What does it mean to enact a jazz beat as a creative performer? This article offers a critical reading of Iyer’s much-cited theory on rhythmic enaction. We locate the sonic environment approach in Iyer’s theory, and criticize him for advancing a one-to-one relationship between everyday perception and full-fledged aural competence of jazz musicians, and for comparing the latter with non-symbolic behaviour of non-human organisms. As an alternative, we suggest a Merleau-Ponty-inspired concept of rhythmic enaction, which we call the enactive communicative (...) approach. Key to this approach is the fact that jazz musicians play by ear, and that the beat emerges because of reciprocal, real-time aural communication. From this perspective, we outline the temporality of a jazz beat as a holistic and dialectical temporal structure. Throughout the discussions, we use John Coltrane’s ‘Trane’s Slo Blues’ as a point of reference. (shrink)

This article proposes a communicative, imitative, and reflective account of musical learning and expertise. It starts from an affirmative yet critical reading of Høffding and collaborators, notably their idea of a musical arch, meant to bridge distinctions between low-level procedural enactment and high-level reflective cognition. While we embrace much of their analysis, we argue that they uphold tensions between these levels. Drawing on recent enactivist thought, phenomenological and hermeneutic resources, and developmental psychology, we propose a ‘linguistic turn’ that allows us (...) to situate the enactive body in what has been called an ‘original communication-situation’. The original communication-situation encompasses procedural proto-linguistic behaviour and a reflexive level of linguistic co-intentionality procedurally coupled with other bodies. From this perspective, musical co-creation within the normative space of the musical arch is a dialectical actualization of vertical and horizontal experience, reflecting transformative accomplishments of symbolic bodies within a linguistic field of participatory sense-making. The normative space of musical performance is the result of emergent features of music as embodied social practice. (shrink)

This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original situations of communication, this view rejects both autonomist and direct continuity views of the art-everyday relation. We start by (...) situating the idea of linguistic bodies within the enactive approach, spelling out relevant aspects concerning the significance of language for human life and perception (Sect. 2). Then we embark on a discussion of aspects of Shaun Gallagher’s and Alva Noë’s enactivist perspectives on art experience, highlighting places where their views align with and depart from ours (Sect. 3). The last two sections aim to lay out the transformative view in more detail, proposing a pluralistic understanding of art media and a view of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought (Sects. 4 and 5). (shrink)