What is the potential of music as emergent knowledge?
Gent March 26th - 30th, 2019
I presented this paper at the Music Educators and Researchers of Young Children (MERYC) conference COUNTERPOINTS OF THE SENSES BODILY EXPERIENCES IN MUSICAL LEARNING. I was asked to co-edit the conference proceedings.
My intention was to bring new materialist philosophy in an understandable way to the Early Childhood Music Community. Conference proceedings are available here
Abstract
In this paper I take a new-materialist and non-representational approach to ask: How can improvisation in the temporal arts reconceptualise and broaden our adult understandings of young children’s communication and knowledge?
I draw on two filmed events from the recent SALTmusic project (Pitt & Arculus 2018). This filmed event data has been re-turned to many times used to illustrate unique and particular events which took place in the past, but when re-viewed and re-told constitute a new and particular happening or entanglements (Barad, 2007) between the original event, the video technology which brings the past into the present and the philosophical thinking that the events inspire.
The temporal arts are intrinsic, indescribable, knowledges based in relation and movement (Manning 2009). Improvised temporal arts practices are not concerned with representation or reproduction and they offer an alternative to the ways in which spoken language in early childhood is increasingly used to narrate, describe, direct and name (Maclure, 2013, 2016). In the first part of this paper, I critique the fixation on young children being made to talk as early as possible and call for improvised arts practices as de-colonising pedagogies where children’s own knowledges are able to inform and shape their education.
I re visit Trevarthen and Malloch’s Communicative Musicality and Stern’s ideas on vitality affect and the present moment to see how they entangle and transform within new materialist philosophy. Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ideas of refrain and event, I focus on ‘pedagogy of improvisation’ (Lines, 2017) as having unique and particular affordances for collaborative thinking with movement, sound and gesture. I will discuss improvisation, and its relation to young children’s transversal, rhizomic thinking (Dahlberg 2016) as an ethical responsibility to the give-and-take, in-the-moment, on-going creative processes that are unfolding. I resist dominant forces in education policy that colonize childhood and attempt to make pedagogy a fixed and measureable object.
What is the potential of music as emergent knowledge?
Charlotte Arculus
Manchester Metropolitan University
Norwich, Norfolk, UK
charlottearculus@gmail.com
Keywords
New materialism; multimodality; improvisation; temporal arts; movement; talking; communication; literacy
Abstract
In this paper I take a new-materialist and non-representational approach to ask: How can improvisation in the temporal arts reconceptualise and broaden our adult understandings of young children’s communication and knowledge?
I draw on two filmed events from the recent SALTmusic project (Pitt & Arculus 2018). This filmed event data has been re-turned to many times used to illustrate unique and particular events which took place in the past, but when re-viewed and re-told constitute a new and particular happening or entanglements (Barad, 2007) between the original event, the video technology which brings the past into the present and the philosophical thinking that the events inspire.
The temporal arts are intrinsic, indescribable, knowledges based in relation and movement (Manning 2009). Improvised temporal arts practices are not concerned with representation or reproduction and they offer an alternative to the ways in which spoken language in early childhood is increasingly used to narrate, describe, direct and name (Maclure, 2013, 2016). In the first part of this paper, I critique the fixation on young children being made to talk as early as possible and call for improvised arts practices as de-colonising pedagogies where children’s own knowledges are able to inform and shape their education.
I re visit Trevarthen and Malloch’s Communicative Musicality and Stern’s ideas on vitality affect and the present moment to see how they entangle and transform within new materialist philosophy. Thinking withDeleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ideas of refrain and event, I focus on ‘pedagogy of improvisation’ (Lines, 2017) as having unique and particular affordances for collaborative thinking with movement, sound and gesture. I will discuss improvisation, and its relation to young children’s transversal, rhizomic thinking (Dahlberg 2016) as an ethical responsibility to the give-and-take, in-the-moment, on-going creative processes that are unfolding. I resist dominant forces in education policy that colonize childhood and attempt to make pedagogy a fixed and measureable object.
