Abstract
Making music is a physical act, leading, simultaneously, to an intangible output, since music is associated with sound and unfolds in time. When it comes to performance, or to the process of learning musical skills, the sensual spectrum necessarily expands from sound and hearing to embodiment, revealing more extensive possibilities of expression, all associated with music. Indeed, the process of learning and experiencing music, regardless of its social and cultural context, is essentially one that relates to physical practice. Music expresses itself socially and in the physical body at the same time, i.e. music lives from its social attributions, but certain instrumental techniques also depend directly on physical skills. Musical practices are always grounded in an embodied learning experience.
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Notes
- 1.
A selection of introductory papers on musical performance can be found in Rink, 2002.
- 2.
“The body obviously has vast potential as a source of information on music” (Grupe, 2010, p. 74)
- 3.
With the invention of the metronome in 1815 by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, which Beethoven promoted quite intensely, he was able to specify a precise definition of the tempo for his works and prescribe it for future interpreters.
- 4.
See my critical remarks on this behalf in Tiago de Oliveira Pinto, 2011.
- 5.
Only with the possibilities of sound software can the tonal musical events be visualized even more comprehensively.
- 6.
The music critic and musicologist Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) goes so far as to recognize the beautiful in music alone in its abstract configuration, independent of performance and emotion (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 1852).
- 7.
Harmonics is an element closer related to space, rhythm is closer to time. Movement occurs in space + time.
- 8.
- 9.
It is probably no coincidence that Rutz’ physiological studies on the human body as a cultural instrument would bring him later close to nationalistic and even antisemitic ideologies (in Menschheitstypen und Kunst, Jena 1921).
- 10.
- 11.
Mrs. Pires refers to a situation in which she had to play a different Mozart piano concerto than that she had prepared for the occasion, because of a previous lack of communication with conductor Ricardo Chailly. On stage she had to switch and play a concerto, she had played in the past, but not expecting to perform it in that concert night. She managed to do it completely by heart.
- 12.
A few of the public presentations of the Afghan ensemble of the Safar-Project (Weimar-Kabul) can be found in the YouTube Chanel of the University of Music Franz Liszt. See, for example, http://www.amrc-music.org/mediathek/videos-safar-2012/
- 13.
- 14.
The importance of performance for musical transmission and educational purposes has been discussed for a long time from the most different angles in music research. Regarding musical pedagogical research in contemporary traditional Southeast Asian context, see Ramón Pagayon Santos, 2012, p. 53.
- 15.
In this regard, cf. Dargie, 1996.
- 16.
- 17.
For instance, Israeli-French violinist Ivry Gitlis (1922–2020) owned Sancy, a Stradivarius violin made in 1713. It was named after its first-known owner from the Leloup family of Sancy in the Auvergne, France, in the first half of the nineteenth century.
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de Oliveira Pinto, T. (2022). Music as an Embodied Learning Experience. In: Kraus, A., Wulf, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_29
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