To become one with the instrument: The unfolding of a musical topography

Introduction

As part of establishing an effective relationship with her or his instrument, every apprentice musician engages in an open-ended exploration that might take from months or years to a lifetime. In doing so, the practitioner develops an intuition of the instrument's possibilities, which eventually lead to the development and refinement of what I shall call a musical topography. The topography in question builds upon idiosyncratic gestures and movements embedded in the practical-operational morphology of the instrument. However, these gestures are not merely determined by the layout and the mechanical properties of the instrument: they also pertain to an expressive musical sphere, which forms a distinct auditory spatiality. Throughout the development of this musical topography, audible forms, effective gestures and the materiality of the instrument progressively merge into a unified field. ¹ Our aim is to explore this field, starting with a description of the engagement between the practitioner and the instrument, which per se constitutes a qualitatively rich area of study.

Although the term “topography” might appear as fixed or static to some, such connotation depends on the time-scale one adopts. Over long extensions of time, topographies can actually be fluid and dynamic, similarly to one's effective playing of a musical instrument, as I will argue. I have adopted this figure of speech from ethnographer and pianist David Sudnow, who conceives the keyboard as a terrain to be traversed (Sudnow, 1978). The actual traversing affects both the manner in which one sees the terrain and the creation of new pathways, modifying the terrain itself. Thus, the figure of topography presents a tension: on the one hand, topographies can stabilize over time (I constantly look for stable ground on my instrument). On the other hand, its permanent navigation reorganizes the shape of the topography itself (the different pathways acquire new and polyvalent uses). As we will see, this underscores the developmental character of musical topography, which I will be discussing below.

The notion of musical topography stands in contradiction to an axiomatic perspective (that used to be particularly popular in cognitive descriptions of skill) according to which the knowledge of one's musical instrument would consist in a collection of rules that unambiguously define the way it should be operated. The knowledge of the chain of skills involved in this relationship is not specifiable, in the sense of being convertible into verbal instructions or descriptions, for the simple reason that they consist of physiognomic, kinaesthetic and motor gestures that can only be grasped or felt in experience. As it will hopefully become apparent, this certainly does not mean that such skills cannot be passed on to others. The knowledge in question can obviously be acquired, but only by means of a lived practice, where verbal and/or written indications seem to play a rather auxiliary role. The development of such lived practice is characteristically a social process, and, therefore, draws its force from a situated tradition. The latter consists of normative, structural and stylistic elements, and from a constellation of genres and values that take their shape throughout generations of practitioners. Finally, I suggest that the deployment of such a practical topography implicates an imaginative process akin to Giambattista Vico's notion of fantasia. The notion of musical topography seeks to contribute to the larger framework of semiotic anthropology (Lassègue, Rosenthal, & Visetti, 2009), since it describes expressive, meaningful gestures within technical bundles that, in turn, partake in the institution of collective values. At least in the context of the present article, our inquiry has a predominantly descriptive character, rather than an explanatory or normative one, limiting myself to better circumscribe the notion of musical topography. Therefore, I will leave potential input for a theory on musical education, or pedagogical applications outside of this article's aims.

The affinities between practitioner and instrument

In his detailed account on becoming a jazz piano player, David Sudnow (1978) described the development of his relationship with the instrument as composed of three major phases: from his first encounters with the keyboard, to an active search for particular sounds, up to his entrance into the realm of jazz proper. Certainly, it took him several years to accomplish the fluent keyboard manoeuvring he sought. During this time, he experimented with his own motions and what came out of them, leading to a more accurate handling of the impact his touch had over sound quality. The dynamics that secure the relationship between tonal and bodily motions will lead the upcoming pianist to discover a myriad of effective gestures or pathways that make up the topography of his instrument. A schematic summary of Sudnow's endeavours should provide an overview of the reorganization of kinaesthetic and auditory dispositions that takes place in instrumental musical practice. ²

Sudnow characterizes his first six months at the piano by his predominant investment into the way the keyboard looks. In particular, he noticed that scales could be understood as visual paths to be traversed. By this time, he approached the keyboard as a multiplicity of routes that are to be found and followed effectively. These seemingly “neutral” routes soon started to reveal clear contours and affordances:

“When a scale was learned at first, I consulted the rule and regarded the individual notes by way of it, finding the arrayed course of keys. In short order a gestalt of the scale as a whole was detected, and I saw the path itself as a figure against the background of the terrain. But the scale was detected not merely as a ‘scale to be seen’ but a ‘scale to be seen and played’, and a starting place was given special status within the sight. When I regarded the keyboard to find this diminished scale, for example, I would see the bounded starting point most prominently; looking down from above it went from F up to the next F, for how I had practiced fingering the scale became part of the way it was visually appreciated” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 21).

