Dylan van der Schyff
Dylan van der Schyff is an improvising percussionist and a researcher in interdisciplinary musicology. He received his PhD from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and holds master’s degrees in humanities (Simon Fraser University) and music psychology (University of Sheffield). His postdoctoral work was hosted by the Faculty of Music at the University Oxford, and was funded by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Dylan’s scholarship draws on developments in embodied cognitive science, phenomenological philosophy, and musicology to explore questions related to how and why music is meaningful for human beings. Much of this research focuses on developing possibilities for thought and action in practical areas such as improvisation and creativity, performance, and music education. His writing has also explored the relationships between music, emotion, and empathy, the foundations of musical creativity, and the emergence of musicality in human evolution. Dylan’s published work appears in journals that cover a broad spectrum of fields in the sciences and humanities. He has also contributed chapters to edited editions, including Oxford University Press Handbooks. He is -co-author of 'Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality' (forthcoming on MIT Press). As a performer (percussion, electronics) and producer, Dylan has contributed to almost 200 recordings, spanning the fields of jazz, free improvisation, sound art, experimental, electronic, and ‘new music’. Additionally, he has contributed to numerous cross-disciplinary collaborations involving dance, theatre, film, and spoken word.
Dylan is Associate Professor in Music at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (University of Melbourne) where he coordinates the honours and graduate programs in Jazz and Improvisation. He also lectures in drumming, ensemble practice, and other areas.
Dylan’s scholarship draws on developments in embodied cognitive science, phenomenological philosophy, and musicology to explore questions related to how and why music is meaningful for human beings. Much of this research focuses on developing possibilities for thought and action in practical areas such as improvisation and creativity, performance, and music education. His writing has also explored the relationships between music, emotion, and empathy, the foundations of musical creativity, and the emergence of musicality in human evolution. Dylan’s published work appears in journals that cover a broad spectrum of fields in the sciences and humanities. He has also contributed chapters to edited editions, including Oxford University Press Handbooks. He is -co-author of 'Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality' (forthcoming on MIT Press). As a performer (percussion, electronics) and producer, Dylan has contributed to almost 200 recordings, spanning the fields of jazz, free improvisation, sound art, experimental, electronic, and ‘new music’. Additionally, he has contributed to numerous cross-disciplinary collaborations involving dance, theatre, film, and spoken word.
Dylan is Associate Professor in Music at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (University of Melbourne) where he coordinates the honours and graduate programs in Jazz and Improvisation. He also lectures in drumming, ensemble practice, and other areas.
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Books by Dylan van der Schyff
Musical Bodies, Musical Minds presents a fascinating approach to human musicality based on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. Traditionally, the study of the musical mind has been guided by a perspective that sees cognition as information-processing confined to the brain of the perceiver. Accordingly, musical cognition is often thought to involve internal neural mechanisms acting in response to external events – a causally linear process that entails the internal (in-the-head) representational recovery of an external musical environment. The ‘enactive’ approach developed in Musical Bodies, Musical Minds offers a radically different perspective. It explores musical cognition as a form of embodied ‘sense-making’ that is central to the ways living agents interact with the socio-material environments they inhabit and actively shape. This approach highlights the situated, distributed, and corporeal dimensions of the musical mind. In doing so, it provides alternative ways of thinking about musical perception, the development of musicality in infancy, its emergence in human evolution, as well as the nature of musical emotions and musical creativity. Musical Bodies, Musical Minds also considers the important practical implications of this approach for music education and everyday life.
Expected publication in 2020.
Papers & Chapters by Dylan van der Schyff
An enactive approach to music education is explored through the lens of critical ontology. Assumptions central to the Western academic music culture are critically discussed; and the conception of ‘ontological education’ is introduced as an alternative framework. It is argued that this orientation embraces more primordial ways of knowing and being, revealing the fundamentally autopoietic nature of the embodied musical mind. This enactive perspective is then contrasted with constructivist approaches; and is situated within the context of care ethics. Ethical and practical possibilities for an enactive pedagogical ecology are suggested with the goal of helping music educators develop approaches based in possibility, imagination, and interactivity, rather than conformity to standardized practices and conventional ways of thinking. To conclude, the importance of critical ontology and the enactivist perspective is considered for music teacher education if we as a society are to open up to the full possibilities of music for human well-being.
Musical Bodies, Musical Minds presents a fascinating approach to human musicality based on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. Traditionally, the study of the musical mind has been guided by a perspective that sees cognition as information-processing confined to the brain of the perceiver. Accordingly, musical cognition is often thought to involve internal neural mechanisms acting in response to external events – a causally linear process that entails the internal (in-the-head) representational recovery of an external musical environment. The ‘enactive’ approach developed in Musical Bodies, Musical Minds offers a radically different perspective. It explores musical cognition as a form of embodied ‘sense-making’ that is central to the ways living agents interact with the socio-material environments they inhabit and actively shape. This approach highlights the situated, distributed, and corporeal dimensions of the musical mind. In doing so, it provides alternative ways of thinking about musical perception, the development of musicality in infancy, its emergence in human evolution, as well as the nature of musical emotions and musical creativity. Musical Bodies, Musical Minds also considers the important practical implications of this approach for music education and everyday life.
