Gestural Musings: The Cognitive Domain

In the last post in this series (found HERE), I talked about the very basic framework for the foundations of my gestural pedagogy. This post will look at the first of three domains in which we can communicate: the cognitive domain.

Before we jump in, I want to just admit right up front that I am still building my own fluency in verbalizing some of these concepts. If things are challenging to understand, please ask questions in the comments section below. A big part of why I’m writing this is help myself continue to process this information and gain efficiency in my own ability to teach and communicate these ideas. If we can dialogue, it will help us all find clarity.

For me, the cognitive domain is all about information and choice (In the other two domains, we look at triggering pre-conscious physical reaction–psyco-motor–and communicating emotional content–affective). Basically, we are offering information that the performers can choose to act on or ignore. In the parallel of Bloom’s Taxonomy, from which I borrow this terminology and categorization, the cognitive domain deals with how we acquire and master knowledge. The parallel in gesture becomes clear when we think this way.

So what kinds of knowledge are we talking about? A good first example is meter. We have a pre-existing system in conducting that, through rebound direction, communicates information about the number of beats in a measure and which beat we are on. Consider the following:

• A downbeat can be preceded by an upbeat or by a downbeat
• An inbeat can be preceded by a downbeat or by an inbeat
• An outbeat can be preceded by a downbeat or an inbeat or an outbeat
• An upbeat can be preceded by a downbeat or an outbeat or an upbeat

That leaves a lot to chance until we consider the following:

• A downbeat must be preceded by an up-rebound
• An inbeat must be preceded by a down-rebound
• An outbeat must be preceded by an in-rebound
• An upbeat must be preceded by an out-rebound

I’ll talk more about the distinction and the details of rebound and beat mechanics in a post in the Gesture 101 series at a later date, but for right now it’s enough to understand that there is a very clear pattern of movement that communicates beat groupings. But this is information that performers can seek if they need it, ignore if they don’t, and choose to act upon (or not act upon). Unlike a breath gesture, which lives in the psycho-motor domain, there is no compulsion to act immediately on this information. A well-shown beat pattern does not necessarily mean that performers will be on the right beat. They have to accept the information and then make the choice to use it. That’s what makes this information cognitive as opposed to being in another domain.

There are some murky areas where our intent to communicate an idea lives between two domains. One example is tempo. In this case, it is possible for the performers to look directly at the conductor and ignore the indication given, which makes this lean into the cognitive domain. However, to get a unified tempo, the conductor needs not only communicate the cognitive information through the idea that time=the relationship between movement and space, but must communicate, through psycho-motor modeling, that accurate tempo relates to breath, which can be modeled at the pre-conscious level. The best shared tempo will incorporate both, and if a tempo change is motivated by or interpreted as an emotional event in the music, affective communication will also be required. However, the signal of time=the relationship between movement and space is a cognitive communication, and in the ensemble’s ability to ignore it is great power–it allows a tempo to be shown for all performers but gives freedom for all performers to make choices about their breathing as appropriate to the demands of their parts, for example various parts having different phrase lengths or different articulations.

It’s important to remember that our goal in information theory communication is to understand how to communicate information such that the receiver can interpret the signal and create the appropriate result. It is not our goal to communicate all of the information in the score at all times. That would be too much and too confusing–one form of entropy is excessive information such that the intent of the signal becomes lost in the sheer amount of data transmitted. Our goal is actually to find the sweet spot where everything we communicate is useful and necessary, and then show that and only that. In understanding that cognitive information includes the choice of the performers to act or not, we are able to make better choices as to when it is useful and when it is excessive. If we’ve been showing 4-beat measures at the same tempo for a while, and there’s no expectation that it will change, we can trust our ensemble to not need that information as a priority any more, and focus on communicating other things that may be more helpful.

As we explore the other two domains, and then look at ways to use these structures to manage our own communication, this idea should become more clear. For now, it might be useful to just think about things that we communicate that fall into the cognitive domain and what we’re really hoping to achieve through communicating them. Next up: psycho-motor.

Have ideas on the Cognitive domain ideas applied to gesture? Please post below!