Context: Saltmusic and the Tyranny of Talking
The background to the SALTmusic project is the increasing anxiety in the UK for children, particularly those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to be talking as early as possible. The school-readiness and word-gap agendas drive an almost un-contestable focus on small children’s acquisition of words. Susan Blum (2018) uses the term ‘Wordism’ to critique the idea that language is words and more words are better. The individual ’word’ dominates as the primary unit of analysis in education; words are ‘celebrated, counted, accumulated - or found missing’ (pg. 7). Children without words, or with fewer words than others, are invariably problematized.
SALTmusic was a research project for young children (24-36 months) diagnosed by speech and language services as having communication ‘difficulty’ or ‘delay’. The project was an interdisciplinary action research project, co-delivered by speech and language specialists and music specialists (Pitt & Arculus 2018). The SALTmusic approach recognised that the problematizing of children’s lack of words places anxiety, guilt and stress upon children, parents and practitioners which in turn impacts on interaction and communication. The opportunity to engage with children playfully, on children’s terms becomes hijacked by an imperative (driven by the word-gap agenda) for adults (parents and educators) to be talking, naming, describing and narrating through words. This tyranny of talking (my term) could be seen as representing the world rather than engaging with it; ignoring other vital, creative ways in which children communicate.
It is almost as if the purpose of education is to make children into adults as quickly as possible. There is a profound lack of interest in the actual knowledge of and abilities of children (Voneche 1987, quoted in Cannella and Viruru 2004 ).Children are described in ways that both embody and reconstruct colonialist views of the world (Cannella and Viruru 2004 pg. 87). Children ‘are the largest group of people who have been othered, marginalized and colonized’ (ibid pg. 9).Language is used as a critical dividing factor to distinguish between ‘civilization and barbarism’ (Seed 1991 in Cannella and Viruru 2004). Language is the human behaviour most deeply accepted as truth (Barad 2003, Cannella and Viruru 2004)and thus feeds into conceptualisations of young children as lacking any real knowledge or understanding of the world (Maclure 2013). Post-colonialist thinking labels babies and toddlers as barbaric since they have not mastered spoken and written language (Gluschkof, 2019 in print).
A world without language seems unthinkable to most adults. Yet it is an everyday knowledge of young children. This unthinkable, talk-free world is also central to a variety of improvisational interactive practices in music and dance. It is a world that was created during SALTmusic sessions. Performative and non-representational understandings, such as those encountered during SALTmusic contest the unexamined habits of mind that grant language an ontological hegemony (Barad 2003: 133). So, I ask: if we bring the ‘barbaric’ children and ‘unthinkable’ practices together, what new, musical, embodied knowledges may emerge?
Revisiting Communicative Musicality & Daniel Stern
The patterns and rhythms of relational communication that emerged between children, materials and adults during the SALTmusic sessions were interactive and expressive with their own meaning and knowledge - what Cross (2009) describes as a floating intentionality. They constituted a shared or mutual understanding that, like music, is not describe-able or representation-able through words.
A broader anthropological perspective shows that the primary unit of linguistics is interaction within which one can identify sounds, sound patterns, signs, grammatical patterns and the many intended and unintended effects of the linguistic encounter (Blum 2017). This foregrounds ways of interacting which are musical, complex and multimodal. Theories of Communicative Musicality (eg. Trevarthen & Malloch, 2014, Dissanayake 2015 have contributed greatly in making temporal arts visible in infancy and have been gaining ground in recent years particularly in early childhood education. Communicative Musicality has emerged out of a wide variety of academic disciplines: biology, psychology, musicology, anthropology and neuroscience bringing a transdisciplinary perspective placing the temporal arts in the centre of what it is to be human. However, the philosophical problem comes when these aesthetic behaviours are situated as a beginning to what comes next in both developmental and evolutionary terms - a preverbal protomusic (Malloch & Trevarthen 2018) or the first step on a linear trajectory towards the preconceived outcome of a modern, talking, adult human.