It is important to note that these contours initially appear to him primarily as visual paths that are to be traversed with the fingers. Sight supports the exploration of the keyboard as a “terrain”, enabling him to move from one constellation of notes to another. At this stage, practice is mostly centred on both scale and chord recognition. And although the salience of these different paths increased by adopting this approach, an inability to manipulate the actual sounds soon became explicit. Dependence upon sight to move along these paths started to show its shortcomings: “After about six months of instruction I had (…) places to go in a theory's terminology on the surface skin of an untouched piano (…) these wheres without hows, places you can make ‘music’ with a wooden, soundless, practice keyboard” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 28).

This does not mean that the sight-supported traverse of the keyboard was unfruitful. The first period of repeatedly going through different pathways rendered familiar their particular sounds, even though these pathways could not (as yet) be easily traversed at will. It will be argued that knowing a scale translates into an increasingly dynamic relationship between recognizable patterns on the keyboard and one's own bodily motion. Certain locations in the pathway become more prominent than others as their functions appear more evident (i.e. the different degrees of the scale). These “sensitive points” in the topography will guide the apprentice by providing a relative placement not only in a given pathway, but also in a constellation of interrelated paths. As the acquaintance with the instrument advances and includes other types of scale, such routes become less fixed, more contextualized and furthermore, polyvalent.

A second phase brings on what he describes as “going for the sounds”: “I recognized the pathways' sounds. They had become quite familiar to me. But it is one thing to recognize familiar sounds you are making and another to be able to aim for particular sounds to happen. A different sort of directionality of purpose and potential for action is involved in each case” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 38). Evidently, it is not as if his previous engagement with the keyboard was devoid of attentive listening. Nevertheless, his instrumental practice now started giving priority to the melody's shape, as part of aiming toward a characteristic “jazz sound”. What motivates practice at this point is aiming for a particular sound quality under the form of a phrase or a motif. This translates into a further deepening of the perceptual field, and particularly of auditory participation, where an increasing unity between motions in the tonal space and bodily motions becomes tangible. Hence, what started out as a relationship between sight and hand motion now develops into a further integration that opens novel possibilities.

Once the focus shifts to melody construction, the scale becomes less of a stable route to be followed, and more of an enabler to go from place to place. It no longer presents itself as a univocal pathway: on the one hand, because it can accommodate variations suiting different fingerings (one can also think of the violin or the guitar neck); on the other hand, since it is driven by melody, such musical practice actually seeks to escape the scale as a ready-made form in order to play with it. For the apprentice, what matters is not to find a single “privileged” path, even for a single scale, but to explore alternative paths.

Although from an outsider's point of view a scale might be understood as a succession of fixed places (assigned musical notes) in the instrument's body (i.e. keys, or fingerboard positions), Sudnow describes the scale as being gradually invested with tonal qualities and colorings particular to its physiognomy. Although this term originally refers to human faces, the concept of the physiognomic character of perception underscores the qualitative dimension of perceived forms (Arnheim, 1949; Werner, 1948). Any form, ambience or general configuration in the perceptual field presents itself as an animated tonality or allure, as a spontaneous manifestation of life. The musical scale thus carries an ambience and a mood of its own, along with an array of sound possibilities. I will return to this issue later on in our discussion. ³ For the time being, let us note that Sudnow was already familiar with such “jazz” physiognomies thanks to his constant listening to recordings and performances. His own practice allowed him to later identify a particular jazz sound in a host of licks (or small motifs) and short phrases that exploited distinctive stylistic resources (i.e. chromatic insertions, bebop rhythmic patterns, underlying chord sequences, etc.).

Such change of disposition toward melody making promptly made him encounter the challenge of fluent phrasing that jazz players exercised so effectively. This demanded a motivated looking for “handful” (q.e.: within reach) tonal possibilities, and forced him to abandon the previous logic of pre-set routes, since producing an actual line entails a kind of “melodic intentionality”, providing both a sense of direction and possibility for accurate repetition:

“Motivated so predominantly toward the rapid course, frustrated in my reproductive hearing of the recorded piano passages, whatever skills for melodic construction I had were dormant. The simplest sorts of melody work entailed a manner of soundful intentionality that had been virtually obliterated as a possibility by the course of my acquisitions” (Sudnow, 1978, pp. 41–42).

During his third year of play, he noticed how “going for the sounds” contributed to develop such melodic intentionality. A tighter bond between hand and musical gestures started to sediment more clearly (note that by this point the sight of the keyboard has become increasingly marginal):

“As I found the next sounds coming up, as I set up into a course of notes, it was not as if I had learned about the keyboard so that looking down I could tell what a regarded note would sound like. I do not have that skill, nor do many other musicians. I could tell what a note would sound like because it was a next sound, because my hand was so engaged with the keyboard that it was given a setting of sounding places in its own configurations and potentialities” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 45).

During the third and final phase, an important shift takes place toward what he describes as “going for the jazz”. Briefly put, his mode of playing the piano increasingly becomes undistinguishable from singing:

“…[I]t occurs after no more than several instants at the keyboard that I find myself singing. I sing with my fingers. One may sing along with the fingers, one may use the fingers to blurt out a thought, and one may sing with the fingers. There are specific differences in ways of being singingly present with the fingers and the terrain to be identified here” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 87, italics are mine).

