Music as a manifestation of life: exploring enactivism and the 'eastern perspective' for music education.

The enactive approach to cognition offers a relational, bio-cultural perspective on music that moves beyond Western reliance on language, symbol, and representation as primary sources of meaning. This life-based view provides an alternative to standard academic music education by emphasizing the embodied, transformative, and interpenetrative nature of the musical mind, helping reconnect students and teachers to lived experience. Concepts from Buddhist psychology further develop possibilities for a contemplative music pedagogy. An enactive-contemplative perspective may help students and teachers rediscover music as a manifestation of life, fostering richer, more compassionate relationships with peers, communities, and the natural and cultural worlds.

Study at a glance

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.