PUBLIC LECTURE: School of Music presents: Research Seminar Series - Kristin Bowtell

Kristin Bowtell (returning Court Music Fund award-holder)

The Embodied Score: Conductors' Interpretive Decision-Making

Conductors are expected to develop a personal interpretation of each piece in advance of the first rehearsal, yet the conducting and performing literature gives little guidance beyond ‘gain experience’. Contemporary research in neuroscience, learning theory and philosophy suggests that musical expressivity originates in bodily processes, (particularly motion) and that cognition is not purely located in the brain but is distributed throughout the body. This indicates that conductors who seek to develop their range of musical expression (and hence increase their interpretive options) should utilise the body as a musical interface and source of ideas, rather than merely as a machine that inputs and outputs sounds on behalf of the disembodied brain.