This allowed him to attain a new sense of fluency, where he was no longer suddenly cut off from music, even if he was to stand back from it for a moment: “It was to permit nonstuttering and nontripping disengagements from the terrain when a saying was not at hand, disengagements that would not make the music stop but would be silences of the music” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 104). In fact, singing is a privileged, transversal analogy in instrumental practices, particularly concerning melody and phrasing (i.e.: one listens for a phrase's “breaths”, and makes a melody sing). It often operates as a recurrent motif, one where the musician listens to the sounds that come out of the instrument as her or his own voice. Without having to be a singer, a musician's relationship with an instrument relies heavily on being (or not being) a resonating chamber her or himself.

Looking back on his journey, the changes in the way he manoeuvred the piano had a direct relationship with the spatiality he was faced with, as well as the musical possibilities he was able to jump into at any point in the terrain:

“[N]ow I would do jazz sayings that increasingly brought my full ‘vocabular’ resources, my full range of wayful reachings, into the service of that jazz on the records, into the hands’ ways of pace-ably traversing not from route to route, but doing singings. And the language of paths and path switching, born of my instructed introduction to jazz music and deeply intrinsic to the nature of my selectional negotiations for so long thoroughly situated in the image-guided traverse ways of my past, must be abandoned” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 141).

From an outsider's point of view, the exploratory restrictions of an instrument might seem contradictory: for a student who is starting out, a musical scale can initially seem deprived of expression. Nevertheless, in the context of instrumental practice, the apparently deceptive neutrality of a musical scale actually reveals an intimate, yet quite tangible striving for expressive colourings. Musical gestures will then be less and less manipulation of an external object and more and more direct action upon musical expressivity. The relationship between music and the instrument stabilizes through an alternation of expressive gestures endowed with both musical and bodily character. Thus, far from a simple familiarity with the use of an object, the musical topography of an instrument involves an ensemble of kinaesthetic, postural, tactile, motor-perceptual dispositions related to its sonic palette, colourings, intensities and traditional uses. As I would like to suggest, the notion of a musical topography goes hand in hand with the idea of a unified field indistinctly embracing the instrument, the sound and auditory imagination.

The exploratory quality of motion

The exploration of the musical instrument demands finely tuned gestures that differ from those directed to everyday-life objects or surfaces: “The keyboard is as many sorts of places as there are activities to be undertaken with it, a rather different-looking place to the cleaning lady than to the musician who in the course of play may see past it into the music with a look that is hardly looking at all” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 10). The motor-perceptual dispositions that mature as a result of this exploration are adapted to the specific materiality of the instrument. For instance, the morphology of the violin's fingerboard demands great precision in the attack of each note in order to stay in tune, since notes are not (at least initially) noticeable upon sight. This precision will only develop very slowly by means of countless repetitions, until the attack of tones stabilizes. Mastering the sound of the violin, or of any instrument for that matter, requires one to fine-tune one's own movements.

This does not mean that learning bodily gestures relies on mere mechanical repetition. Quite on the contrary, when the kind of motility involved in instrumental practice turns mechanical, it is soon bound to failure. Richard Sennett (2008, ch. 5) illustrated this by pointing out to some of the shortcomings of the Suzuki method: exploratory motion is deliberately suppressed in order to prevent the child from getting frustrated and abandoning the instrument. Unfortunately, as he argues, the method blocks the development of the effective solidarity between listening and the traverse of the instrument. The required motility consists in the discovery of the sensorial qualities that are ingrained in instrumental gestures and the education of attention that serves as their support (see Ingold, 1996), all of which often takes a harsh toll on the practitioner. ⁵ Just as the repetition of a heard musical figure or motif in the context of a piece contributes to its intensification, attentive repetition of felt bodily motion deepens the knowledge of the instrument and of the tonal space where these gestures take place. The monitoring of attention that characterizes the effective acquaintance with an instrument is a constantly renewed rhythmic cycle rather than one guided by blind repetition. It is an explorative relationship in nature, for one is unable to go back to an original starting point. Unlike mechanical motion that is unresponsive to context, the instrumentalist's gestures need permanent fine-tuning. A continuous monitoring of attention is thus a requisite in every musical performance, irrespective of the musician's degree of expertise.

