Developing cognitive skills for Artistic Research in music
This approach addresses two fundamental areas of question in Artistic Research pedagogy:
- How to encourage researchers to expand not just their attention but their thought processes beyond what is ostensibly the topic of their research? How to develop thought beyond the cognitive-intellectual paths that are already established (however unreflectedly)? Researchers can easily arrive at a point of seeing only their own topic as they constitute it, or even of feeling closed in by that topic.
- What is it appropriate and useful for institutions to teach in the area of Artistic Research, beyond scholarly practice, theoretical frameworks and their use, and particular topic-relevant materials? What subjects can be taught across the wide range of interests and approaches that characterises Artistic Research at advanced levels in many institutions? What skills are of common relevance?
The two issues are closely related. Mentors will regularly encourage researcher students to think ‘laterally’ or ‘outside the box’, but without material guidance as to how this might usefully and coherently happen. At the same time, research students are often hungry for material knowledge, keen to acquire new skills, while the topics on offer inevitably tend to be generic: scholarly skills, artistic research theory, standard methodologies. They are invariably presented with a range of specific examples, from which they first have to abstract broader questions and approaches from the ostensible topic at hand, and then remap some relevance to their own work.
Students in artistic research in music bring a vast palette of topics, approaches and modes of knowledge-production. It is common for researchers engaged so intensively with their topic to become increasingly entrenched in patterns of thought, as they pursue the challenge of coherently charting the new contribution they aspire to make. Such sustained focus is, of course, an opportunity. But it can also in some respects become a barrier to new perspectives, new kinds of thought.
We can present concepts, methodologies and examples of different modes of thinking, but that still leaves students to their own devices. What pedagogical framework might both introduce and support students in acquiring new and instrumental conceptual capacity? How can we help students develop thinking skills – cognitive skills – in ways that are free of ideology or trick, in areas that are materially relevant across the wide range of researchers in music?