My book, “Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music Performance: Distributed Cognition in Musical Activity” is now in press.
My Research: Musical performance is a very complex and multi-layered communicative joint activity. Experts in the Western Art Music tradition train for decades to perform at a professional level, and they develop highly specialized ways of thinking about their work. Attempts to codify instrumental knowledge become known as schools of performance, and their explanatory boundaries are often quite narrow, confined to initiates of that stylistic approach (for a great written example, please see David McGill’s discussion of the Tabuteau style of woodwind performance in his book, Sound In Motion, McGill 2007). My research aims to systematically explore the knowledge of instrumentalists in the Western Art Music tradition in order to build, organize, and extend that knowledge as formal research. To do this, I have identified conceptual frameworks that scaffold inquiry on the tacit processes of human interaction in music making.
My Background: I wasn’t always a researcher. In fact, my first ambition in life was to become a professional bassoonist. I trained on the bassoon from 1985-1996, earning a Bachelor of Music degree in Bassoon Performance from the University of British Columbia, and a Master of Music in Bassoon Performance from the Yale School of Music. I was an Artist in Residence at The Banff Centre for the Arts in 1990-1991 and 1993, and received three travel grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, for performances in Italy and Japan. As a young musician, I performed in operas, symphonies, wind ensembles, and chamber ensembles. I particularly enjoyed the genre crossover challenges of woodwind chamber music arrangements performed at weddings and other public venues. Most importantly, I feel so tremendously lucky to have studied and performed with some of the world’s finest musicians. I learned so much from those formative years as a bassoonist, and I want you to know that my research is really an expression of gratitude for the work that my teachers shared with me.
in 2008, I earned a PhD from the Individual Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program at the University of British Columbia. My committee consisted of two music theorists, Dr. William Benjamin and Dr. Alan Dodson, a social scientist Dr. Susan Cox, and a cognitive linguist, the late Dr. Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson. I wrote comprehensive exams in music performance analysis, qualitative research methodology, and three theoretical areas in cognitive science (cognitive metaphor, cognitive systems, enactive cognition). My dissertation project “Systematic Approaches to the Study of Cognition in Western Art Music Performance” used grounded theory research methodology to study how two flutists learned to perform Toru Takemitsu’s Masque for Two Flutes. In the process of gathering, organizing, and analyzing rehearsal and performance data, I found that Herbert H. Clark’s theory of language use had tremendous explanatory power for the kinds of tacit processes employed by the flutists in rehearsal.