Abstract

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’?

This series of events aims to reflect on how distributed models of cognition apply to, and change our perception of, musical engagement. Growing interest in music-making practices outside the normative, and ideally sterilised, settings of the concert hall and the studio has already highlighted the extent to which ‘musicking’ creates living, distributed assemblages out of performers, listeners, instruments, and architectural spaces. In each session of the series, the academics, performers, and practitioners interviewed will share their reflections on the way the language and insights of distributed cognition engage and enrich models of aural encounter in fields such as music performance, environmental studies, history, religious studies, and literature.