I would like to take these ideas of temporal arts, weaving between people and take a theoretical leap into a new materialist philosophy where reality is considered to be movement rather than stasis and consider the phenomena of Communicative Musicality as an ongoing, emergent and immanent operation at play in the relations between people and the world rather than the foundation of a superior outcome of spoken language or musical identity.Cartesian enlightenment philosophy, deeply flawed, yet still influential, considered reality to be fixed and absolute and hierarchical. Human thought was considered to be top of the reality food chain and language the expression of thought. Minds were separate and above bodies and thinking was the transcendent outcome of doing and being in the world. Interaction in this fixed reality assumed boundaried, individual, subjects making contact with each other, exchanging meaning, what Manning (2009) calls a self-self (or self-other) model of interaction. Karan Barad’s ideas on intra-action (2007) and Deleuze and Guattari ideas of immanence, territories, rhizomes, refrains and machinic heterogenesis lay out a reality which is mobile, in-process and interconnected rather than hierarchical and fixed. Everything is both part of and consisting of everything else. Stern (1985) foregrounded the relational aspect to being in the world in his influential studies on interpersonal infants that laid the ground out for Trevarthen & Malloch’ s theories of Communicative Musicality. Manning describes Stern’s work as treating ‘the relation as the node of creative interpersonal potential, shifting away […] from a self-self model of interaction toward a radically empirical notion of immanent relationality’ (2009:35). Speaking about therapeutic processes and the importance of the present moment, Stern said ‘We move from an enquiry about intentions, means, and goal states to an enquiry about processes of creation, emerging and becoming’ (2010: 126). However, while Stern coined and used the term Affect Attunement to express the quality of shared feeling, focussing on the relation, Trevarthen & Mallochuse affect attunement to describe an exchange of affect for a ‘mutually beneficial ‘inner’ purpose’(2018: 14), focussing on the inner individual rather than the relationship.
However, in a process ontology, the idea of individuality no longer stands in fixed way. Identity is porous, relational and in flux with encounters in the world. Both Stern and Manning contest the stable self.Therefore, following Stern and Manning, Communicative Musicality could be seen as the relation raising the possibility of music as Deleuze and Guattari understand it: a creative, refranic force that makes the world rather than something human beings do to make contact, interact and grow a musical identity. It is noteworthy that Deleuze and Guattari return again and again to children’s improvised refrains in order to speak about the way the whole universe moves. They never attempt to explain music declaring - “it is not really known where music begins” but they talk about the world through music. How refrains make, unmake and remake the world. Their complex philosophical ideas are a testament to the knowledge of children, small birds and the universality of music.
Pedagogies of Improvisation
The practice of improvisationis a form of what Deleuze and Guattari call rhizomic thinking (1987). Rhizomic thinking creates itself as it goes along, continually inventing itself in the moment. It is a state of flux, entangled with relations and encounters. An experimental dealing with what is not yet known, that which is emerging, that which is yet to be discovered. In a new materialist reality, improvisation becomes very significant because it deals with what is actually going on in the world rather than seeking to describe or reproduce or fix it (territorialise it) in the way conventional thinking and behaviour does. Young children are very good at improvisation; theyare rhizomic and trans-disciplinary thinkers (Dahlberg 2016). They are constantly making and remaking heterogenous semiotic connections unencumbered by representation and unhampered by language. Therefore, the practice of improvisation as a pedagogical approach is particularly fruitful in getting behind language and representation and alongside children in order to investigate new worlds.
The idea of a pedagogy of improvisation, was central to the SALTmusic practice it involved, to quote David Lines, ‘a responsibility within the unfolding ensemble to stay sensitive and also keep exploring. Itrequires openness, alertness and attentiveness to sustain creatively’ (2017: 56). SALTmusic strove to bean ethical and emergent practice attending to the give-and-take responsibility for the in-the-moment, on-going creative processes that were happening.
The Events
Having deeply contested the hegemony of words, representation and reproduction, I am not reducing the performative happenings into description or notation. What follows is an incomplete list of materials, movements, sounds and what happened with them. This is then entangled with theory situated in new materialism and process ontology.
Event one – Round and Round
Involved in the event are 5 people: A child, his father, the researcher, a dance and music specialist and myself (filming with an ipad). We are around a bucket that spins. Other people are in the room. The room is also full of objects, mostly abstract – cloth, tubes, balls, and instruments. There is an ambient soundtrack playing in the background The film clip lasts for about 6 minutes, which is an unusually long time to film. The bucket is attached to a turntable so it can spin around. In the bucket and around the room are a variety of colourful tubes. A number of motifs or refrains are introduced during the sequence. They are in different modes and between different people/things, they include (but are not limited to): bucket spinning; tubes placed/dropped in the bucket; smiling; eye contact; looking through tubes; dropping tubes from a height into the bucket; voice play “weeee” (to the spinning bucket); movement play; spin-hand-gesture; voice play/micro song “round and round and round”; voice play “stop”. This multiplicitous and multimodal conversation/ chorus/ensemble continues between people and things for the entire clip. Refrains keep returning and transforming.
