Contextualizing Music and the Body

The presence of the phenomenological body is central to music in all of its varieties and contradictions. With the explosion of scholarly works on the body in virtually every field in the humanities, the social as well as the biomedical sciences, the question of how such a complex understanding of the body is related to music, which has its own complexity, has been investigated within specific disciplinary perspectives. The present handbook brings together these particular aspects of such relationships in a broad context and provides a platform for the discussion of the multidimensional interfaces of music and the body. This introduction first discusses the multiple definitions of the body and raises a set of fundamental questions in the general context of body studies. Thereafter, it contextualizes the topic within the discourse of musicology and identifies six different yet related aspects of music and the body, namely, the moving and performing body, the brain and psyche, embodied mind and embodied rhythm, the disabled and sexual body, music as medicine, and the multimodal body.

Multimodal Music in Infancy and Early Childhood

Music in the early years is best understood as creative play with sound and body. Infants are highly responsive observers of mothers’ multimodal singing, which consists of expressive vocalizations in conjunction with facial and bodily gestures. Infants derive pleasure and solace from music, and they exhibit sensitivity to its pitch and temporal patterning. As toddlers, they engage in rudimentary singing and dancing, which ultimately become tools for emotional self-regulation. Preschoolers exhibit increasing sensitivity to culture-specific aspects of music. They sing as they play, producing conventional as well as invented songs and aligning their vocal patterns with their movements. By the early school years, children exhibit considerable understanding of musical forms and functions. Their melodic and rhythmic skills are more readily evident on the playground than in the classroom. Although music and movement are linked for adults, they are inseparable for infants and young children.

Rhythm and the Performer’s Body

Numerous studies of expressive timing use quantitative measurements to reveal and compare ways in which performers realize rhythmic and other notations given on the score, implying that expressive performances creatively inflect elements of musical structure. This study offers an alternative, speculative account of expressive timing in performance based on the complex, dynamic structure of a performer’s gestures as coordinated in the performance of the second étude from Chopin’s Trois nouvelle études and Godowsky’s first paraphrase-study of that étude. Impactful and nuanced temporal fluctuations of two recorded performances are explained in terms of the approach to crafting expressive bodily gestures codified by the piano pedagogue Abby Whiteside. Suggesting that Godowsky’s paraphrase realizes through composition several expressive possibilities latent in Chopin’s score, this chapter also highlights some ways that analyses, representations, and interpretations of rhythm and timing in performance could benefit from taking into account the expressive structure of the performer’s body.

Listening to the Musicking Body

Listening is generally discussed in connection with auditory perception, with the ear as the primary perceptual organ. Recently, however, more comprehensive approaches are being emphasized along with the need to understand listening in the context of cultural and historical changes. This chapter investigates the plasticity of the idea of listening, both across disciplines and across historical contexts. By engaging with various discourses on seeing, hearing, and kinesthetics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the present chapter examines how a holistic conceptualization of listening that goes beyond the ear and functions in the context of the whole human body emerged and argues how understanding the past can shed light on the current understanding of music and the body.

Sexuality, Dis/Ability, and Sublimity in Grand Opera

This chapter proposes that in the grand opera of the nineteenth century, sexuality and dis/ability combine with opera’s musical, literary, and dramatic elements, enabling experiences of the sublime within the context of human embodiment. Operatic representation of disability, including madness and lovesickness, enables audiences to both experience and contemplate uncontrollable and overwhelming forces, the essence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s conception of sublimity. The rise of these representations in nineteenth-century opera coincides with increasingly influential concepts of normative bodies, bodily controllability, and marginalization of bodily excess and disability. Opera’s textual, musical, sung, and acted representations of embodied excess, disability, and physical extremity enhance audiences’ immersive witnessing of and physical empathy with those representations.

Musical Remediation of Disability

Music, in its capacity to represent motion and in the supposed capacity of those motions to affect a listener’s character, has frequently assumed a recuperative function in the remediation of disability. This tradition may be sourced to ancient and medieval doctrines, in which proportions of the human body possess an innate musicality, tuning to and sympathetically vibrating with surrounding sounds. These principles have provided the basis for many extraordinary tales of musical cures, which invoke an abstractly idealized musical body as an antidote to physical impairment. Further, within these tales, disability often allegorizes some other theme or subject, functioning as a “narrative prosthetic” that defines by counterexample a desirable state.

Embodied Rhythm and Musical Impact of Corporal Punishment in Twentieth-Century Opera

Operatic dramas often set to music the extremes of human bodily experience—disease, death, and violence—all duly tinged with hues of eroticism. Not surprisingly then, the genre includes a number of works that stage scenes of corporal punishment. These moments of physical suffering can focus attention on the body in a way that even Mimi’s consumption or Carmen’s stabbing cannot. This chapter examines three such scenes in operas by Britten (Billy Budd), Adams (Nixon in China), and Lloyd Webber (Jesus Christ Superstar) to see how music, action, and text multimodally represent not only the cruel impact of blows, but also the emotional impact for victim, punisher, onstage onlookers, and audience. Close readings of the three scenes draw on theories of embodied rhythm and mimetic listening to engage the question of how this music “gets into our bodies” and helps us to experience the dramas.

Music and Movement

Music and movement go together in every human society: “music to my feet,” as it were. The human condition, particularly human emotional expression, is linked to music. Indeed, movement and a sense of time are intimately connected, and the brain is prepared to detect movement, both familiar and unfamiliar. Our sense of self is tied to movement. Aesthetic sense is a feature of the way we come prepared to interpret the world. Such aesthetics are historically variable and rich when the ecological conditions are suitable. Aesthetic judgment reflects our cognitive flexibility, and our extension and use of specific cognitive mechanisms to widen domains of human expression. Music evolved in the context of social contact and meaning. Music continues to allow us to reach out to others and expand our human experience toward and with others. This process began with sounds and expanded into song and instrumental music.

Virtuosities of Deafness and Blindness

This chapter explores the convergence of disability and virtuosity in competitive music performance. Two case studies of the pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii performing Beethoven’s Apassionata and Hammerklavier sonatas in the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition illustrate how the virtuosic body renders both normal and disabled bodies as other within the competitive arena. The critical and popular reception of these performances by Tsujii made much of their staging of a musical encounter between a blind pianist and a deaf composer; Tsujii himself, on the other hand, has publicly declared a more complex relationship to Beethoven as a fellow disabled musician. Exploring blindness and deafness as forms of virtuosity, this chapter shows how musical representations of virtuosity in performance exist in unfixed, dynamic, and even unsettling relationships to normal and disabled senses, bodies, and minds.

Entrainment and Embodiment in Musical Performance

This chapter introduces three distinct concepts of entrainment and relates them to the topic of musical embodiment. Drawing on work in music and other disciplines, the chapter discusses the relationships between “long-term,” “short-term,” and “physical” entrainment. Given the close relationship between entrainment and bodily movement, it is argued that each of these concepts implies a particular type of musical body. These types are discussed and compared, and their salient differences identified. The chapter closes with a brief exploration of these three types of entrainment and their related musical bodies, as they can be seen and heard in the course of playing J. S. Bach’s Prelude in C minor, BWV 847.