The Roots of a Capacities-Based Approach to Music Composition Pedagogy

The question centering the capacities-based approach is a deceptively simple one: “How can the building blocks of music be assembled in a manner that purposefully invites feeling?” While philosophers readily acknowledge a relationship between feeling and music within the human experience and musicians seek to shape the elements of music in ways that will invite such outcomes, the exact nature of the relationship has evaded explication. Recent advances in neuroscience (Brain and Creativity Institute, 2020) offer insights that bridge the worlds of philosophical inquiry and musical practice. This work positions body-based perception as a precursor to feeling and cognition and may suggest that we can intentionally create music to invite and advance unique human understandings.

Philosophical Musings Supported by Neuroscientific Data. Some of the most prescient writing addressing the relationship between feeling and music is offered by Susanne Langer. In Philosophy in a New Key (1942), she writes, “There are certain aspects of the so-called “inner life”—physical or mental which have formal properties similar to those of music—patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, of agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfillment excitation, sudden change, etc” (p. 228). These observations correspond to the features of musical expressivity (Kaschub & Smith, 2009). As her work advanced in Writing in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967), Langer proffered a feeling-based biological theory which delineated perceptual and conceptual knowings.

More than five decades after Langer’s initial ideas were published, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio published Descartes Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (1999). Drawing on data derived from technologies not available in Langer’s time, he describes a theory of consciousness built upon the connections between a person, an event, a bodily-based emotional response, and a feeling that invites consciousness. The feeling, he writes, “depends on the juxtaposition of an image of the body proper to an image of something else, such as the visual image of a face or the auditory image of a melody” (Damasio, 1994, p.145). He continues to suggest that cognition begins when we realize we have sensed a movement, change, or alteration against the background of biological homeostasis. What Langer’s philosophical lens identified as perceptual knowledge made possible through an “inner life,” Damasio substantiates as the fundamental action required for all forms of knowing.

Making Connections. Direct experiences with music, through singing, playing, composing, listening, and improvising, evoke the background biological responses which Langer and Damasio reference. Such experiences create feeling and then consciousness. Not only does music arouse feelings that are familiar, attainable, and comfortable, but also it allows for the opportunity to explore the unfamiliar, unattainable, and uncomfortable at a body-safe distance.

Music and feeling, then, are related in two ways. First, music parallels feeling. Composers seek to invite felt responses to their music, performers craft interpretations that seek to invite particular responses, and listeners often attribute emotional meaning to the music they encounter. Second, engagement with music generates physical sensation. Music plays a causal role in producing specific body- based perceptions and that give rise to feeling and give rise to mental processes which allows music to convey emotional meaning (Sloboda, 2010; Veloso & Carvalho, 2012). Our engagements with music are acts of translation; the inner imaginative work of composers, performers, and listeners translates to an outward representation of experience, which then has the potential to become an internalized understanding.