In his work “Vom Sinn der Sinne” (1935/1989) (The primary world of senses), Erwin Straus described the process of movement learning. He stressed that movements are not learned in a mechanical fashion (specifically alluding to the manipulation of musical instruments). Learned movements are not developed in isolation but are always part of an oriented action. In accordance with Sudnow's description of “going for a sound”, Straus points out that such learning relies on the articulation of movements rather than on local, independent gestures:

“The one who wishes to learn how to play the violin must be able to listen. By its acoustic and aesthetic quality, the sound directs both hands' activity. The sound determines the degree, direction, speed, shifting and strength of the movements. Only the student who instantly encounters the possibilities of musical organisation in all their richness and who at the same time enters the domain of gradual movement will make any progress” (…) “To speak of individual movements (in the plural form) hides the fact that no movement begins on its own. We are never at a movement's beginning: its starting point is always the ending point of a previous one. Movements take place in a stance of transition or change; the problem is stopping. One does not learn isolated movements according to the trial an error principle, but rather the articulation of moving oneself, the movement of the limbs related to visible, audible and tangible objects in their spatial disposition” (Straus, 1935/1989, pp. 408–409, my translation).

Such exploratory quality of motion supposes that musical gestures are in a sense anticipatory. Thus a pre-figuration of what will later constitute a steadier figure in the perceptual field is already comprised at the outset of a musical gesture (if we view it as a microgenetic process, see Rosenthal, 2004a). In instrumental practice, every motif or small phrase latently announces what is to follow, and reciprocally, every motif is sustained by its forerunners. Anticipation should not be viewed here as a definite expectation or a ready-made plan, but as continuation of a gesture motivated by search for cohesion. This is a crucial aspect of the participatory engagement that underlies musical phenomena. Sudnow gives a rhythmical example of such anticipatory movement:

“If I am to play six notes, or seven, three, or twelve, a pacing is established for the reach, is determined at the outset with a pace set in the opening two, and is internally modifiable only in an orderly fashion. If the first two notes are set for a six-noted passage, I may not set out fast and then slow down within the course of a phase toward a ‘termination time’ and reach destinational coincidence. A course of speeded movement is undertaken that implies a number of notes to follow and implicates a manner of forward movement for the hand, a manner of movement that must be brought to the necessary sort of completion if the gesture is to proceed smoothly, without faltering or tripping” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 114, emphasis in the original).

Although there is a clear need for continuity and fluency, as Sudnow noted, it is the possibility of making mistakes that differentiates exploratory from mechanical motion. This possibility appears to be a requisite for effective musical practice, in the same way that “managing” to make the “right” mistakes is an important step into the sway of the instrument. If the need of exploratory motion is acknowledged as such, it will become a part of the practitioner's wilful intent ⁸ : “I began to do fingering changes with increasing improvisational intent, using ‘wrong fingers’ and ‘struggling fingers’ from the standpoint, for example, of the way a very competent sight reader at the piano does fingering, and ‘right fingerings’ that often indeed appear quite bizarre from the classicist's perspective – right jazz fingerings” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 136). And while this case bears on practice in a study setting, the general aim is to achieve an effective control of mistakes in situ. Klemp et al. (2008) have thoroughly illustrated and discussed this point in their analysis of successive takes of Thelonious Monk's “In Walked Bud” solo. What could have been considered a faulty note is quickly incorporated into the solo itself and set in the larger environment of the piece. Whether it is heard as a mistake or not will depend on the subsequent notes that feed the phrase. Such analysis allows the authors to point out that a strong distinction between plan and performance fails to capture the ongoing character of musical praxis. This practice unfolds in what they called a circuit of mis-takes and repairs. Mistakes are reformulated as “an apparent deviation from patterns established by previous notes and used in turn, and in time – just in time – to build a new pattern” (Klemp et al., 2008, p. 7) (mis-takes). Even if the grasp of this exploratory intention may take several years to become effective, efficient practice does not oppose playing and planning.

An effective exploration of a musical instrument goes hand in hand with holistic participation. The actual movements of the performer go well beyond those needed to “get a sound” out of the instrument. The motor participation of the body is wide-ranging, and is certainly not limited to the movement of the limbs that appear to be controlling the instrument. These movements take hold of the whole body of the musical performer. To an ingenuous eye, vocalisations, gesticulations, bouncing, etc. may appear fancy, and at best unnecessary ‘add-ons’. However, these gesticulations are an integral part of the participative engagement that drives the interpreter into an expressive gesture. Rather than putting on a show (although it might be the case), these “non functional” gestures are motivated by an expressive motion. A drummer has no real need to blink his eyes, clutch his jaw or make faces; yet these manifest an intimate negotiation between an expressive thread and bodily motion. The latter is constantly acting as a backdrop to musical listening. Becoming aware of this involvement is a crucial part of every musician's training, since gesticulations sometimes drive unwanted tensions and dynamics (m.s.) into the piece.

The developmental configuration of skill

The development of musical skill involves the constant possibility of slips and mistakes, and this differentiates it from any mechanical procedure. An improvisatory quality is ingrained in the sought gestures, not the least for lack of orientation. In fact, an anticipatory pull guides them and allows them to preserve their exploratory character. The apprentice, on the other hand, must find expressive gestures fitting her or his corporality. One can certainly imitate the gestures of another performer, but these will need to be adjusted to one's own bodily morphology to bring forth a dynamic embodied bundle.

