Choking RECtified: embodied expertise beyond Dreyfus

On a Dreyfusian account performers choke when they reflect upon and interfere with established routines of purely embodied expertise. This basic explanation of choking remains popular even today and apparently enjoys empirical support. Its driving insight can be understood through the lens of diverse philosophical visions of the embodied basis of expertise. These range from accounts of embodied cognition that are ultra conservative with respect to representational theories of cognition to those that are more radically embodied. This paper provides an account of the acquisition of embodied expertise, and explanation of the choking effect, from the most radically enactive, embodied perspective, spelling out some of its practical implications and addressing some possible philosophical challenges. Specifically, we propose: (i) an explanation of how skills can be acquired on the basis of ecological dynamics; and (ii) a non-linear pedagogy that takes into account how contentful representations might scaffold skill acquisition from a radically enactive perspective.

The musical enculturation of Irish traditional musicians: An ethnographic study of learning processes

The enculturation of Irish traditional musicians involves informal, non-formal, and sometimes formal learning processes in a number of different settings, including traditional music sessions, workshops, festivals, and classes. Irish traditional musicians also learn directly from family, peers, and mentors and by using various forms of technology. Each experience contributes to the enculturation process in meaningful and complementary ways. The ethnographic research discussed in this dissertation suggests that within Irish traditional music culture, enculturation occurs most effectively when learners experience a multitude of learning practices. A variety of experiences insures that novices receive multiple opportunities for engagement and learning. If a learner finds one learning practice ineffective, there are other avenues of enculturation. This thesis explores the musical enculturation of Irish traditional musicians. It focuses on the process of becoming a musician by drawing on methodologies and theories from ethnomusicology, education, and Irish traditional music studies. Data was gathered through multiple ethnographic methodologies. Fieldwork based on participant-observation was carried out in a variety of learning contexts, including traditional music sessions, festivals, workshops, and weekly classes. Additionally, interviews with twenty accomplished Irish traditional musicians provide diverse narratives and firsthand insight into musical development and enculturation. These and other methodologies are discussed in Chapter 1. The three main chapters of the thesis explore various common learning experiences. Chapter 2 explores how Irish traditional musicians learn during social and musical interactions between peers, mentors, and family members, and focuses on live music-making which occurs in private homes, sessions, and concerts. These informal and non-formal learning experiences primarily take place outside of organizations and institutions. The interview data suggests these learning experiences are perhaps the most pervasive and influential in terms of musical enculturation. Chapter 3 discusses learning experience in more organized settings, such as traditional music classes, workshops, summer schools, and festivals. The role of organizations such as Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann and pipers’ clubs are discussed from the point of view of the learner. Many of the learning experiences explored in this chapter are informal, non-formal, and sometimes formal in nature, depending on the philosophy of the organization, institution, and individual teacher. The interview data and field observations indicate that learning in these contexts is common and plays a significant role in enculturation, particularly for traditional musicians who were born during and after the 1970s. Chapter 4 explores the ways Irish traditional musicians use technology, including written sources, phonography, videography, websites, and emerging technologies, during the enculturation process. Each type of technology presents different educational implications, and traditional musicians use these technologies in diverse ways and some more than others. For this, and other reasons, technology plays a complex role during the process of musical enculturation. Drawing on themes which emerge during Chapter 2, 3, and 4, the final chapter of this dissertation explores overarching patterns of enculturation within Irish traditional music culture. This ethnographic work suggests that longevity of participation and engagement in multiple learning and performance opportunities foster the enculturation of Irish traditional musicians. Through numerous and prolonged participation in music-making, novices become accustomed to and learn musical, social, and cultural behaviours. The final chapter also explores interconnections between learning experiences and also proposes directions for future research.

Transitions: From novice participation to expertise, pre-school 'matters' in an Irish pre-school community