5 humans are fully engaged in the encounter, making musical refrains and polyrhythmic encounter through the materials. To say that ‘the child drops the tubes into the bucket’ or ‘the dancer makes a “weee” sound’ is as meaningless as extracting a single note from an improvised tune. It is the movement of the assembled components, the entanglement to what has past and what may occur that gives this heterogenic machinic opera its sense. I could suggest that everything happening in this event is music. Music is between everything, the repeating gestures that return and transform. Davies (2014) describes encounters as an always-evolving story that requires not knowing what is happening or where things are headed. Schulte (2013:2) conceives gaining children’s trust as unstable, provisional, multiple and incomplete, not something a script or score can be written for; it requires openness, alertness and attentiveness to sustain. Encountering in this improvisational pedagogy takes you beyond habit and the already known. It is what Biesta describes a world-facing pedagogy (2018). Being open, being affected by the others (including non-human others) is an explicit practice of improvising artists. It involves working in ensemble and feeling out towards the boundaries of self to become emergent with others.
This encounter has no measureable or reproducible outcomes. It is impossible to say what has been ‘learned’. It might be possible to say that trust was gained or that it felt significant. Relational co-production of multiple refrains is tricky to quantify. And yet process philosophy sees this entangled symbiosis as the stuff of life, critical and world making.
Event two - the Boats are on the Sea
This was filmed later during the same SALTmusic session. The small group of parents, children, speech and language practitioners and music and dance specialists have cleared the room together and have just gathered around a large blue piece of stretchy lycra fabric. They start to bounce it and create a pulse. Paper boats are introduced. There is a shussshing vocalisation, a bit like the sea and a bit like a call for quiet. I am holding the camera at the far end of the room away from the group. Everyone else is around the lycra. As the lycra pulses, it becomes noticeable that the child who was filmed in clip 1 is singing softly. He suddenly sings out loudly into the room. His song is extraordinary and beautiful, the tune is complex and it has six words. He sings it once and all the adults join in. My voice is clearly audible on the film clip and what becomes clear on re-view is that I and the other adults don’t reproduce the child’s original tune - we transform it into something else. The event continues as the child conducts the singing of his transformed song through the shared pulse of the lycra.
The child’s song emerges from his body through a unique and particular situation and what happens next emerges from that song. The song is an Event; it is an act of creation, a new thing in the world. He ‘launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune’ (Deleuze &Guattari 1987:363). Surrounding the event is a pedagogy and community of improvisation, which is attuned to what is emerging through the material affordances of blue lycra fabric that joins people together through a shared pulse; the special geographical, aesthetic, material and psychological space full of open-ended possibilities: the convivial, improvised, rhizomic, refrain-ful hanging-out that happened earlier and, I would suggest, the absence of talking, directing, representing or reproducing.
Massumi (2010) explains how an event becomes an event only when the constituent parts are actively and creatively assembled. Everything which enters the event must do so actively not by proxy or representation or pre-constituted content. People approach the event aware of its uniqueness and particularity and therefore pre-constituted positionings must be left behind.
The improvisational pedagogy of the SALTmusic space, focussed on what is happening rather than outcomes, enabled the child’s knowledge and creative power to become foregrounded and visible. The song does not spring from an isolated and boundaried individual child but from a set of relationships and processes that are in play. The song is a movement coming from the child’s body as a new thing into the world. When the adults territorialise the child’s song, he re-territorialises through his conducting. The group don’t territorialise in order to direct the child, they do it through a movement and desire towards his song. The song is a manifestation of the relationship and the group follows where the relationship leads.
This then, is a call to develop practices alongside children that are alert to when words colonise, tyrannise, or exclude. To engage in open-ended, improvised encounters with children and acknowledge that children have something of their own to bring. And, drawing on Biesta’s world-facing pedagogy (2018) and Tim Ingold’s transformational anthropology (2013) to encounter the world with children. To learn what children can do fromchildren and to learn what music does by doing it with children.
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