Towards transformative musical body-mind

According to Bredo, perhaps the best alternative attempt to the mechanical, idealist culturalism and materialist brain-image theories was created by James, Dewey and G.

H. Mead who tried to combine naturalism and culturalism, to bridge the gap between a physiologically reductive and an idealistic or culturally holistic view of mental life⁶⁹⁷. Elliott’s assumption that a naturalist approach needs to defend eliminative materialism is therefore incorrect⁶⁹⁸. Elliott responds to Reimer’s critique concerning the missing somatic aspect by arguing that expressions such as body-mind imply a dualist ontology and that in naturalism there is no mental terminology since the mind is not distinct from the physical material of the brain⁶⁹⁹. From this background it is not quite understandable why Elliott then concludes that human consciousness arises from physical processes but is “ontologically distinct”⁷⁰⁰.

From the pragmatist naturalist point of view it is completely possible to talk about the body and mind separately whenever the problem in question requires that⁷⁰¹. The continuity of the duality does not open up to an ontological dualism. Dewey, as a pragmatist, thought that the mind is an important factor in the adaptation of human groups and individuals⁷⁰². However, his attempt was to combine both the biological and sociocultural in psychology. The view shifts from a brain-mind in an environment to a person-environment relationship where the adaptation involves

696 See also, Velmans 2000, 94, 278.

697 Bredo 1998, 448.

698 See Elliott 1995, 51. The pragmatist view on mind does not necessary share the materialism view that mind equals brain although it abandons all non-natural claims (see, e.g., Alexander 1998).

699 See Elliott 1997.

700 Ibid., 30.

701 Addis (1999) accepts the same view in Of Mind and Music (ibid., 46).

702 Bredo 1998, 448.

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dynamic mutual modifi cation. Interaction as a starting point means that the mind should not be thought of as a thing, but rather as a verb. Action-engagement with sound-objects is minding musically or acting mindfully with sounds.

What is the difference then between Dennett’s functionalism that examines human brain functions in the environment and the pragmatist approach that is searched for here? Määttänen argues, that in the contextual and pragmatist approaches the problem is not as to how the mind (performing somehow intelligent operations) is related to the brain. There is no doubt that the brain is material and something happens in it. It is also clear that mind and/or consciousness must be intimately associated with the activity of the brain, as Velmans wrote. In a holistic approach the whole question of the mind is set up in another way. The main problem is “how a biological organism can behave intelligently in its environment”⁷⁰³. According to Dewey, a human being is an experiencing and transformable ‘organism’ that functions as a whole. In this whole the body-mind, and not the thinking brain, is the acting and experiencing unit.

Therefore, according to Dewey, the brain is “primarily an organ of a certain kind of behavior, not of knowing the world”⁷⁰⁴. The whole organism thinks with the brain, but

“experience is not identical with brain action”⁷⁰⁵.

This holistic view of the human being does not mean that the human organism is only a sum of its parts. A machine might be that since it cannot transform its parts.

A human being is capable of growth and development that occurs also in relation to something else other than the organism itself. In this sense an organism through its environment-engagements becomes a part of the environment. Mind as interaction, doings and undergoings, changes reciprocally the character or structure of the person as well as the environment.⁷⁰⁶ In this process, the aims of his/her action change as the situation changes so that a person’s consciousness cannot be examined as being separate from the situation. Musical consciousness is then not a property of an individual or his/her brain but the property of the interaction between the whole body and its environment.⁷⁰⁷ The claim that mind or consciousness is in the brain instead

703 Määttänen 2000c, 41, my italics. Also M. Johnson (1987) writes: “It is a mistake to think of an organism and its environment as two entirely independent and unrelated entities; the organism does not exist as an organism apart from its environment” (ibid., 207).

704 Dewey MW 10:26, my italics.

705 Ibid.

706 Bredo 1994b, 24.

707 Määttänen 2000c. Peirce meant the same when he wrote: “just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us” (Peirce 1931-1958, 5: 289 n. 1).

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of being in the world in this sense locates the mind in the private and subjective⁷⁰⁸. In Dewey’s pragmatism, mind and consciousness is the human organism’s interaction within and throughout a social and material environment, which cannot be simply equated to brain functions.

The problem that Dennett’s theory has is in how to combine the fi rst-person vertical perspective of ‘qualia’ and the third-person perspective of shared meanings and rules.

