Music Performance– Part I: Personal, Aesthetic Experience

I was asked the other day if I thought it was possible to have an ‘aesthetic experience’ while listening to and/or performing music. This question led to a rather long answer that I thought would be worthwhile to put it into a post and get some feedback. I’ll use two approaches to explain my personal experience, both by aesthetics and by explanation from the culture of science, so that those of you reading this post will have a broader understanding of my personal experience. My hope is that you will be able to learn about the subject of musical performance as explained purely from a “feeling” perspective of a professional musician, while being exposed to the explanation provided by the scientific community.

First, the “aesthetic experience” can be interpreted as a means to describe a feeling, understanding or emotion expressed when encountering music or fine art. Using this definition as a general concept, I believe that it is possible to have an “aesthetic experience” while performing music. From the inclusion of a personal experience to the evidence of music’s aesthetic qualities observed in the science community, praxial methods in music education can strengthen the “aesthetic experience.”

My encounter with a personal “aesthetic experience” took place in Argentina five years ago. It embraced what Bennett Reimer (Music Education philosopher) has described as “linguistic, the musical, the logical-mathematical, the spatial, the bodily kinesthetic, the interpersonal, and intrapersonal”(1) levels of intelligence. It was only a five-minute song, but the ramifications of the experience will last a lifetime.

-----
1 – Bennett Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision (2nd ed. Prentice Hall/Person Education: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002), 11.