Enacting Musical Aesthetics: The Embodied Experience of Live Music (Open Access)
Remy Martin & Nanette Nielsen (Shared first authors)
The vitality and affective potential of the live concert experience is a result of rich, cross-sensory interactions and varied participatory practices. The complexity of such entanglements has recently led philosophers to argue for an enactive, affordance-based approach that interrogates a variety of perceptual and sensory possibilities inherent in aesthetic experiences. Further, Shaun Gallagher’s recent addition of the 4As (Affect, Agency, Affordance, Autonomy) to the 4Es (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended) for clarifying mind–world relations seem to have potent explanatory power for these kinds of encounters. Building on such current philosophical approaches while examining specific (and actual) live musical engagement, this article offers an interpretation of selected audience data from the MusicLab Copenhagen with the Danish String Quartet research concert to discuss particular responses from the audience physically present at the venue. Responding to neuroaesthetic approaches, we clarify the audience members’ individual and collective aesthetic experience through an enactive, affordance-based approach. We suggest that what is at play in the live concert environment is a mode of attentive dynamic listening. Rather than seeking to characterize the audience as passively responding to music, a 4Es/4As approach to aesthetic experience seeks to clarify embodied-enactive audience engagement for which anticipation is a dynamic factor that enables further musical action and resonance, also for the musicians on stage.
Mind surfing: attention in musical absorption (Open Access)
Simon Høffding, Nanette Nielsen, Bruno Laeng (shared first authors)
Literature in the psychology of music and in cognitive psychology claims – paradoxically – that musical absorption includes processes of both focused attention and mind wandering. We examine this paradox and aim to resolve it by integrating accounts from cognitive psychology on attention and mind wandering with qualitative phenomenological research on some of the world’s most skilled musicians. We claim that a mode of experience that involves intense attention and what superficially seems like mind wandering is possible. We propose to grasp this different mode of experience with a new concept: “mind surfing”. We suggest that a conjoined consideration of attention’s intensive and selective capacities can partially explain how one can be both focused and freely “surfing” on a “musical wave” at the same time. Finally, we couple this novel and foundational work on attention with a 4E cognition account to show how music acts as an affective and cognitive scaffold, thereby enabling the surfing.
- Nielsen, Nanette (2020). Den musikalske etik. In Varkøy, Øivind & Holm, Henrik (Ed.),Musikkfilosofiske tekster. Tanker om musikk – og språk, tolkning, erfaring, tid, klang, stillhet m.m. . Cappelen Damm Akademisk. ISSN 9788202696818. p. 61–77. doi: 10.23865/noasp.115.ch4.
- Nielsen, Nanette & Phillips-Hutton, Ariana (2020). Ethics. In Nielsen, Nanette; McAuley, Tomas; Levinson, Jerrold & Phillips-Hutton, Ariana (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780199367313. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199367313.013.15.
- Nielsen, Nanette; McAuley, Tomas & Levinson, Jerrold (2020). Introduction. In Nielsen, Nanette; McAuley, Tomas; Levinson, Jerrold & Phillips-Hutton, Ariana (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780199367313. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199367313.013.61.
- Nielsen, Nanette (2019). ‘Carl Nielsen, the Modern Musical Philosopher: Life as an Aesthetic Experience’. In Manos, Perrakis (Eds.), Life as an Aesthetic Idea of Music. Universal Edition.ISSN 978-3-7024-7621-2. p. 79–103.Show summary
- Nielsen, Nanette & Evans, Elizabeth (2015). Preludium: The Memory Dealer. Journal of Sonic Studies. ISSN 2212-6252. 9.
- Nielsen, Nanette & Hibberd, Sarah (2015). Immersion and Proximity: Music, Sound, and Subjectivity in The Memory Dealer. Journal of Sonic Studies. ISSN 2212-6252. 9.
- Nielsen, Nanette (2013). ‘Ernst Krenek’s “problem of freedom” in Jonny spielt auf’. Twentieth-Century Music. ISSN 1478-5722. 10(1), p. 25–57. doi: 10.1017/s1478572212000400. Full text in Research Archive
- Nielsen, Nanette (2011). Opera for the people: melodrama in Hugo Herrmann’s Vasantasena (1930). In Hibberd, Sarah (Eds.), Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama.Ashgate. ISSN 978-1-4094-0082-0.
- Nielsen, Nanette (2007). ‘Sein oder Schein?: Paul Bekker’s “mirror image” and the ethical voice of humane opera’. Opera Quarterly. ISSN 0736-0053. 23(2-3), p. 295–310. doi: 10.1093/oq/kbn042. Full text in Research Archive
- Nielsen, Nanette; Morgenstern, Martin & Steichen, James (2007). ‘To the Mirror Image’, by Paul Bekker. Opera Quarterly. ISSN 0736-0053. 23(2-3), p. 311–317. doi: 10.1093/oq/kbn043.Full text in Research Archive
- Nielsen, Nanette & Hibberd, Sarah (2003). ‘Music in Melodrama: “the Burden of Ineffable Expression”?’. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. ISSN 2048-2906. 31(1), p. 30–40.
