Tom Eide Osa

Knowledge in musical performance
-enlightened by sources who discuss the articulation of knowledge.

This paper is based on my Master dissertation in music education: Kunnskap i musikkutøving -lyssett av kjelder som problematiserer artikulering av kunnskap (Osa 2000b), and the article “Å sjå noko som noko” (Osa 2000a). The dissertation is about to be published as a Grieg Academy Publication at the University of Bergen.

Download Knowledge in musical performance -enlightened by sources who discuss the articulation of knowledge. About the project and excerpts. (149,87 kB)

Introduction

We who sing and play musical instruments, the great ones and the little ones, the experts and the novices, the loving amateur and the professional artist, we all play and sing in our own way. We are able, we know and we do something when we play and sing, we have knowledge in our musical performance. It is this phenomena I want to enlighten. What are we doing? What is it those experienced ones who are good at it can do that the inexperienced cannot? How can we understand this knowledge? How do we acquire this knowledge? I want to examine the knowledge that is at work in singing and playing a musical instrument. This knowledge I call knowledge in musical performance.

My interest concerns opening up, making visible and understanding the knowledge that musical performance is. Is my perspective the perspective of the performer? Yes and no. My perspective is the performer’s in the sense that it is the performer who carries the knowledge and who through playing and singing can show the knowledge to those who understand. But the performer knows and does more than he can understand and explain. We cannot explain knowledge exhaustively and we can never understand knowledge completely. Our knowledge is baked into and constituted by the world, and should we understand knowledge completely, then we have to understand the world completely, which we do not. My perspective is not the performer’s, but the knowledge which consciously and unconsciously is our musical performance.