What Does Embodied Musicality in Musical Learning Actually Mean?

Prof Martin Fautley, Professor Emeritus Birmingham City University, UK
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We hear a lot about the notion of ‘embodiment’ in music education (inter alia Bowman, 2004; Juntunen, 2017; Nijs & Bremmer, 2019), but what does this mean for learners who, in the context of an OHMI event, are differently abled? In music education we have the situation where there is a clear and distinct issue of the physical and the mental. In school music classrooms children learn to play musical instruments, and, concomitantly, learn music. This is musical learning, and it is generally recognised that the ‘best’ way to teach music, is, as Swanwick observed, musically (Swanwick, 1999). But in the case of the children whom OHMI encounters daily, what does this mean? Are we moving to a situation where we invoke the notion of Cartesian dualism at this juncture? Is there a mind-body split wherein children and young people can be ‘musical’ in their minds, but not able to embody their responses using a conventional musical instrument? As (Lycan, 2009) observed: 

To anyone uncontaminated by neuroscience or materialist philosophizing, the mental does not seem physical in any way at all, much less neurophysiological. The parsimony argument does not even come in the door until it is agreed that we can find nothing to distinguish mental states from neurophysiological ones. 

There are clearly problems with a stance that only conventionally abled children can benefit from music lessons, and, as we know from earlier WCET research (Fautley & Kinsella, 2017) excluding children who do not have the full use of both upper limbs can be an overly simplistic reaction. 

This takes us to the territory of the social model of disability, with which there are also issues:

Deciding how to respond to “disability” in law and culture depends on a normative framework that cannot be supplied by the model. (Samaha, 2007)

And it is this notion of a normative conceptualisation and response that will be troubled in this paper.

What this paper will do is present the case for problematising thinking about what musicality means. We have come a long way since the Bentley Test (Bentley, 1966), and yet we seldom stop to think about what notions of musicality actually entail in music education. We know that there has been a “skills vs knowledge” dichotomy promulgated by the previous government in the UK, but in school music lessons musicality proceeds with both skills and knowledge running hand-in-hand, but what does this mean when there is only one hand? Asking questions of what it means to develop musically, and how this can be demonstrated is the function of this paper. Its intention is to ask listeners to reflect on what they think about when designing programmes of study and learning sequences for both regular classrooms, and those with a range of children in them, when ‘othering’ in an overly-simplistic fashion can be problematic for all concerned.

This paper is designed to provoke thinking, it is not a recipe with answers, this is a difficult area, and yet in many instances internationally we are only beginning to scratch the surface. It is this thinking to which this paper contributes. 

REFERENCES:
Bentley, A. (1966) Musical ability in children and its measurement, London, Harrap.
Bowman, W. (2004) 'Cognition and the body: Perspectives from music education'. In Bresler, L. (Ed), Knowing bodies, moving minds: Towards embodied teaching and learning, pp. 29-50. Dordrecht, Springer.
Fautley, M., & Kinsella, V. (2017) Independent evaluation of the OHMI teaching pilot. Birmingham, BCU. ISBN 978-1-904839-89-7
Juntunen, M.-L. (2017) Embodiment in music teaching and learning. Finnish Journal of Music Education, 20, 1, 117-126.
Lycan, W. G. (2009) Giving dualism its due. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 87, 4, 551-563.
Nijs, L. & Bremmer, M. (2019) 'Embodiment in early childhood music education'. In Young, S. & Ilari, B. (Eds), Music in early childhood: Multi-disciplinary perspectives and inter-disciplinary exchanges, pp.