Musical Improvisation As The Performance
Musical Improvisation As The Performance
Musical Improvisation As The Performance
THE PERFORMANCE OF
EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE:
EMBODIED NARRATIVITY IN
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
VINCENT MEELBERG
ABSTRACT
One of the possible aims of artistic research in musical improvisation is to make
explicit how improvisation can teach us about coping with uncertainty, with the
unknown, with acceptance and rejection, and how to collaborate with others in a
nonverbal way. Even though all musical improvisation can be regarded as a
performance that at the same time is a form of research, of exploration, the
investigative aspect of this activity might not always be clear to the audience, or even
to the performers themselves. This is where artistic research comes in: Artistic
research foregrounds the fact that musical improvisation can be research,
experimenting, exploration; research that is not only restricted to music, but one
that extends to important aspects of human life. In this presentation I will
demonstrate how artistic research might be able to do this, by focusing on the
concept of embodied narrative. By taking a recorded performance of my free
improvisation trio as a case study, I will argue that musical improvisation can teach
us about the function of embodiment in storytelling. Referring to Daniel Punday’s
notion of corporeal narrativity I will show that engaging in a musical improvisation
is not only a matter of listening to each other, but also of feeling the movements of
all participants, participating in an activity that ultimately can lead to a narrative
that is created by, and becomes expressive because of, embodiment.
In this essay I will discuss how artistic research might be able to do this, by focusing
on the concept of embodied narrative. By taking a recorded performance of my free
improvisation trio as a case study, I will argue that musical improvisation can teach
us about the function of embodiment in storytelling. Drawing on theories on
narrativity and embodied perception, I will suggest that engaging in a musical
improvisation is not only a matter of listening to each other, but also of feeling the
movements of all participants, participating in an activity that ultimately can lead
to a narrative that is created by, and becomes expressive because of, embodiment.
In order to find an answer to this question, we need to first make clear what
narrative is, or can be. According to David Herman, narratives are an effective means
by which knowledge, experience, beliefs, desires, and fantasies can be represented.
They are one of the most important means by which human beings communicate.
Narrative is an instrument for distributing and elaborating the perspectives that can
be adopted on a given set of events. Moreover, stories aid in enriching the whole
compound of past, present, and possible future events that constitutes the
foundation of human knowledge. Narrative is the manner in which the individual
subject has access to other people’s experiences; it is a way to distribute experience
and knowledge.(Herman 2003.)
Language is a very effective means to tell stories, but is it not the only way to convey
a narrative. Cinema, for instance, has shown that series of images also have the
capacity to tell a story, with or without the aid of language. The question is whether
stories can also be told through music, without the aid of words, or through wordless
performance alone. Whether or not this is possible depends at least in part on the
way narrative is defined. I propose the following working definition of narrative,
which is derived from Mieke Bal’s narratology: A narrative is the representation of a
temporal development. (Bal 1997.) It is the representation of a sequence of events in
time, a sequence that can be regarded as displaying some kind of development.
Temporal developments can indeed be noticed in music; in many musical pieces the
listener can perceive expectations and resolutions. Music elicits expectations by
giving the impression that musical events lead to or cause other events. This in turn
results in the suggestion of forward motion and of a temporal development. The
question is whether these tensions and resolutions are actually caused by the music
itself, or represented by it. If it is the former, then music can be considered a
process, but not a narrative. In order to be a narrative, developments created by
tension and resolution should be represented by music, rather than actually being
located in the musical sounds themselves.
Indeed, an actual interplay of tension and resolution does not take place in music. A
dominant seventh chord, say, does not necessarily have to resolve to the tonic. There
is no physical necessity for this chord to resolve. Rather, listeners expect it to resolve
accordingly, as a result of the musical conventions and precedents they are familiar
with. In other words, listeners interpret a dominant seventh chord as wanting to
resolve to the tonic. This chord is a musical representation of tension, rather than
actually being unstable or tense; indeed, the physical makeup of the chord is as
stable as any other sound. Thus tension and resolution, which can lead to temporal
development, are not physically present in the music, but instead are represented by
it.(2)
Consequently, sounds, particularly those that play with expectation and resolution,
can create autonomous reactions of the listeners’ bodies. They can induce frisson, a
bodily reaction that happens at an unconscious level. Sounds can move the listeners’
bodies – generate chills up and down the listeners’ spines – that motivate listeners to
reflect on the sensations they are experiencing.(3) This reflection can lead to labeling
certain sounds as being the cause of other sounds, and in this way listeners can distil
some kind of temporal development from the sounds they are listening to. The
awareness of this development thus starts with the embodied perception of musical
surprise, and, through narrativization, ultimately might lead to the construction of a
musical temporal development, and thus to a musical narrative.
The performance of musical improvisation makes this process explicit, at least for
the performers themselves. The performers become conscious, through performance,
of the fact that the narrativization of bodily sensations is crucial for the creation of a
musical improvisation that shows some degree of coherence, to arrive at an
improvisation in which collective musical ideas are developed. This awareness,
however, is highly subjective and remains unnoticeable to the audience during the
performance. Artistic research on musical improvisation may turn this subjective
experience into an intersubjective account, so that others can learn from the
experience of improvising music as well.
BIO
Vincent Meelberg is senior lecturer and researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen,
the Netherlands, Department of Cultural Studies, and at the Academy for Creative
and Performing Arts in Leiden and The Hague. He is founding editor of the online
Journal of Sonic Studies and editorOinOchief of the Dutch Journal of Music Theory.
His current research focuses on the relation between musical listening, playing,
embodiment, and affect. Beside his academic activities he is active as a double
bassist in several jazz groups, as well as a composer.
NOTES
1) See for instance Nachmanovitch 1990 for a discussion on the importance of
improvisation in everyday life.
REFERENCES
Bal, Mieke 1997. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Second edition.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Herman, David 2003. Introduction. In David Herman (ed.) Narrative Theory and the
Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications. pp. 1–30.
Huron, David 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Leman, Marc 2007. Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation in Music. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Meelberg, Vincent 2009. Sonic Strokes and Musical Gestures: The Difference between
Musical Affect and Musical Emotion. In Jukka Louhivuori, Tuomas Eerola, Suvi
Saarikallio, Tommi Himberg and PäiviOSisko Eerola (eds.) Proceedings of the 7th
Triennial Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM
2009). Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, pp. 324–327.
Menary, Richard 2008. Embodied Narratives. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15: 63–
84.
Nachmanovitch, Stephen 1990. Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. New York:
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Pfeifer, Rolf and Josh C. Bongard 2007. How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A
New View of Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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