Implementation of a Remote Instrumental Music Course Focused on Creativity, Interaction, and Bodily Movement. Preliminary Insights and Thematic Analysis

In a newly designed collaborative online music course, four musical novices unknown to each other learned to play the clarinet starting from zero. Over the course of 12 lessons, a special emphasis was placed on creativity, mutual interaction, and bodily movement. Although addressing these dimensions might be particularly challenging in distance learning contexts, a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with the learners revealed how the teaching approach proposed has generally facilitated learning. Qualitative findings highlight the importance of establishing meaningful relationships with the musical instrument as well as with other students to build musicality, and of the interplay between creativity and control in individual and collective music-making activities. We suggest that remote music tuition with a small group can be a valuable resource to start learning music and that a creative, collaborative, and movement-based approach can contribute to musical growth.

Giambattista Vico and the psychological imagination

This special issue originates from an international workshop on “Vico and imagination,” that took place at Aalborg University in 2014, within a research project on Giambattista Vico and the epistemology of psychology. Imagination has inexplicably been relegated to the background in contemporary psychology, despite the fact that imaginative processes are involved in even the most mundane activities. In this editorial, I first present the rationale and the content of the articles and commentaries. Then I outline a brief history of the concept of imagination before Vico, drawing some consequences for contemporary psychology. Finally, I provide the proposal for a new research program on imagination as a higher psychological function that enables us to manipulate complex meanings of both linguistic and iconic forms in the process of experiencing.

Worldly beings becoming human beings: Differentiations and articulations within our different ways of being

These excellent papers by Pablo Rojas and Mariagrazia Grantella, both in their own very different ways, begin to bring into view aspects of our social psychological functioning that Descartes’ mechanical–mathematical world view has occluded, i.e., made rationally invisible to us. They both emphasize the degree to which we have our being within already flowing, intra-mingling, strands of both physical and social activities that influence us more than we can influence them. Rojas’ interest is in our coming to feel so “at home,” so to speak, in moving around on a piano keyboard, that we can come to relate to it as we relate to our own vocal tracts in singing—skills that we can develop (but not easily) by rigorous training. Grantella too, in turning to Vico’s notion that the early people’s “were almost entirely body, and practically not at all reflection,” makes a similar point: we need to replace our rationalistic interest in abstract entities with an interest in origins and processes, and to focus on our human ways of being and of living our lives. My only point of criticism of these two excellent paper is that I think that they still start too late in the day.