If we abandon the behaviouristic notion that we can stipulate musical beliefs only from musical behaviour, then we have to turn to the human itself as an interpreter of himself or herself. We cannot know about someone’s thoughts even by observing his or her brain states. This person has to interpret the brain states somehow. When the two perspectives are combined in Dewey’s philosophy, musical learning and adaptation involve dynamic mutual modifi cation, active interaction, rather than a matching of pre-existing musical information. In education, the starting point is to acknowledge the human being in his/her situational context and not just teach the rules although these are not separate questions. Elliott is right in the sense that the teacher does not teach the “being” in its fi rst-person perspective but the “doing”, ways of interacting, and a search for meaning. However, the perspective of being is always present as a general condition so that we cannot separate them in interaction.

It is this very aspect which becomes important when the subject content meets the students’ experience and when the student is supposed to search for meaning. Even if we think that perceptual involvement with sounds is channelled in a certain way by the acoustic sounds themselves, the very act of playing and singing, which Elliott is interested in, involves bodily feelings and control in relation to sounds that do not simply follow the rules and purposes of the sounds. For instance, the singer’s jargon that is developed in order to achieve what Howard calls “event-replicas”⁷⁰⁹ for certain musical purposes is not simply forcing the body to follow certain sounding ideals but it also helps to search out ways that feel natural to the singer him/herself.

Berleant describes how the bodily experience of a pianist can involve “[p]ounding heart, trembling fi ngers, profuse perspiration, shaking knees” as well as “a wondrous lightening of the limbs”⁷¹⁰. The body of the pianist

708 See also, Velmans 2000, 104-105. Velmans writes that, for reductionists, the presuppositions that contents of consciousness do not seem to be located anywhere, that they do not seem to have spatial extension or that they seem to be insubstantial seem to confi rm the fact that conscious experiences are nothing more than states or functions of the brain. (Ibid., 105).

709 See Howard 1982, 87- 93.

710 Berleant 1999, 77.

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feels charged with an intense, limitless, yet focused energy; the fi ngers becomes marvellously supple. The entire body is transmuted into a powerful yet sensitive instrument, actually part of an instrument, for it unites with the complex mechanism of the piano—that construction of wood, metal, felt, and leather—to become a single performing instrument.⁷¹¹

An individual’s interaction in and through the environment thus has two angles.

There is the fi rst-person perspective, for instance, the singer’s or listener’s qualitative subjective bodily felt and sensed experience, and the “larger” world in the sense that the singer who has his/her own ‘quale’, qualitative experience, is supposed to perform in an already meaningful world that sets, in this sense, certain expectations. However, neither the brain nor its processes represent the complicated web of relations of musical meanings in the world since the individual fi rst-person vertical horizon is always perspectival. What happens in the brain has to do with the particular musical interaction, with the particular ‘quale’. As Velmans writes: “The mind/brain models energies and events into experienced phenomena that have many different ‘qualia’, and, together, these experienced phenomena form the contents of consciousness”⁷¹². However, what is at the centre of consciousness is up to the individual in the cultural context and it is always partial in relation to all possible perspectives. Sounds as such do not cause and affect an experience, but are part of a more complicated web of relations.

Therefore, when searching for musical consciousness one has to look at the environment where the body-mind is, not just at the brain and the musical-cultural information. Experiences of the body-mind are not composed of the material causes and correlates of the brain. In this sense musical experience is not in the brain even as functions. Musical experiences are composed of what happens between the sensing body-mind and the environment. Quoting Velmans: “If one combines microcosmic neural states together, one obtains more complex, macrocosmic neural states. And if one adds all the neurons in the brain together one obtains a whole brain, not a phenomenological world.”⁷¹³ The existence of brain as a material system depends upon its supporting surround and the contents of consciousness. As explained, from this starting point one cannot say that brain functions are the only thing there are.

Embodiment in the musical context thus means individual involvement and transaction with the world so that an individual is not taking music as something to which one

711 Ibid.

712 Velmans 2000,135.

713 Ibid., 227.

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has to fi t one’s mind, but rather he or she is an actor and mediator who is always working to knit together one’s behaviour and environment including the sounds⁷¹⁴. From this viewpoint we neither just use our body as a causal terminal point in order to understand the world outside of it nor as a tool in musical communication as if our self would live somewhere inside it. The physical phenomena, such as tactile or kinaesthetic sensations, for example, that are involved in the lived-in-experience can be examined as physical (as observed), but in the context of musical experience they function differently from merely physical experiences. It is the whole body-mind that is involved in doings and undergoings.

