiros play in this context. This research treats the experience of immersion of human bodies in long time-spans of music and dance performance. Again, the entrainment is taken here as a meaningful social process, where each brotherhood struggles to keep its own tempo against another brotherhood’s tempo, demonstrating in this way their spiritual strength and their internal unity as a fellowship. The natural tendency towards synchronization between groups is hard to resist, and maintaining inter-individual entrainment evinces power and self-control.
The next essay, by McGuiness, “Self-consciousness in Music Performance,” explores the subjectivity of music performers in the course of what the author calls “felicitous and creative performance.” McGuiness studies the rehearsal strategy of rock bands called “overlearning”: the endless repetition of music so that the performance becomes automatic through muscular memory, a process that obliterates cognitive involvement and privileges motor activity, abdicating all mental control and self-abandoning to automatic motor skills, which allows the player a particular kind of creativity. Players become aware not only of what they do but of what others think about what they do. Public scrutiny and evaluation are strongly linked with attitudes such as pride or shame, an essential component of self-consciousness in music performance. Obviously, there are implications of these findings for musical education.
In “Rhythm and Role Recruitment in Manitoban Aboriginal Music,” Dueck studies indigenous approaches to meter that are quite different from the prevailing ones in Western music traditions. Some musical genres are performed in a regular-beat bar, but in the case of Manitoban aboriginal players, the same music, while maintaining a regular and strict pulse, does not tend to be structured into larger and regularized groups. The metrically irregular style that is considered old-fashioned or incompetent by some musical cultures is a much appreciated feature of high aesthetic value in Manitoban musical tradition. This suggests that meter is a social construct, a sort of mental framework. He concludes that the Western corrective pressure toward metrical singing and playing is inherent to the tradition of written music.
Leante’s “Imagery, Movement and Listeners’ Construction of Meaning in North Indian Classical Music” investigates how ragas are determined not only by their intrinsic musical features but essentially by extramusical traits such as moods, mental associations and images, prescribed times of performance, character, and perlocutionary effects. Ragas are associated with spiritual and religious feelings, which arise not only from the effect of music but also from the effect of context as a whole. The verbal reports listeners give about the music experience are rooted in the embodiment of sound and metaphor through the so-called “kinetic anaphones” (sound analogues of movement) and gestures that are studied in detail in this research.
The last chapter, by Clayton and Leante, “Embodiment in Music Performance,” deepens the notion of embodiment, a concept that is gaining increasing attention in music cognition and music psychology research. The authors urge the precise use of the term “embodiment” in the context of the musicological discipline, because reactionary orientations, like mind-body dualism and the “mind as computer” metaphor, have prevailed in most studies, ignoring the advances by well-established disciplines like cognitive science, philosophy, and linguistics. The authors rescue the importance of metaphor-oriented studies, offering new and unsuspected possibilities in recent research in musicology.
Undoubtedly, this is a book highly recommendable for those wanting to understand the new trends in musical cognition scholarship.
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[Review length: 1365 words • Review posted on December 8, 2015]