This in depth, qualitative, participant observer study tracks children's transition experiences from novice to experienced membership of their pre-school community. It also considers adult roles in mediating this process in the context of the recent introduction of a universal free-pre-school year for children growing up in Ireland. Participation and the space to negotiate a participatory identity is understood in this study as a key element of positive experiences of early years transitions, within pre-school and beyond. The underlying theoretical framework is socio-cultural. This approach shifts from a scientific positivist view of thinking and learning as an individual inside the head process and asserts the historical, social, cultural as well as the situated context of learning and meaning making All participants, including myself as researcher, are recognised, explored and valued as embedded in the cultural context studied. In a sense, this approach tilts the worlds being observed through participation in them and reflects them in new light. The aim is to interpret and reflect the multiple realities constructed in this context rather than seek a truth out there waiting to be found. Special efforts are made to be invited in to and acknowledge children's expertise in the cultural worlds they negotiate with peers and adults in pre-school. The aim is to better understand what children may find motivating, interesting or problematic as they interpret reproduce and transform meaning within their play and learning worlds. My aim is for an honest rendering of the voices of stakeholders in pre-school communities from teachers, parents, and policy makers to children themselves. It makes visible constraints; potentials and possibilities within everyday Irish pre-school practices in the situated context studied as well as the broader societal, legislative and macro policy influences it reflects. Casting light on the taken for granted opens the possibility of adaptation or transformation. Transition itself can act as a tool to meet the changing needs of children on their developmental pathways across the life cycle

ELGAR AND MART&: THE CELLO WORKS AND MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF TWO REMARKABLE, SELF-TAUGHT, NATIONALISTIC COMPOSERS

The British Edward Elgar and Czech Bohuslav MartinB were two of the most prominent Nationalistic composers of their respective countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their musical patriotism incorporates the unique paths of their lives as socially isolated and self-taught composers as expressed their outstanding Nationalistic compositions produced through the period of history encompassing the two World Wars.In the first chapter of this dissertation, a brief biography of Elgar is presented and the essential aspects of his formative years influencing him to become a self-taught musician are discussed. The second chapter demonstrates Elgar's musical characteristics through the study of a selection of his masterpieces. In the third chapter, a brief biography of Martinti is presented along with a history of his musical development, characterized by his social isolation during four different periods of his life-his residences in PoliCka, Prague, Paris, and then in the United States. The fourth chapter considers MartinB's musical characteristics as revealed through the study of a selection of his greatest works. In support of this doctoral project, I performed two recitals of cello works by Elgar and Martini3 at the University of Maryland, College Park. The first recital, accompanied by Susan Slingland and Hiroko Yamazaki, included three of Martini3's works, Sonata No. 2 for Cello and Piano (1941); Variations on a Theme of Rossini for Cello and Piano (1 942); and Sonata No. 3 for Cello and Piano (1952). The second recital, accompanied by Wonyoung Chang and Naoko Takao, presented Martini3's Sonata No. 1 for Cello and Piano (1939) and Elgar's Concerto for Cello and Orchestra Op. 85 in E minor (1 919).

Sikh Sabad Kirtan as a Musical Construction of Memory

The performance of devotional music in India has been an active, sonic conduit where spiritual identities are shaped and forged, and both history and mythology lived out and remembered daily. For the followers of Sikhism, congregational hymn singing has been the vehicle through which text, melody and ritual act as repositories of memory, elevating memory to a place where historical and social events can be reenacted and memorialized on levels of spiritual significance. This dissertation investigates the musical process of Shabad Kirtan, Sikh hymn singing, in a Sikh musical service as a powerful vehicle to forge a sense of identification between individual and the group. As an intimate part of Sikh life from birth to death, the repertoire of Shabad Kirtan draws from a rich mosaic of classical and folk genres as well as performance styles, acting as a musical and cognitive archive. Through a detailed analysis of the Asa Di Var service, Shabad Kirtan is explored as a phenomenological experience where time, place and occasion interact as a meaningful unit through which the congregation creates and recreates themselves, invoking deep memories and emotional experiences. Supported by explanatory tables, diagrams and musical transcriptions, the sonic movements of the service show how the Divine Word as Shabad is not only embodied through the Guru Granth Sahib, but also encountered through the human enactment of the service, aurally, viscerally and phenomenologically.

Exploring Musical Diversity in the Collaborative Repertoire from 1880 through 1963

