Professor Ewa Marchwicka, PhD

Employ­ment:

Qual­i­fi­ca­tions:

Artis­tic activ­i­ties:
(choir conducting)

Research activ­i­ties:

Major inter­ests:

music, sci­en­tific research, for­eign lan­guages, plas­tic arts, the­atre, pho­tog­ra­phy, tourism and sport (includ­ing extreme sport).

MA and PhD the­sis top­ics which inter­est me most:

  1. The role of the best vocal ensem­bles in the devel­op­ment of per­for­mance cul­ture — case studies;
  2. Avant-gardists’ choral com­po­si­tions as a study of the per­fec­tion of into­na­tion and inter­pre­ta­tive thinking;
  3. The method­ol­ogy of teach­ing “ensem­bles” in music schools of dif­fer­ent levels;
  4. Inter­pre­ta­tion and score exem­pli­fied by the works of var­i­ous composers.

The author’s own work at the inter­sec­tion of var­i­ous disciplines:

- inte­gra­tion

A review of the rel­e­vant lit­er­a­ture has led to the con­clu­sion that we still have not reached a suf­fi­cient under­stand­ing of either the struc­ture of inte­gra­tion or its inher­ent poten­tial even though every new con­struct is obvi­ously the result of some spe­cific assump­tion and the func­tional merg­ing of com­po­nents, many of which have been analysed, stud­ied and described. The con­struc­tion per se, how­ever, the ensu­ing method of func­tion­ing and the way com­po­nents are linked are rarely asso­ci­ated with the nat­ural process of integration.

The rea­son prob­a­bly lies in the ana­lytic method of sci­en­tific research which devel­oped in the 20th cen­tury. But, as the Nobel prize Win­ners antic­i­pate, if the 20th cen­tury was the age of analy­sis the 21st cen­tury will be the age of syn­the­sis because — they think — syn­the­ses will be the next cause of more in-depth cog­ni­sance of the pat­terns and rules gov­ern­ing our sur­round­ing world. Hence in the field of research method­ol­ogy we can now recog­nise a deter­mined effort to lay new foun­da­tions for novel approaches to sci­en­tific issues.

- a quan­tum inter­pre­ta­tion of learn­ing processes

The human brain actu­alises its poten­tial to var­i­ous degrees in the process of devel­op­ment and incul­tur­a­tion. Cre­ative processes and activ­i­ties have a par­tic­u­larly stim­u­lat­ing effect on this “growth” process. The organ­ism actu­alises its poten­tial in ways which are most con­ve­nient for it. This actu­al­i­sa­tion is phys­i­o­log­i­cally deter­mined but it is also deter­mined by the person’s sit­u­a­tion (envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors in the broad sense). Assim­ila­tive and accom­moda­tive poten­tial increases and, as it becomes more and more flex­i­ble, it enables var­i­ous forms of “sys­tem­atic” intel­lec­tual edu­ca­tion at school, in the fam­ily and in the com­mu­nity. But nat­ural poten­tial will only be really rein­forced if this edu­ca­tion is based on meth­ods which are com­pat­i­ble with, or at least not com­pletely at odds with, the organism’s phys­i­ol­ogy includ­ing its cog­ni­tive functions.

- a quan­tum inter­pre­ta­tion of the psy­chol­ogy of music

Con­tem­po­rary inter­pre­ta­tion of uni­ver­sal physics, but also state-of-the art genetic and brain phys­i­ol­ogy research, com­pel us to rein­ter­pret many areas of the psy­chol­ogy of music anew. We must take into account the QUANTUM nature of the uni­verse and life. This inter­pre­ta­tion has unex­pect­edly proven to be more akin to music than we have so far thought. Hence the need to rein­ter­pret what has tra­di­tion­ally been called musi­cal apti­tude. In this con­text music not only serves such func­tions as recre­ation, devel­op­ing the love of music, con­tact with artis­tic val­ues, ther­apy, com­pen­sa­tion, ener­getic cleans­ing. Above all it stim­u­lates the “growth” which may lead to men­tal and cere­bral self-creation. It all depends on the method!!!

- the bio­log­i­cal deter­mi­nants of artis­tic achievement

My expe­ri­ence as a con­duc­tor, teacher and researcher has inspired me to seek for the ori­gins of musi­cal tal­ent. My own inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research pre­sented in my doc­toral the­sis Artis­tic activ­ity and music per­cep­tion in ado­les­cents, the work Par­a­digms of cre­ative edu­ca­tion… and many press arti­cles all sug­gest that every skill is “poten­tialised” but this “poten­tial­i­sa­tion” is phys­i­o­log­i­cally non-specific and must first be assem­bled. This means that as long as we know a skill’s major “oper­a­tors” and meth­ods of assem­bly, we may pro­voke the human brain to assem­ble any func­tion we like. In other words, at least the­o­ret­i­cally, every­body can learn every­thing. If it is true that we are all endowed with the poten­tial for ver­sa­tile tal­ent but only a few of us achieve a high spe­cific level (in music — a level which will allow us to be pro­fes­sional musi­cians) then the con­clu­sions are obvi­ous: the causes lie largely in the meth­ods of incul­tur­a­tion, school­ing and self-education. Pur­su­ing this line of rea­son­ing fur­ther I dis­cov­ered the pred­i­cate of the train­ing of musi­cal think­ing, one which sit­u­ates the art of music in the realm of the most sub­lime, cre­ative intel­lec­tual processes. This is a major shift in the approach to the role of music in human self-creation because it moves the cen­tre of grav­ity from the devel­op­ment of sen­si­tiv­ity (always asso­ci­ated with reac­tiv­ity — the 2nd sig­nal sys­tem) to con­scious, voli­tional processes which cre­ate not only the human mind but also the human brain. How­ever, human men­tal poten­tial is rooted in the cre­ativ­ity of the phys­i­o­log­i­cal func­tions of the organ­ism. Their recog­ni­tion, analy­sis and rever­ber­a­tion in human cre­ative processes is the next step in my research.

- inter­pre­ta­tion of works of music within the frame­work of the premises of quan­tum physics

To under­stand the phys­i­ol­ogy of cre­ative process is to ful­fil the dream of the eugen­ics of mankind.

Pathetic as this may sound, we will not be able to delib­er­ately develop the poten­tial of the human brain until we grasp the very nature of the phys­i­ol­ogy of cre­ative processes. Sim­ple analy­ses have demon­strated that cre­ativ­ity is not lim­ited to the artis­tic domain. It is the mech­a­nism of grand human men­tal progress. For what is every sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery if not a new inter­pre­ta­tion of the fac­tual state, of pat­terns pre­vi­ously unrecog­nised? The the­sis that inter­pre­ta­tion as a men­tal process has many analo­gies in sci­ence and pro­ce­sual arts can be sup­ported with­out lab­o­ra­tory tests although nowa­days they too are fea­si­ble. In both these fields the core of spe­cial­ist cog­ni­tive processes is dis­cov­ery, i.e., spec­i­fi­ca­tion of the uni­ver­sally unfa­mil­iar and per­cep­ti­ble only for the appro­pri­ately armed mind.

Pro­fes­sor Ewa March­wicka, PhD

e-mail: marchwicka@chopin.edu.pl

 


last modified: 14/12/2010
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