Cognition and the body

perspectives from music education

Wayne Bowman

pp. 29-50

in: Liora Bresler (ed), Knowing bodies, moving minds, Berlin, Springer, 2004

Abstract

Appeals to multiple-intelligence theory have become common currency among educators in the arts, apparently because status as "an intelligence" is seen as vindication of the educational integrity of artistic undertakings. Unfortunately, ascendancy to the status of intelligence has not been accompanied by careful examination of what intelligence means. We have become assertive about its plurality, to be sure. But "it" remains more or less the kind of cognitive construct it always has been: abstract, mental, cerebral, disembodied. After years of unsuccessful urging that music's alignment with feeling made it an essential corrective to such one-sided cognitive activity, we appear to have decided in recent years that there is more strategic clout to be found on the rational side of the cognitive/emotional divide. What we have not done, precisely, is to question the nature of the divide itself: this stubborn dichotomy between knowing that counts and that which does not, in light of which musical and artistic endeavors invariably come up short. In this essay, I explore from the perspective of musical experience what cognition means—of what intelligence that is musical consists on the assumption that there can be no genuine progress in our efforts to explain and justify the contributions of artistic endeavors to education until the meanings of things like intelligence and cognition are reconstructed.