It is essential in musical performance not only to convey the unique language of the composers but also to approach each composition from the perspective of its style. During the 20th century, diverse musical idioms co-existed, sometimes mixing or fusing, yet retaining recognizable characteristics and thereby remaining distinctive. This dissertation explores myriad examples from Late Romanticism/Post- Romanticism, Naturalism, Neo-Classicism, Nationalism and Impressionism composed during this unusually rich period. In order to explore a broad range of collaborative repertoire and to deepen my knowledge of the styles and performance practices relating to these pieces, I studied and performed the repertoire with pianist Eunae Baik–Kim, clarinetist Jihoon Chang, and singers Joshua Brown and Young Joo Lee. The first program featured Post-Romantic, Neo-Classic and Impressionist two-piano works composed by Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky. Each of the three composers used their own distinctive harmonies, rhythms, melodic inventions, pedaling and figurations. In all of the works, both piano parts were densely interwoven, having equal importance. Lied and operatic aria was the focus of the second recital. Brahms’ Vier Ernste Gesänge Op. 121, Ravel’s Don Quichotte a Dulcineé and Italian, French and German operatic arias were the examples of Post-Romanticism and Nationalism. The representative composers were Verdi, Massenet, Korngold, Leoncavallo, Ravel and Wagner. Despite the fact that all of the repertoire was written in traditional musical forms, the composers’ unique voices mark each work as belonging to a particular genre. The third recital focused on Post-Romantic and Impressionistic music written for clarinet and piano: the Première Rhapsodie by Debussy, the Sonata by Poulenc and Brahms’ Sonata in F minor Op. 120, No. 1. These works, although profoundly different in style, share elements of simplicity, clarity and elegance as well as technical virtuosity, articulation and profound musical depth. The three recitals which comprise this dissertation project were performed at the University of Maryland Gildenhorn Recital Hall on February 27, 2010, October 25, 2010, and January 31, 2011. The recitals were recorded on compact disc and are archived within the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM).

The beginnings of expertise for ballads

To study the beginning stages of expertise, 14 students, who were inexperienced with ballads, heard and recalled a series of 5 ballads over the course of 5 weeks. Compared with their first recall of the first ballad, their first recall of the fifth ballad had one and a half times as many words, two times as many rhyming words, and three times as much line structure evident in the written recall protocols. Compared with novices, the 14 beginning experts more often filled in blank spaces in novel ballads with words of the correct number of syllables and more often chose the original stanza of a novel ballad that was paired with a changed version of the stanza. The beginning experts were also able to compose, in 20 min, ballads about two thirds as long as the 10-stanza ballads they learned. Thirty characteristics were identified in the set of the five learned ballads. The ballads composed by the beginning experts used over half of these. The beginning experts also explicitly stated about one quarter of these 30 characteristics, but there was no statistical relationship between the characteristics used and the characteristics stated. Memory expertise is viewed as a pervasive aspect of cognition in which people make use of a variety of regularities in the material to be learned. © 1993 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

DEGENERATE MUSIC?! MUSICAL CENSORSHIP IN THE THIRD REICH

In 1938, in Düsseldorf, the Nazis put on an exhibit entitled "Entartete Musik” (degenerate music), which included composers on the basis of their “racial origins” (i.e. Jews), or because of the “modernist style” of their music. Performance, publication, broadcast, or sale of music by composers deemed “degenerate” was forbidden by law throughout the Third Reich. Among these composers were some of the most prominent composers of the first half of the twentieth-century. They included Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Mahler, Ernst Krenek, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Erwin Schulhoff, and others. The music of nineteenth-century composers of Jewish origin, such as Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, was also officially proscribed. In each of the three recitals for this project, significant works were performed by composers who were included in this exhibition, namely, Mendelssohn, Webern, Berg, Weill, and Hans Gal. In addition, as an example of self-censorship, a work of Karl Amadeus Hartmann was included. Hartmann chose “internal exile” by refusing to allow performance of his works in Germany during the Nazi regime. One notable exception to the above categories was a work by Beethoven that was presented as a bellwether of the relationship between music and politics. The range of styles and genres in these three recitals indicates the degree to which Nazi musical censorship cut a wide swath across Europe’s musical life with devastating consequences for its music and culture.

MUSICAL EXOTICISM EXPLORED IN PIANO WORKS FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THROUGH THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Musical exoticism is the evocation of a culture different from that of the composer. It occurs anytime a composer tries to conjure up the music of a country not his own. Although there have been studies of exoticism in the piano works of an individual composer, namely Debussy, there has not been a comprehensive study of musical exoticism in the piano literature as a whole. Upon chronological examination of the piano repertoire, general trends exhibiting exoticism become evident. The first general trend is the emergence of the Turkish style (alia turca) in the eighteenth century. Turkish style soon transmuted to the Hungarian-Gypsy style (all 'ongarese or style hongrois). [In Beethoven's Op. 129, it is alia ingharese.] Composers often alternated between the two styles even in the same composition. By the late nineteenth century, style hongrois was firmly entrenched in the musical language of Austro-German composers, as seen in the works of Brahms. In the nineteenth century, composers turned to the Middle East, North Africa and Spain for inspiration. In particular are several compositions emulating Spanish dance music, culminating in the Spanish works of Debussy and Ravel. The gamelans from Indonesia and objects from the Far East of Japan and China, brought by advances in trade and transportation, captivated the imagination of composers at the turn of the twentieth century. Also in the early twentieth century, composers tried emulating dance and jazz music coming from the Americas, such as the cakewalk, minstrelsy, and the blues. One sees the ever widening sphere of exotic inspiration for western music composers: from the Turkish invasions to the traveling Gypsies of Hungary; to the captivating dance rhythms, soulful cante jondo sections, and guitar flourishes of Spain; expanding further to the far reaches of Asia and the jazzy rhythms of the Americas. This performance dissertation consists of three recitals presented at the University of Maryland, and is documented on compact disc recordings which are housed within the University of Maryland Library System. The recordings present the music of Balakirev, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Haydn, Hummel, Milhaud, Moszkowski, Mozart, Ravel, and Schubert.

