Mousike or music? Using analysis to explore shifts in musical attention

Abstract

This paper argues that ethnomusicology has trended away from analysing music sound and, consequently, has not distinguished between two distinct-yet-complementary modes of attention, namely the multimodal cognition associated with mousike and the more ‘teleomusical’ (music-directed) attention associated with music. Building on (1) research on music in ancient Greece and China, (2) studies on multimodal perception, (3) the discovery of teleomusical perception in infants, and (4) three contemporary case studies, this paper concludes that mousike and music may be best understood as endpoints on a continuum of musical engagement. Mousike requires attending to the synergistic interaction among competing modalities, such as the linguistic, musical, visual, and kinesthetic, whereas music involves a greater amount of ‘technologizing’ in ‘extending’ musical cognition (extended mind thesis), requiring an attentive shift towards music sound. Founded on stages in infant development, the adult processes of attending to mousike and music must be ascertained through analysis, which can, nevertheless, present both challenges and advantages. The challenges are the biases that can emerge from the music-directed emphasis of ethnomusicological training, which may impede our ability to attend to other competing modalities in performance; the advantages are the revelatory insights that can only come from attending to music sound.