Seminar series | Distributed cognition and music: listening with and beyond the body

Discussion session 1:
‘Distributed cognition and music: setting the terms’

What does it mean to think about cognition and consciousness as “distributed”? What do distributed models of thinking and selfhood say about musical experience, and how does musical engagement––scholarly encounters with music as well as the experience of musicking itself––in turn challenge, deform, and enrich these models? What does this dialogue reveal about the potentials and promises (and about the limits and impossibilities) of interdisciplinary work?

We will begin thinking through these central questions in this discussion session, which follows the release of the first podcast episode of the series. One of the main aims of the series is to be, itself, an exercise in collective and distributed thinking; in this first session we will work together to define the terms of our conversation and to delineate our main aims and interests, to be revisited with the help of our guest speakers in the weeks to come.

Discussion session 2:
‘Music cognition and the language(s) of interdisciplinarity’

This week’s discussion session is focussed on questions around language, communication, meaning: what and how does music communicate, and what relationship does this communication bear to verbal communication? Can music be ‘about’ something? How can different methodologies, each with their own vocabulary, come together to examine musical experience and its representational ‘excesses’?

Discussion session 3:
‘Where do we go when we play? Attention, embodiment, and ensemble performance’

Using a psychological study on body language in ensemble performance and poet Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay on playing the piano (mostly) alone as our starting points, we will discuss the relationship between musical experience and attention, effort, presence, co-presence, and absence. How much does intention matter when we play, and how is intentionality formed and shared when we play with others? How does our perception of the performance as public (“for others”) or private (“for ourselves”) change our presence and participation? In blurring the borders of the individual mind, does musical experience create assemblage or a kind of absence, or both?

Discussion session 4:
‘Embodied song: then and now’

Katherine Larson (Professor of English, University of Toronto) joins this week’s discussion session to speak more about literary representation and historical performance, how her musical practice and scholarly work shape each other, and why early modern studies has proven to be a rich ground for more flexible approaches to questions of subjecthood and relationality.

Discussion session 5:
‘Early modern ears’

Discussion session 6:
‘The classroom, the chamber, the concert hall: situated musicking’

In this session, we will discuss the notions of rigour, improvement, and success in musical performance. We will think about the ways they are measured and determined in ensemble performance and in “private” (rehearsal) and “public” (concert) settings, as well as in the classroom. How do performance spaces shape ensemble dynamics? Who (or what) has power in collective musicking, and how is this power negotiated, distributed, and contested? Do different models of ensemble performance (as a network, as distributed agency, as collective cognition) also offer different ethics of encounter and relation?