MUSICAL THEATER AND THE CLASSICAL VOICE: CROSSOVER SINGING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

This dissertation explores the transformation of opera comique (as represented by the opera Carmen) and the impact of verismo style (as represented by the opera La Boheme) upon the development of operetta, American musical theater and the resultant change in vocal style. Late nineteenth-century operetta called for a classically trained soprano voice with a clear vibrato. High tessitura and legato were expected although the quality of the voice was usually lighter in timbre. The dissertation comprises four programs that explore the transformation of vocal and compositional style into the current vocal performance practice of American musical theater. The first two programs are operatic roles and the last two are recital presentations of nineteenth- and twentieth- century operetta and musical theater repertoire. Program one, Carmen, was presented on July 26, 2007 at the Marshall Performing Arts Center in Duluth, MN where I sang the role of Micaela. Program two, La Boheme, was presented on May 24,2008 at Randolph Road Theater in Silver Spring, MD where I sang the role of Musetta. Program three, presented on December 2, 2008 and program four, presented on May 10, 2009 were two recitals featuring operetta and musical theater repertoire. These programs were heard in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park, MD. Programs one and two are documented in a digital video format available on digital video disc. Programs three and four are documented in a digital audio format available on compact disc. All programs are accompanied by program notes also available in digital format.

MUSICAL IMPROVISATION AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Musical improvisation combines technical proficiency and musical intuition. Due to its interactive nature, improvisation provides an avenue of communication among all art forms. This dissertation project explores the collaborative aspects of improvisation involving a musician, visual artist, a small group of dancers, and videographer. Video footage from two separate recording sessions provided hours of visual materials which were studied and edited. The first session was a live performance recorded in front of a studio audience. The second session was a two-day collaboration between musician and dancers in a studio space. The process of editing and compiling images with audio-an important element in this project-presented many unforeseeable challenges and lessons. This recorded dissertation is comprised of seven music videos that demonstrate my ability as an artist in collaboration with visual artist-professor Richard Klank, dancers David Yates, Jamie Garcia, Raha Behnam, Rachel Wolfe and Adrian Galvin, and video artist Nguyen Nguyen. Each video represents an individual creative process involving musical performance, studio lighting, sound recording, and video editing.

A case based reasoning system capturing fire modelling expertise

This paper describes the architecture of the case based reasoning (CBR) component of Smartfire, a fire field modelling tool for use by members of the Fire Safety Engineering community who are not expert in modelling techniques. The CBR system captures the qualitative reasoning of an experienced modeller in the assessment of room geometries so as to set up the important initial parameters of the problem. The system relies on two important reasoning principles obtained from the expert: 1) there is a natural hierarchical retrieval mechanism which may be employed; and 2) much of the reasoning on a qualitative level is linear in nature, although the computational solution of the problem is non-linear. The paper describes the qualitative representation of geometric room information on which the system is based, and the principles on which the CBR system operates.

Belief, Knowledge and Expertise. The emergence of the lay expert in medical sociology

The paper has three main aims. First, to trace – through the pages of the Journal – the changing ways in which lay understandings of health and illness have been represented during the 1979-2002 period. Second, to say something about the limits of lay knowledge (and particularly lay expertise) in matters of health and medicine. Third, to call for a re-assessment of what lay people can offer to a democratised and customer sensitive system of health care and to attempt to draw a boundary around the domain of expertise. In following through on those aims, the author calls upon data derived from three current projects. These latter concern the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in people with Down’s syndrome; the development of an outcome measure for people who have suffered a traumatic brain injury; and a study of why older people might reject annual influenza vaccinations. Key words: Lay health beliefs, lay expertise, Alzheimer’s, Traumatic Brain Injury, Vaccinations