Artistic Practice as Embodied Learning: Reconnecting Pedagogy, Improvisation, and Composition

Almost fourty-five years ago, Joseph Kerman proposed the notion of getting out of analysis, in fact a strategy through criticism to broaden its formalist parameters (Kerman, 1980). Kerman’s argument was flawed in many respects as Agawu pointed out; analysis was necessary in his view to teach “undergraduate music theory” and “basic musical literacy,” (Agawu, 2004: 269) something Kerman would not have denied.
Yet these debates, and their continuation (Horton 2020; Cavett et al. 2023) have missed something more fundamental, especially as ideological ivory towers and territories needed protection. Over the last fourty years the rise of theory courses, has led to a schism between theory as a discipline and theory as a necessary precursor to practice (for learning repertoire, improvisation and composition); this is till prevalent in Universities and conservatoires today. This issue has not been helped by the interdisciplinarity of musicology, by the concomitant continual expansion of the curriculum, and the move away in many university departments from study of ‘the dots’ to other equally-valid forms of engagement with music. Part of this separation results from an educational ideal that differentiation is necessary before integration, something that the somatic thinker Mosche Feldenkrais advocated, but the ‘integration’ element, has more often been left to chance.
This study seeks to make a pedagogical synthesis between theory improvisation and composition, allowing the teacher and student to move freely between these areas, and the student to develop their own sense of autonomy. Artistic research is premised on knowing something, on having some ‘petrol in the tank’, and especially on the ability to make aesthetic choices. This paper develops a critical and reflexive method to do begin this task. It begins by presenting a creative rethinking of species counterpoint, a foundation for thinking in Schenkerian analysis (Forte and Gilbert, 1983, also played out through Kennan 1987, Schubert 2003, Davidian 2015, and Denisch 2017) through Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741). This develops a resource for pedagogy and practice through teaching musical techniques of composition.
I present a layered-cake of musical lines against the figured bass of the theme (moving from semibreves to quavers) as an exercise that inculcates various aspects of var. 1 of the ‘Goldbergs’, and then I explore the codes and ramifications of this that allow both historical sensitivity and creative development. This contextualized exercise provides a stepping-stone to a discussion of Variation 1 (prefigured in my species example), and the development of complete variations beginning with a given “invention” (Dreyfus 1997), and then moving to the composition of new ideas. I suggest how these exercises can be used for teaching improvisation and show how this invaluable connection can be developed through other models (‘la folia’ for example). This model of thinking is historically connected to partimenti (Gjerdingen 2010, 2020), and, following Feldenkrais’s thinking (Sholl 2019, 2021), I provide different solutions to the same exercises. This strategy attempts to promote an “adaptive flexibility” (Thelen and Smith 2004) in which students can enactively and organically learn musical and technical fluency, while also developing their creativity and autonomy.