Note that in the previous section I remarked the need for fluency that drives the practitioner forward. At the same time, mistakes need be kept around the corner to achieve an exploratory quality of motion. But if one is bound to make mistakes and constantly restart, how is one to achieve fluency and not become stuck? Instead of considering this to be a paradox of sorts, ⁹ I would like to formulate it as alternating instances that organize the development of skill. In addition to bodily adjustments I have mentioned, the development of a skill consists in the appropriation of a tacit structure.

Michael Polanyi (1958) proposed the principle of dual control of action that starts from a functional relationship between the focal object of attention and a ‘background’ that serves as a subsidiary pole of attention. Tool use (including musical instruments) provided a rich source to illustrate this structure: a tool gradually becomes an extension of my own corporality. This kind of phenomenal transformation is a feature of all knowledge that emerges from this organization of action. More generally, all skilful action (and all perception) has its extensionality and intentionality. On the one hand, every attentional act implies an awareness of something (i.e. Brentano, Husserl), but on the other hand, it extends from something (which may include my own body) to something else, which constitutes its horizon in the perceptual field. Perception and skilled action are inconceivable without personal partaking, where the link between the focal and the subsidiary outline the attentional organization of action and perception (i.e. retinal and tympanic stimulation being subsidiary to the perceived object).

The same principle is transposable to musical training, starting with the discovery of the intimate relationship between gesture and sound. Sudnow described how he worked on a section by trying out different fingerings until he found the one that fluently adjusted to both his hands and the sought musicality. Yet after a number of repetitions, a particular fingering would recede into the background, favouring a phrase's or a motif's expressive movement and quality. At this point, he would arrive at a tacit integration between tonal movement (focal awareness) and fingering (subsidiary awareness). In this way, the structure of dual control contributes to the cyclical reinforcement of the continuous field in which bodily, instrumental (i.e. the motion of piano keys, levers and strings), and sound gestures are experienced as a single, encompassing one.

The importance of the functional relationship between focal and subsidiary poles of a course of action can be illustrated by its breakdown. Were Sudnow (or another hypothetical player) to follow the movement of his fingers instead of the actual musical motion, the functional relationship would be broken, and his playing would become a mere fiddling exercise deprived of musicality. He would even be forced to interrupt his playing, since it is the focal musical thread that keeps the continuity of the piece, not the isolated sequence of fingering positions on the keyboard. Nevertheless, it would be enough for him to redirect his attention to the tonal motion and be re-immersed in musical performance. The tacit integration would be quickly regained, making the subsidiaries (in this case, the fingering pattern) recede again into the background.

It is important to note that tacit integration is never definitely set, since it is always prone to further development and fulfilment. An aspect of the instrumentalist's work consists precisely in playing with this proximal/distal alternation in order to get a better grasp of the piece's expressive movement or to discover new configurations within it.

The concept of tacit integration sheds light on the developmental dimension of a skill. Practitioners of a given craft can notice that tacit integrations are not transparent, but that it is always possible to recapture them by going back to their underlying dual structure. For example, an instrumentalist will work on the expressive character of the interpretation of a piece by going back to his bodily gestures. He will thus be able to establish a stronger dynamical contrast (m.s.) between different parts of a phrase by changing the way he presses the keys. This gradual phenomenal transformation will make him act directly on tonal quality rather than focusing on the keys as such. In turn, this will eventually create a more stable relationship, which can eventually be re-evaluated. From this point of view, Polanyi's dual control of action helps us to conceptualize the instrumentalist's achievement.

The principle of dual control described by Polanyi can also be found in many instrumental sub-practices that I have not mentioned so far. Although a detailed examination of these would detour us from our main topic, let us take musical reading as an illustration (even considering the vast array of existing musical notation formats; i.e. tablature, pneumatic notation, modern staff notation, shōga, etc.). In her study of traditional Japanese flute music, Kawori Iguchi (2008) found that musical reading practices do not rely on decoding, but rather on previously constituted tacit integrations, motivated by the field continuity between practitioner, instrument and tonal spatiality:

“When my (more experienced) fellow students claim to ‘sight-read’ a line of unlearned shōga and work out its fingerings, it appeared that it was not because they had acquired a firmer grasp of the logic on which the correspondence between the shōga [notational] characters and yubitsuke [finger-markings] symbols was made, but because they had accumulated enough experience to recognize the resemblance of the new melody to previously learned pieces and lines and were able to deduce how the melody should go by referring to its title, the overall structure of the piece and the position of a line within it” (Iguchi, 2008, p. 258).