Expected publication in 2020.
An enactive approach to music education is explored through the lens of critical ontology. Assumptions central to the Western academic music culture are critically discussed; and the conception of ‘ontological education’ is introduced as an alternative framework. It is argued that this orientation embraces more primordial ways of knowing and being, revealing the fundamentally autopoietic nature of the embodied musical mind. This enactive perspective is then contrasted with constructivist approaches; and is situated within the context of care ethics. Ethical and practical possibilities for an enactive pedagogical ecology are suggested with the goal of helping music educators develop approaches based in possibility, imagination, and interactivity, rather than conformity to standardized practices and conventional ways of thinking. To conclude, the importance of critical ontology and the enactivist perspective is considered for music teacher education if we as a society are to open up to the full possibilities of music for human well-being.
This thesis consists of an introduction and seven essays that develop possibilities for philosophy of music and music education through the lenses of phenomenology and the ‘enactive’ approach to mind. The phenomenological-enactive perspective presents a compelling alternative to dominant information-processing or so-called ‘cognitivist’ models by embracing an embodied and relational understanding of perception and cognition. It therefore offers new opportunities for exploring the nature and meaning of music and education that have both ethical and practical implications. While the essays may be read as stand-alone pieces, they also share a number of concepts and concerns. Because of this, they are organized into four parts according to the general themes they develop. Part I provides a general introduction to the basic ontological questions that motivate the essays. Here I discuss my path as a scholar, introduce the phenomenological and enactive perspectives, and briefly consider how they align with pedagogical theory. Building on these concerns, the following essay adopts a ‘critically ontological’ orientation. It draws out a number of reductive assumptions over the nature of music, education and what human being and knowing entails. In response, it posits a general framework for a music pedagogy based in enactive bio-ethical principles. Part II explores the nature of musical experience in more detail. Here knowledge in embodied cognitive science is developed towards an enactive approach to musical emotions, and to reconsider the problematic notion of (musical) ‘qualia’. Part III discusses practical applications of phenomenology for music and arts education––first in the context of private music instruction (drumming pedagogy), and then through the development of multimedia arts- inquiry projects. Part IV draws on enactivism to explore the deep continuity between music, improvisation, and the fundamental movements of life. The first paper suggests possibilities for curriculum development and self-assessment in improvisation pedagogy. The concluding essay brings together many of the insights discussed in the previous papers––recasting them in light of Eastern philosophy to reassert the relational, holistic, and “life based” understanding of mind, music and education that lies at the heart of an enactive music pedagogy.
The orthodox approach to the mind and its origins is examined; and its influence on music cognition research is discussed. Alternative embodied, developmental, ecological and bio-cultural perspectives on cognition and the musical mind are considered. The ‘enactive’ approach to embodied cognition is then offered as a theoretical framework that better accommodates these broader and more nuanced ways of understanding musical meaning. To conclude, the relevance of the enactive approach is considered for music education, performance and practice.
The embodied approach to cognition associated with the interdisciplinary research program known as ‘enactivism’ is posing a growing challenge to traditional dualistic conceptions based in standard ‘information-processing’ or ‘mind-as-computer' models. The enactive approach sees bodily, affective and cognitive development as ontologically continuous with each other. As such it highlights the perceptual autonomy of the organism with regard to the kinds of ‘meanings’ it enacts through its history of structural coupling with the environment––arguing that the relationship between a living creature and its environment involves dynamic self-generating or 'autopoietic' processes whereby the system 'enacts' its own domain of meaning through sensorimotor activity. As we discuss, this approach allows us to reexamine music cognition beginning at the embodied-affective origins of self- hood and intersubjectivity, where musicality may be considered as a primordial sense-making capacity that plays a central role in how we enact the socio-cultural worlds we inhabit. Such insights support recent attempts to decentre the dominant Western academic approach to music education, which is increasingly criticized for its focus on the depersonalized reproduction of musical works and norms, as well as for the reductive and disembodied assumptions it makes about the nature of communication, learning, knowledge, aesthetics and what musical experience entails. We outline such criticisms and explore how key issues and ideas associated with enactive cognition may offer new ways of thinking about and doing music education. Most importantly perhaps, we consider how an enactive approach to the musical mind may help educators develop more adaptive, relational and communal pedagogical perspectives that embrace possibility, creativity, and the unique sets of relationships that emerge in the living pedagogical ecology. With this in mind, we conclude by discussing what an enactive pedagogical environment might entail and suggest some possibilities for practice and research.
present collection of articles is conceived around the following five themes: (i) body and action,
(ii) technology,
(iii) lived experience and meaning-making,
(iv) pedagogical implications, and
(v) beyond the musical instrument.