Becoming a Bass Player: Embodiment in Music Performance
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2009
Abstract
As a trumpet player, now learning to play the bass guitar, I notice changes happening to my body that I was unaware of as I learned to play the trumpet. Specifically I notice the changes that are happening to my fingers. These changes that are happening as I learn to play the bass, as well as the relationship I have with the instrument, are physical and embodied. They are specific to my experience, and they are layered with cultural and social meanings. In this chapter, I consider how learning to play the bass alters my experience of the world both on and off stage. Technologies, such as musical instruments, are connected to and with our experience of the world at an embodied level, and these connections shape the ways in which we know the world and are in the world. As I learn to become a bass player, I am changing even at the level of my body, and therefore changing both who I am and how I come to know myself.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
No
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Becoming a Bass Player: Embodiment in Music Performance, in B. L. Bartleet & C. Ellis (Eds.), Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal, Australian Academic Press, p. 136-150
Scholar Commons Citation
McRae, Christopher, "Becoming a Bass Player: Embodiment in Music Performance" (2009). Communication Faculty Publications. 351.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/351