Expression as the telos of musical praxis

When Sudnow described his “going for the sounds”, and eventually his “going for the jazz”, he introduced a wilful orientation as a requirement for effective musical practice. In motivated motion, the sounds of the instrument somehow carry a “demanding character” that guides them toward their own completion. Musical gestures are imbued with idiosyncratic physiognomies, which are rarely perceived as such. In its physiognomic dimension, the affective tint of musical gestures provides the motivation for their fulfilment. The perception of music is in this sense directly expressive; its motions are immediately captured as gloomy, cheerful, solemn, obscure, light, menacing, jazzy, cool, etc., just as timbres are perceived as pointy, round, tight, and so forth. It follows that the range of physiognomic qualifications is potentially as wide-ranging as that of felt nuances. The physiognomic character of perception gives substance to the claim that musical form extends well beyond the realm of the audible, and, as far as the development of musical topography is concerned, spins a unitary thread between motility, affect, listening and imagination. This unitary thread sustains the aforementioned field continuity, and provides a motivation for the fulfilment of musical gestures.

While exploring the expressive dimension of experience, Rudolph Arnheim (1949; 1984) described the process of musical learning as the discovery of an expressive theme, namely the discovery of a guiding principle that allows the practitioner to grasp the qualitative character that should be sought throughout the progress of a musical piece. Arnheim illustrates this point with a drawing lesson. When attempting to grasp the model's physiognomy, “the student will watch proportions and directions, but not as geometrical properties in themselves. Rather will these formal properties be perceived as being functionally dependent upon the primarily observed expression, and the correctness and incorrectness of each stroke will be judged on the basis of whether or not it captures the dynamic “mood” of the subject”. Additionally, “…whereas the artificial concentration on formal qualities will leave the student at a loss as to which pattern to select among innumerable and equally acceptable ones, an expressive theme will serve as a natural guide to forms that fit the purpose” (p. 107, italics are mine). Arnheim suggests that the same principle is equally applicable to any artistic manifestation, stressing that even when asking for a description of formal qualities in a piece, listeners spontaneously draw on its expressive qualities (p. 106).

Although both listeners and performers alike usually enter musical motion through a local gesture (a motif, sequence, or phrase), the latter appears to be already meaningfully embedded in the wholeness of the piece. The acknowledgement of an expressive theme not only foregoes any differentiation of significant components, but is also the condition of possibility and the starting point for such a differentiation. Before identifying individual tones and intervals, the harmony student follows a cadence's motion, as she or he is able to grasp (or not) its colour and texture. To illustrate the expressive role of the gesture in musical practice, we may ask how can a cadence be “weak”, “strong”, “deceptive” or even “evasive” based only upon a description of the relationship between the chords and the tones that compose them? In this case, cadences are named after their implied gestures. ¹¹

Our earlier discussion of Polanyi's principle of dual control of action sets the stage to establish a convergence point with Arnheim's view on the role of expression. It suggests that bringing attention exclusively to the formal aspects of a piece confronts one with a variety of potentially inconsistent options so as to miss any cohesive principle. In contrast, picking an expressive theme naturally conducts the practitioner into a coherent movement. Polanyi defended the idea that a detachment from what is felt in order to attend to formal (or purely mechanical) particularities of the task at hand would render the musician's work impossible. Actually, music would lose its meaning if it underwent what Polanyi called destructive analysis: namely, focusing on the formally definable particularities of the score (or, on the mechanical procedure required to perform the piece) that are as such devoid of musical meaning. The separation of the focal and subsidiary aspects of the attentional field into distinct entities would simply dismantle both the extensional principle and the expressive thread of musical gestures.

In accordance with Polanyi's principles, we can say that the expressive theme or motif plays the role of recurrent fixation point for the practitioner's attention. An expressive thread thus forms the horizon of every functional relationship underlying the musician's playing, the telos that guides her or his action. This horizon allows for a constant re-launching of the interpretative quest without running the risk of “draining” the piece or loosing track of its musical north. Even when she or he seems to have achieved a “definitive” version of a piece, the interpreter can always do a rerun of it without damaging its freshness and appeal. The expressive horizon of skill engages the musician in a re-evaluation at each replay.

The acknowledgement of the expressive character of experience highlights the mutual implication between its perceptual, affective, motivational and axiological aspects. It is the disregard of expressivity and of aesthetic dispositions that partly explains the shortcomings of cognitive approaches in dealing with perceptual phenomena and skill development. By promoting a dislocation between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of perception, theories of cognition have rendered aesthetic, and particularly musical phenomena unintelligible. In the best case, this goes accompanied by an overall downplay of aesthetic phenomena; otherwise, we are faced with a worrying silence concerning the issue (Rosenthal, 2004a). The mutual implication between quantitative and qualitative aspects of music is vital to the constitution of the thematic field and to the movement of attention that reconfigures this field. Expression guides musical skill indistinctly at the level of reception and performance, evidencing an immediate mode of participation (pre-comprehension) in musical gestures.

