Epistemic Power of Music project summary
How does research through art, rather than about or for art, facilitate understanding? This
question seems particularly challenging for music. Since Carolyn Abbate’s 2004 essay
“Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” musicology has emphasised performance, materiality, and
carnality. Yet, how do we understand the cognitive dimensions of these aspects? As the field
of Artistic Research demonstrates, performance and the body entail knowledge, not only in
terms of knowing how to do something, and knowing what conventions shape music practice
and how, but as a means of understanding.
The “Epistemic Power of Music” project examined music’s four modalities and their
contribution to understanding: (1) Listening. Listening is imbricated with positive and
negative bias, sometimes leading to the marginalisation or silencing of certain musical voices
and features. Thus, listening is well-conceived as an intimate act, as a space of give and take
that allows the “sonic-affective” markers of performance to emerge, inviting deep listening;
(2) Performing. By examining tacit knowledge and emotions as concepts that are ideal endpoints
towards which we move, music gives felt shape to emotion concepts, extending our
understanding of them. For example, in Schubert’s Der Lindenbaum, an emotional landscape
is created which affectively shapes the concept of grief, and accompanying feelings of
fondness and sadness; (3) Participating. Utility music gathers people together; collective
intentionality is one way of understanding how. Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women
mobilises the power of assembly as intentional practice, facilitating a moving to (as
coordinated action), and a moving towards (a goal). Its afterlife in her art-music embodies the
motifs of freedom, and the strength and ingenuity of women; (4) Composing. Music “makes
sense”, by transcending musical constraints (thereby opening new avenues of making musical
sense) and by transcending existential constraints (including suffering). Music also makes
world(s), by creating and dismantling musical, social and cultural contexts. These forms of
musical understanding are contiguous. Florence Price’s compositions show how she “makes
sense” of social constraints and the broader context of the Black Renaissance, and how she
combines her own musical heritage (including African-American folk songs and dances) with
the idiom of classical concert-hall music through worldmaking processes. Through such
analyses, and a philosophical penetration of the knowledges concerned, the project traced and
confirmed music’s epistemic power, showing that artistic research has always existed as part
of diverse musical practices even if its current methodological refinement and explicit
institutionalisation are unprecedented. The Epistemic Power of Music
question seems particularly challenging for music. Since Carolyn Abbate’s 2004 essay
“Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” musicology has emphasised performance, materiality, and
carnality. Yet, how do we understand the cognitive dimensions of these aspects? As the field
of Artistic Research demonstrates, performance and the body entail knowledge, not only in
terms of knowing how to do something, and knowing what conventions shape music practice
and how, but as a means of understanding.
The “Epistemic Power of Music” project examined music’s four modalities and their
contribution to understanding: (1) Listening. Listening is imbricated with positive and
negative bias, sometimes leading to the marginalisation or silencing of certain musical voices
and features. Thus, listening is well-conceived as an intimate act, as a space of give and take
that allows the “sonic-affective” markers of performance to emerge, inviting deep listening;
(2) Performing. By examining tacit knowledge and emotions as concepts that are ideal endpoints
towards which we move, music gives felt shape to emotion concepts, extending our
understanding of them. For example, in Schubert’s Der Lindenbaum, an emotional landscape
is created which affectively shapes the concept of grief, and accompanying feelings of
fondness and sadness; (3) Participating. Utility music gathers people together; collective
intentionality is one way of understanding how. Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women
mobilises the power of assembly as intentional practice, facilitating a moving to (as
coordinated action), and a moving towards (a goal). Its afterlife in her art-music embodies the
motifs of freedom, and the strength and ingenuity of women; (4) Composing. Music “makes
sense”, by transcending musical constraints (thereby opening new avenues of making musical
sense) and by transcending existential constraints (including suffering). Music also makes
world(s), by creating and dismantling musical, social and cultural contexts. These forms of
musical understanding are contiguous. Florence Price’s compositions show how she “makes
sense” of social constraints and the broader context of the Black Renaissance, and how she
combines her own musical heritage (including African-American folk songs and dances) with
the idiom of classical concert-hall music through worldmaking processes. Through such
analyses, and a philosophical penetration of the knowledges concerned, the project traced and
confirmed music’s epistemic power, showing that artistic research has always existed as part
of diverse musical practices even if its current methodological refinement and explicit
institutionalisation are unprecedented. The Epistemic Power of Music
