Graduate Student, Music
Thesis Title: Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition
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Lawrence Zbikowski
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About
My research looks at interactions between musical instruments and performers’ bodies. I show how instrumental interfaces ground both players’ actions and the sounds they produce. Yet, drawing on cognitive psychology and phenomenology, I further claim that such interfaces shape instrumentalists’ perception and understanding. Instruments, in other words, give rise to modes of music cognition that are historically situated and technically conditioned.
I illustrate this theoretical argument with music-analytical examples from various performance traditions, involving baroque lutenists, romantic pianists, Appalachian fiddlers, blues harmonica-players, jazz guitarists, and more.
