Taking the trumpet up there: enactment of embodied high pitch in a multimodal body schema

Abstract

Abstract This contribution examines how an expert musician teaches high pitch as an embodied practice in a digital instruction video. Musical meaning-making in this perspective calls for a naturalized phenomenology which deals with the practice of music teaching, which involves a performing body. The notion of high musical pitch in terms of an abstract embodied image schema is challenged in favor of a multidimensional body schema, conceptualized at the interface between multimodal language, i.e. in speech and gesture, and the affordances imposed on musical production by the human body and the instrument artefact. As a result, the traditional metaphorical take on upward verticality, movement and causal force in image schemata becomes a conceptual background which may lead to errors on behalf of the potential student, and needs to be further enriched by natural local corporeal dimensions: immobility, non-vertical change in the lips, mouth and air flow. Such body schemata can be used in teaching more dynamic concepts about enactive knowledge in the body in interactive contexts of knowledge transmission.