Intergenerational reconstitution of musical topography

Up to this point, I have mainly focused on a particular dimension of the instrument's musical topography by describing it as an extensive principle of one's own body. I have attempted to describe it as a progressive coupling that takes place between handling an instrument and its audible potentialities. In melding bodily and musical gestures, the pursuit of expression is transposed into complementary juncture points. Sudnow provides an illustration of it when he sings in order to better capture the required melodic dynamics. However, the notion of musical topography would be incomplete without the stylistic values that populate musical praxis, since gestures are effectively expressive insofar as they belong to (or stand against) a particular tradition. As Lassègue (2012) has argued, a proper account of technical activity would be incomplete if one were to consider it only in terms of organ projection. If we are to capture the semiotic dimension of technical activity, we should acknowledge the sociality of technical gestures from the start. In short, “in order to take place, a human activity needs social landmarks that must be recognised as such by those involved in the activity” (p. 144). More specifically, the process through which a practitioner becomes socialized within a particular tradition should be characterized as one of tuition. However, a full development of this notion would derail us from our aim, and deserves to be attended in detail. ¹² I will limit myself to outline the ways tradition can be involved in the formation of musical topography.

The aspects of musical topography that have been discussed in terms of motility should now be casted in its cultural dimension, which operates as a background in the appropriation of musical skill. The latter does not arise strictly as a private ability but it engages in reciprocity with public norms: it rests upon a tradition woven by collective, practical and symbolic motifs, developed by successive generations. Just as the history of our native language precedes our insertion in it, a constellation of practices from which a tradition stems is instituted before one's effort to join in it. The cultural background of skill is clearly illustrated by Polanyi:

“The structure of knowing, revealed by the limits of specifiability, thus fuses our subsidiary awareness of the particulars belonging to our subject matter, with the cultural background of our knowing. To this extent knowing is an indwelling: that is, a utilization of a framework for unfolding our understanding in accordance with the indications and standards imposed by the framework” (Polanyi, 1961, p. 468).

Although the examples considered so far could appear restricted to the manual handling of the instrument, they also reveal the works of interpretative normativity. A drummer can smoothly shift from one particular customary grip to another as she or he goes through different sections in a piece of music (she also may alternate between different parts of her or his instrument's body). Similarly, the interpretation of a piece from a particular period obeys a set of aesthetic standards, which are in turn closely bound to a distinctive constellation of gestures. Every effective movement is affected by the aesthetics of its life/art-world. As she or he becomes increasingly familiar with different musical genres, the interpreter adapts her or his corporality to this multiplicity of stylistic demands. Irrespective of the particular genre she or he is dealing with, her or his “feel” and “touch” will be her or his own and will be expressive of her or his idiosyncrasies. However, her or his discovery of each genre will suppose realizing their specific possibilities and restrictions, which will work as permanent guidelines:

“[T]hrough repeated work in chord grabbing, an alignment of the field relative to the body's distancing potentials begins to take place, and this alignment process varies in delicacy and need in accordance with the form of the music. The rock-and-roll pianist's capacities for lookless left-hand reaching differ from the baroque's specialist's, and these both from the stride-style jazz pianist's. Every musical style as the creation of human bodies entails correspondingly constituted tactile facilities for its performers” (Sudnow, 1978, p. 13)

Thus, although the ensemble of practices mentioned above participates in a cycle of sedimentation of standards, the norms they institute are not established once and for all. Just as the potentials for action-perception deployed throughout the “bonding” between the practitioner and her or his instrument, these norms display different degrees of freedom and in situ fine-tuning (namely, they do not precede the instrumentalist's actual praxis). The exercise of musical praxis both emanates from and contributes to feed a cultural sensorium, a common sensibility. Just as with the structure of tacit knowledge, the normative aspects of such sensorium operate at different degrees of salience (implicit/explicit axis). ¹³

Imagination as embedded in musical praxis. A note on Vico's fantasia

I hope it became clear by now that the development of a musical topography does not consist in a mere tag-placement on the instrument's body, but in the qualification of a spatiality that is hardly exhausted in terms of machine manipulation. Before coming to a close, I would like to add that the constitution of a musical topography entails an imaginative exercise. I have partly advanced this idea with the aspects discussed above; namely, the exploratory (anticipatory) quality of motion, the topography's expressive telos, and its traditional embedding. With these aspects in mind, it should become increasingly apparent that imagination exerts its powers well beyond imagery, encompassing auditory and kinaesthetic modalities. Such notion of imagination would go hand in hand with an underlying intermodal organization of action/perception. Ultimately, this calls for a concept of imagination consistent with a holistic engagement with practical endeavours.

This holistic, participative engagement that motivates the emergence of potentials for action in the encounter between the practitioner and her instrument goes along the lines of what Vico called fantasia. ¹⁴ Granatella (2015), has pointed out the crucial role fantasia plays in Vico's pledge for a primacy of imaginative powers in human indwelling. The fundamental mode of human dwelling in the world is not the one prescribed by rationality, but rather the one described by the genesis of myth. In the mythical dimension of experience, things do not present themselves by means of their ‘thing-like’ properties, but rather in their animated, expressive modality.

“Now, rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things through understanding, homo intelligendo fit omnia. But with perhaps greater truth, this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding, homo non intelligendo fit omnia. For when man understands, he extends his mind to comprehend things; but when he does not understand he makes them out of himself, and by transforming himself, becomes them” (Vico, 1725/1999, §405, p. 160).

