Music as a manifestation of life: exploring enactivism and the 'eastern perspective' for music education.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2015 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00345 via PubMed
Summary
An enactive, embodied approach to music and music education decenters language, symbol, and representation as the primary carriers of meaning, instead emphasizing relational and bio-cultural perspectives. This life-based view offers an alternative to standard Western academic music education by fostering ecological understandings of the transformative, extended, and interpenetrative nature of the embodied musical mind. Drawing on Buddhist psychology, the article develops possibilities for a contemplative music pedagogy that reconnects students and teachers to lived experience. Ultimately, it proposes music education as ontological education, helping individuals rediscover their autopoietic, world-making nature and form richer, more compassionate relationships.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | An enactive-contemplative perspective on music education can help students and teachers rediscover their primordial nature as autopoietic and world-making creatures, forming more compassionate relationships. |
Abstract
The enactive approach to cognition is developed in the context of music and music education. I discuss how this embodied point of view affords a relational and bio-cultural perspective on music that decentres the Western focus on language, symbol and representation as the fundamental arbiters of meaning. I then explore how this 'life-based' approach to cognition and meaning-making offers a welcome alternative to standard Western academic approaches to music education. More specifically, I consider how the enactive perspective may aid in developing deeper ecological understandings of the transformative, extended and interpenetrative nature of the embodied musical mind; and thus help (re)connect students and teachers to the lived experience of their own learning and teaching. Following this, I examine related concepts associated with Buddhist psychology in order to develop possibilities for a contemplative music pedagogy. To conclude, I consider how an enactive-contemplative perspective may help students and teachers awaken to the possibilities of music education as 'ontological education.' That is, through a deeper understanding of 'music as a manifestation of life' rediscover their primordial nature as autopoietic and world-making creatures and thus engage more deeply with musicality as a means of forming richer and more compassionate relationships with their peers, their communities and the 'natural' and cultural worlds they inhabit.