Shaun Gallagherby the music. In that regard, they are not aware of their movements, but they are definitely aware
of the music. In other cases, however, they may be much more explicitly conscious of the other
players or of their own performance.
When observing chamber ensemble musicians playing, one very often sees intentional com-
munication in the form of body language or facial expressions – cues in the form of winks,
blinks and laughs. Sometimes, there might be an element disturbing the unfolding of the per-
formance and this may call for compensatory strategies (Salice, Høffding, and Gallagher 2017).
In the latter case, one musician may focus his attention on one of the other musicians in
order to match the other’s movements; this involves a conscious “trying to be together” or
trying to achieve explicit coordination. A third type of situation is where there is an affective
consciousness that involves a “feeling of intimate trust in the situation.” Høffding describes this
as a complex state that involves auditory perception, affectivity, interoception and intersubjec-
tive proprioception. All of these factors may remain in marginal consciousness; the players may
be minimally aware of these different aspects of their experience. At the same time, this adds up
to a conscious sense that they are playing well together, and in some cases, they are surprised by
where the process goes. One of the musicians, Fredrik, describes it this way:
there were a couple of times where I was surprised by where we were going....
Suddenly we find ourselves in a tempo we hadn’t planned for at all, but we couldn’t
have done otherwise, because the preceding notes leading into it, they had laid the
ground for it. And then you cannot get out of it.
(cited in Salice, Høffding and Gallagher 2017)This is not an unconscious surprise; it’s an aesthetic feeling that emerges in the action process,
and in contrast to ongoing conscious expectations of where the performance would go.
Such aesthetic consciousness is a pleasurable experience that may emerge in other types
of performance. In dance, for example, there are numerous detailed aspects of movement that
are not attended to and that do not come to consciousness. But there is often an aesthetic
consciousness – a pleasure that is in the movement, occurring during movement, associated
with affective touch and affective proprioception. Cole and Montero (2007) have explained
the neurophysiological underpinnings of such experiences that may include the experience
of effortlessness.
One significant aspect of this experience is the feeling of effortlessness, of the body
moving almost on its own without the need of conscious direction. When absorbed in
movement there may even be what might be described as a loss of self, a feeling that, at
least as a locus of thought, one hardly exists at all. And of course the best performances
are those where one is not thinking about the steps at all but is rather fully immersed
in the experience of moving itself.
(Cole and Montero 2007: 304)This description captures two aspects of this experience at once: (1) that there are some things of
which one is not conscious (the details of moving, which do not need conscious direction), and
(2) that there is a feeling of effortlessness that comes along with this kind of movement. Even
deep immersion in performance is not entirely non-conscious.
It is also the case that consciousness during action may actually derive from subpersonal
processes that occur prior to action. As Anthony Marcel puts it, “awareness of voluntary action
appears to derive from a stage later than intention [formation] but earlier than movement itself ”