Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music Performance: Distributed Cognition in Musical Activity by Linda T. Kaastra Reviewed by: Emily Payne , School of Music, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK DOI: 10.1177/20592043221108055 The opening of Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music by Linda T. Kaastra poses a question that implies an ambitious agenda: what is music? As the title of the book suggests, Kaastra addresses this question by locating her work firmly in a performance-centered ontology: music as action rather than object. Not so much “what is music?”, then, but rather “where”, “how”, or even “when is music?”. In this way, the main concern of the book—the location of (musical) knowledge, and, there- fore, (musical) meaning—is fundamentally interdisciplin- ary in its intersection of musicology and cognitive science. Kaastra advocates for attending to the “activities” of western art music, whereby music is understood through performing, composing, improvising, and rehears- ing. 1 As Kaastra describes, since the 1990s, musicology has increasingly moved away from a structuralist, work- centered approach, and towards an understanding of music as a social, cultural, and embodied practice (e.g., most recently, Clarke & Doffman, 2017; Cook, 2018). And, within the broad field of cognitive science, there is now a large body of work on music cognition that has sim- ilarly challenged representational, or “head-bound”, models of processing as part of a paradigm shift towards an ecolog- ical model that understands knowledge as a multi-modal phenomenon that emerges through the dynamic interactions between organisms and their environment (Lesaffre et al., 2017; Schiavio & Benedek, 2020; van der Schyff et al., 2018). This book, then, is a timely attempt to present a rich interdisciplinary model for exploring the embodied and distributed dimensions of western musical perfor- mance, from the micro level and, in some cases, overlooked interactions between a musician and their instrument, to the macro level in exploring the interactions across a perform- ing ensemble. Alongside Herbert Clark’s (1996) theory of language use as joint activity and Roy d’Andrade’s (1995) integrated ontology of mind, Kaastra’s theoretical framework is influenced by Hutchins’s (1995) framework of distributed cognition, which studies the propagation and transforma- tion of processes across social groups, to illustrate the active way in which material culture participates in human activity. Hutchins’s now classic account of the nav- igation of a US Navy vessel demonstrates the way in which the crew of the ship operate as a distributed system, with each agent contributing to the shared cognition that is required to operate the vessel. Here, tools are understood as a set of “representational media” that are manifestations of “repositories of knowledge […] constructed in durable media so that a single artifact might come to represent more than any individual could know” (Hutchins, 1995, p. 96). While Jonathan de Souza (2017) has engaged with Hutchins’s work to investigate the relationship between performer and instrument from a music-theoretical perspec- tive, Kaastra is the first to apply Hutchins’s model of dis- tributed cognition to analyze the processes of solo and ensemble performance. What this means for her discussion is that musical actions are not reliant on inner mental states, but rather emerge through the interactions with various information resources in the environment, both human and non-human. The Gibson (1986) notion of affordance is logically and convincingly deployed in Kaastra’s detailed qualitative analysis of case studies of instrumental tech- niques and rehearsal practices, enabling her to draw out insights on the inextricable link between the musical, psy- chological, and sociocultural. Her framework underlines the dynamic and mutual dependency between performer and environment, which is essential to rethink the creative processes of music-making. A simple example of this is that an instrument’s possibilities for action are likely to differ considerably depending on whether it is played by a novice or highly skilled musician. Equally, cultural and environmental factors are vitally important in shaping a musician’s interactions with their instrument: a jazz musi- cian performing on a double bass in a trio in a busy club is likely to interact with their instrument in quite a different way to a classical double bassist playing alone in a practice room. In this way, Kaastra’s approach is distinct from work on embodied music cognition that retains an emphasis on Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Book Review Music & Science Volume 5: 1–5 © The Author(s) 2022 journals.sagepub.com/home/mns