If we are to accept Christopher Small’s proposition that musicking involves taking part “in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composition), or by dancing,” then it is reasonable to suggest, too, that dancing is entwined similarly with musicking. The act of dancing need not presuppose the types of physical movement or associated cognitive and behavioural processes normally associated with dance practice. Rather, dancing can—and often does—happen purely in the mind or, alternately, in modalities of cognitive experience and physical expression that bear little if any resemblance to the artistic, cultural, or social practices conventionally recognized as dancing.

Given the inextricability of music and dance in cross-cultural perspective, such alternative modalities of dancing hold especially great relevance in the domain of musicking studies, that is, in musicology. How do musicians and other musicking people dance inside their minds? How do they enlist their bodies choreographically but in ways that bear no manifest connection to dancing per se? How do the cognitive choreographies of musicking minds find purpose, context, and meaning in the liminal spaces that at once encompass and animate them? These are the guiding questions for this presentation, which are interrogated through three case studies, the first focusing on a non-speaking autistic woman with cerebral palsy possessed of a vivid inner musicking world, the second a professional percussionist with a self-described dance disability, and the third a legendary Balinese drummer. Tracing their stories, both individually and collectively, opens new portals of inquiry for exploring inflection points of mind and body, sound and movement, and cognition and emotion.

Bio

Michael Bakan is Professor of Ethnomusicology, Head of the World Music Ensembles Program, and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Studies in the College of Music at Florida State University, where he also directs the Sekaa Gong Hanuman Agung Balinese Gamelan and Advanced Intercultural Ensemble. His more than 100 publications encompass subjects and approaches including the ethnomusicology of autism, neurodiversity and disability studies, Indonesian gamelan, early jazz history, world percussion, phenomenology, electronic music technology, applied ethnomusicology, music and the body, and interdisciplinary connections between ethnomusicology and music therapy. They include the books Music and Autism: Speaking for Ourselves, World Music: Traditions and Transformations (now in its fourth edition), and Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur. A forthcoming textbook, Music: Context, Sound, and Meaning, co-authored with Marysol Quevedo, Douglass Seaton, and Stephanie Shonekan, will be published by Oxford University Press.

As a drummer and percussionist, Bakan has performed with everyone from George Clinton and the legendary funk band Parliament to John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Tito Puente, Johnny Rawls, Rudolf Serkin and the Music at Marlboro Festival Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Players, and several leading gamelan groups in Bali, Indonesia. Recordings include A History of the Future, with Longineu Parsons and Brian Hall; Medicaid Fraud Dogg, with Parliament; Planetary Funk (limited-release EP), with George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars; and Ashrei, with Omnimusica(first ballot entry for best world music album, Grammy Awards, 2015).

Dr. Bakan, who holds degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Toronto, has served on the Board of Directors of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Central Fellowships Committee of the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Advisory Board of Ethnomusicology Forum, as series editor of the Routledge Focus on World Music Series, and as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Southeast/Caribbean Chapter. He has lectured, performed, taught, and keynoted at institutions worldwide, such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia universities; the universities of Toronto, Sheffield, Chicago, Colorado, and Washington; and the Eastman School of Music, Berklee College of Music, University of Music and the Arts, Graz (Austria), State University of Rio de Janeiro, and Dublin City University.