Epistemic stance in orchestral interaction

Abstract

An interactional participant's epistemic status relies on their access to “epistemic domains” which exist beyond the unfolding interaction in which they are expressed. Heritage argues that comparative access and epistemic status can be described along an “epistemic gradient” and that it is the expression of this status which, in the interaction, exists as the taking, aligning to, and challenging of epistemic stance. This paper describes some of the resources musicians use in interaction to encode the epistemic domains from which knowledge comes during orchestral rehearsal. As “sound-hearing” and “instrument-playing” are central to the work of musicians, the discussion will focus on how perceptions of auditory and corporeal experience are deployed as part of musicians' epistemic stance taking. I will argue that these epistemic stances, as expressions of graded and differential access to epistemic domains, form part of the construction of authority in orchestral rehearsal.

Keywords:

• orchestral rehearsal
• epistemic stance
• interaction
• gesture

Acknowledgement

Thanks must go to the orchestra who allowed me to carry out both ethnographic observation and video-recording and, without whom this work would not be possible.

Notes on contributor

Katharine Parton is a doctoral candidate in the School of Languages & Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines gesture, social interaction and cognition in musical practice, particularly in orchestral ensembles. Her background and professional training is in both music and linguistics.

Notes

1. The exact number of players varies from session to session within the corpus.

2. In this paper, gesture and other visible actions unaccompanied by speech are displayed on a separate line number, with overlap indicated using different symbols for different participants, as noted in Appendix 1.

3. Following Mondada (2007), participants for visible action unaccompanied by talk are indicated by a two-letter lower-case code; co (Conductor), cm (Concertmaster).

4. Interestingly, the insert expansion sequence in lines 6 and 7 contains an occurrence of the verb “hear”, used as “if we can hear”. This utterance is speculative and describes the resulting state once a change has been made, as part of an account for the request in line 5. The construction is notably unlike the epistemic stance-taking deployment of the predicate “hear”, in that it is a future possibility (“if”) and it is collective (“we”) rather than individual. “Hear”, as a verb, is thus not always used in orchestral interaction as an epistemic stance marker, but can be deployed as such by speakers and understood relative to its position within the unfolding talk.

5. Represented in the transcript as a lower-case cm.

6. Articulation refers to the transition between different notes, achieved through the use of different playing technique. Common examples include staccato (separated or shorter) and legato (connected or lengthened).