Towards an Embodied Instrumental Music Pedagogy

This chapter examines the role of embodiment in instrumental music education and creativity development. In contrast to the traditional conservatoire approach, which often reduces the musician’s body to a mere tool for reproducing predetermined musical interpretations, it proposes an alternative framework that places bodily engagement at the core of instrumental music learning. Drawing on theories of embodied music interaction, dynamical systems, and non-linear pedagogy, this chapter presents an embodied music pedagogy as an integrative approach that acknowledges how musical understanding emerges through an embodied interaction with music. Such interaction is deemed necessary to engage with music creatively. It builds on the basic mechanism of musical interaction, namely entrainment, alignment, and prediction. The presented embodied music pedagogy is explained based on its theoretical foundations, which include the theory of embodied interaction, dynamical systems theory, and non-linear pedagogy in conjunction with the constraints-led approach. Viewing a lesson as a whole of continuously interacting components (teacher, learner, content), this pedagogy argues that musical skills and understanding emerge from these dynamic interactions over time as shaped by a set of individual, task, and environmental constraints. Addressing the context of instrumental music education, this chapter argues that the possibility to engage in an embodied interaction with the music played and to navigate the affordance landscape creatively depends on incorporating the musical instrument as a natural extension of the musician. It explores how musical creativity emerges dynamically through the navigation of affordances in the interaction between performer, instrument, and musical environment. Finally, it presents a movement-based, or kinemusical, approach to instrumental music education that aims to foster creativity through integrating movement and music playing. After explaining the basic premises of this approach, it discursively elaborates on how such an approach may foster creative music playing. A basic idea is that this approach fosters metastable states where learners navigate multiple – bodily, instrumental, and musical – affordances, thereby creating the condition for creative musical expression beyond conventional performance patterns.