Moreover, since in a Deweyan pragmatism the starting point is that music is experienced bodily and learning means transformation of experience, music in education can also be seen as reorienting the students’ bodily experience. Such a transformational perspective requires consciousness of the bodily limitations.

Acknowledging the cultural habituation of our bodily experience allows us to analyse how our bodily felt experience is developed in a social and cultural context and further how transformation can take place in relation to this general starting-point⁷¹⁵. In this sense our bodily states exemplify the social context and musical states without being reduced to an instrumental expression of them⁷¹⁶. In musical performance the body is then the matrix that confronts and generates musical sounds as a biological organism in the given historical, social and cultural context, as has been pointed out by Blacking⁷¹⁷. However, this involvement requires bodily investment from the subject on the level of action and desire in the social context of meaning-production so that the bodily felt experience is faced with resistances, tensions, and struggles as well as enjoyment and a fl ow of satisfaction.

Bodily aspects in the theory of music education bring questions of learning and knowledge closer to the learner. They are not added to experience but are at the nexus of these questions. For instance, Matthews has argued that learning that engages the body independent of the “developmental stage” in the Piagetian map is more effective than abstract thinking⁷¹⁸. He claims that bodily disengaged students are also likely to

714 See Bredo 1998, 456.

715 The ambiguity of transformation also bothered Blacking (1977) who wrote: “[t]he fi rst step to the ownership of our senses in a truly free society is an understanding of the limitations and possibilities of individual and social bodies” (ibid., 25).

716 See also, Sharma 1996, 258.

717 See Chapter 2.3.3.

718 Matthews 1994.

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be mentally disengaged⁷¹⁹. Even if learning is not through direct bodily involvement, it should, according to Matthews, be through imaginative bodily engagement⁷²⁰. Memories of past embodied experiences help even when the body is still. According to Matthews,

[i]n order for this to work, the student must fi rst have had embodied learning experiences relevant to the current domain that can serve as a store of memories from which the new educational challenge can be imaginatively embodied⁷²¹.

In music education embodied learning and bodily involvement does not need to mean only performing since there can be “disembodied” teaching in performance.

It is, however, rather usual in instrumental teaching in particular to focus on bodily experiences while singing or playing. The private experience is in various discursive ways communicated in teaching situations. Teachers often use bodily images across various senses in order to keep the contact effectively in the experienced level of what is done. Successful bodily images are not even always auditory images and, as Matthews argues, are related to the student’s past embodied experiences. For instance, a teacher can say to the young student “touch the piano like it would be a cat, not too carefully, not too roughly” in the search for a certain sound image and a certain bodily felt engagement with the instrument. In cross-cultural music education teachers who acknowledge the social-cultural conditions of the bodily experience often develop images and techniques that may be different from those used by students within their own cultural context.

Subsequently, in Deweyan terms better bodily awareness while performing can be a result of a kind of inquiry. The performer’s bodily attempts to improve bodily functions are not always even directly related to the musical expression but to her physical capabilities for continuing practising and performing in the future. It is noteworthy that, for example, Jaques-Dalcroze’s music pedagogy did not simply combine music and movement, as it is often understood. One of Jaques-Dalcroze’s main ideas was to pay attention to the bodily aspects of musical agency. He thought, for instance, that by becoming consciously aware of one’s otherwise subconscious movements, it is possible to prevent oneself from doing unnecessary habitual

719 Ibid., 166.

720 Ibid., 130.

721 Ibid., 131.

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movements and thus to improve the functioning of the body-mind as a whole. For him, music education was education in and through musical sounds.⁷²²

To summarize, bodily felt musical involvement in its various forms can concretely be understood in terms of collective and individual empowerment for self-production and transformation rather than as an abstract array of evolutionary cognitive, physical, and social traits. It is not merely reduced to musical information that the brain as a bodily organ processes. We are inherently active bodily beings who undergo various kinds of transformations as a consequence of activities and transformation in and through music can be examined from a variety of perspectives of which direct bodily felt conscious experience is one.

In document Bridging experience, action, and culture in music education (sivua 159-165)