Gearing Time Toward Musical Creativity: Conceptual Integration and Material Anchoring in Xenakis’ Psappha

Abstract

Understanding compositional practices is a major goal of musicology and music theory. Compositional practices have been traditionally viewed as disembodied and idiosyncratic. This view makes it hard to integrate musical creativity into our understanding of the general cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. To overcome this unnecessary isolation of musical composition from cognitive science, in this conceptual analysis, we approach compositional processes with the analytic tools of blending theory, material anchoring, and enaction. Our case study is Iannis Xenakis’ use of sieves for distributing rhythmic patterns in Psappha. Though disregarded in previous accounts, the timeline and the gearwheel provide crucial conceptual templates for anchoring Xenakis’ idea of time for this score. This case study of conceptual integration templates for temporal representation seeks to gain insight into musical creativity, embodiment, and blending, especially into how virtual interactions with material structures facilitate the construction of complex meanings.

Oral Tradition as Context for Learning Music From 4E Cognition Compared With Literacy Cultures. Case Studies of Flamenco Guitar Apprenticeship

“…It could be the difference between drawing knowledge from within the individual or receiving it from without (Casas-Mas et al, 2015b). Although flamenco culture of learning is based on the literal transmission of musical knowledge between instrument teacher and student, we have been able to observe this fusion of communicative modalities, such as gestures, the body, the music, and verbal discourse, also in creative processes in other cultures (Besada et al, 2021). This multimodality has repercussions on their sense of identity or self, a state of mind of pre-reflective or embodied subjectivity (Høffding and Schiavio, 2021), and on the capacities or competencies that they integrate into their discourse, such as dance.…”

Gilles Fauconnier and the meaning of a sentence

“…Now it would be interesting to see whether we can incorporate continuous, non discrete elements such as acoustic features (Baayen et al, 2016(Baayen et al, , 2019Baayen & Ramscar, 2015;Chuang et al, 2021), small perceptual changes in the environment (Gibson, 1986;Raja, 2019), the flow of human gestural motion, the details of graphical or pictorial representations, and so many other aspects of human action, linking them directly to meaning. Ed Hutchins' notion of material anchors looks like a good beginning for this (Besada et al, 2021; Gilles Fauconnier and the meaning of a sentence Corela, HS-39 | 2023…”

Neuroscience and New Music: Assessing Behavioral and Cerebral Aspects of Its Perception, Cognition, Induction, and Entrainment

“…However, these kinds of representations are often significant from the composers' side, in a quest of anchoring their particular struggle with temporal conceptions. This topic currently elicits scholarly discussion from cognitive perspectives which acknowledge the importance of embodiment and enaction-from a less radical viewpoint, though-as substantial features of compositional practices (Besada and Pagán Cánovas, 2020;Besada et al, 2021). Rather than a critique of Kozak's position, my last remark is a challenge for future collaboration around overlapping research questions.…”