Vico's fantasia is tightly bound to affect and sentience (Pern, 2015). The participatory engagement that permeates all human activity grants this linkage. In the case of musical topography, this engagement has been dealt with mainly in two senses. On the one hand, I have stressed how the relationship with the musical instrument is not built upon its “thing-like” qualities, but rather on the achievement of field continuity and depth. This brings forth the role of physiognomic perception and the unfolding of an animated quality that is ingrained in musical-instrumental gestures. These physiognomic qualities are not deciphered, but felt. On the other hand, this engagement has been characterized by an anticipatory quality of motility, which is inseparable from the affective orientation of such physiognomies. This has been further stressed by presenting Polanyi's structure of indwelling, where we are not able to become observers of our own action without distorting it. Once these aspects have been taken into account, the participatory (imaginative) engagement involved in musical activity can be further elaborated by looking at the latter's relationship to myth.

In his study on the sound of the violin, Ernest E Boesch (1993) discussed the relationship between practitioner and instrument in terms of ontogenesis. In line with what we have pointed out above, he considers field continuity to be part of achieving the instrument's mastery, wherein “artist and violin form a symbiotic whole, the I, so to say, blending into the object, and the object melting into the I” (p. 13). Perhaps more interestingly, he has argued that “the sound of the violin is deeply embedded in cultural myths”, particularly, the myth of “pure sound” (p. 12). In order to give in to such holistic engagement, the practitioner undergoes a process of identification with these myths (an identification which can certainly resolve into their refusal, or the adoption of other attitudes toward them). “The violin (…) is a recalcitrant object and to master it requires profound transformations of the individual” (p. 13). Throughout the development of an instrument's musical topography, qualities of sound and personal qualities develop alongside one another. In this sense, technical activity is motivated by the pursuit of inner qualities: “Purity of sound, purity of heart, purity of body, thus, all belong to the same myth – although with different connotations” (Boesch, 1993). Seen from a mythical angle, the mastery of the instrument becomes the mastery of oneself. Although I have mostly dealt with aesthesic qualities of the relationship with the instrument, this view also bears ethical implications. In Boesch's example, the myth of “pure sound” embodies a particular ethos that regulates musical praxis. This brings us back to our point on musical praxis as a regulator of standards:

“The young learner will from the very outset be caught between the cultural goal of purity and the natural propensity (not only of children) for noise and dirt. The violin, thus, may begin to symbolize not only the resistance of the object world, but also the conflict between natural penchants and cultural requirements” (Boesch, 1993, pp. 11–12).

In a more epistemological vein, Cassirer has recaptured the spirit of Vico's critique in his article “The perception of things and the perception of expression” (1991). Our scientific tradition has been built upon rejection of a mythical worldview, since the latter is at odds with the “world of facts” that defines the conventional scientific attitude. The perception of expression needs to be (and consequently has been) obliterated from scientific inquiry. Expressive qualities and their colourings are then replaced with sensory qualia, as an effort to attain a quantitative reduction of the former. However, the isolation between “You” and “I” promoted by this “world of facts” runs into serious problems when it gets involved with cultural affairs, since these instances no longer appear as separated. Language, myth and all modes of artistic expression form a single unity (p. 133), a common sense that is overlooked and lost in this “world of facts” (see also Berlin, 1976, pp. 61ff). Running against this trend, expressivity serves as an invitation to reclaim a sensorium commune, both in the sense of an intermodal foundation of perception and in that of a shared social background (koinē aisthesis ¹⁵ ).

Conclusions

The notion of musical topography presented above seeks to contribute to the wider-ranging project of semiotic anthropology (Lassègue et al., 2009), where imagination is understood as an essential part of every semiotic action/perception. In order to do so, I have attempted to emphasise how instruments take on different modalities, both in everyday practice and throughout musical training. Namely, we engage with musical instruments in an array of complementary, co-present dispositions for action within a developmental course. Musical instruments indeed stand to us as what Gilbert Simondon called a reticulate (1958, see pp. 210ff), a knot of aesthesic, mythical, practical and traditional open-ended threads. More generally, the notion of musical topography seeks to describe the engagement with an instrument as an example of our dwelling in practical affairs where, in the words of Tim Ingold, “the organism is not limited by the skin” (2009, p. 153, emphasis in the original), rather than it being part of a system where sentience has little, if any participation. Such notion aims to capture the way in which “practical and mythical aspects of value and meaning are intertwined and cannot be severed from one another” (Lassègue et al., 2009, p. 155). Hopefully, this will bring us closer to a richer portrayal of the common origin of the modalities that partake in actual musical practice and of the developmental processes wherein they become mutually supportive and heightened. From this perspective, musical instruments can be regarded not as mere technological artefacts (emphasizing their thing-like, utilitarian qualities), but as reticulates that participate in a larger thread of technical activity.