Throughout its course, humanity has constructed an enormous edifice of knowledge regarding a certain phenomenon, the nature of which remains to be ascertained – namely music. What we consider the term “music” to encompass is a wide range of preceptory experiences with certain characteristics that read to us as “musical”. To escape this circular definition, one is forced to define the essence of musicality itself, or rather the way in which we attribute musical meaning to certain phonic events. In other words, we need to ascertain the prime principles of music, from which our immense fabrication of musical knowledge and truths proceed. In doing this, we might uncover dimensions of the musical phenomenon previously unthought, layers of meaning excluded by the narrowing effect of techne, and at the same time themselves incredible feats of artistic and cultural production[1], the understanding of which can enable us to appreciate the many layers of meaning that it necessarily excludes, as well. Our current understanding of music, and its cultural development, are worthy of attention, as they conceal integral parts of the musical phenomenon itself[2] – those that fail to show up as meaningful at all. It seems obvious to me that an integral part of the way music is experienced is related to the body. Music, however, is also itself the object of study and theorisation, not as a bodily experience, but as a mathematical principle.
An essential characteristic of the musical phenomenon as we experience it today, then, is this tension, present in varying degrees across most of its instances, between the subject and the object. We pose ourselves outside of the actual musical experience, observing its quantitative characteristics (the amplitude and frequency of air vibrations, the subdivision of linear time, and so on) while concealing many more of the meanings present in our engagement with music. And this consideration seems to be fairly common sensical to most, as music is experienced in many instances in ways that transcend this theoretical understanding we have made for ourselves. Rhythm, the understanding of which is in many ways instrumental to the production of theoretical knowledge, from the microscopic sense of extremely fast, equally spaced sound waves (pitches) to the macroscopic one of recurring patterns in ordered time, is itself always mediated by the body, so that we rely on our hearing perception and its faculties, as well as on our physical and subjective understanding of time, to classify phonic events in more or less rigid ways. In doing this, the body serves first of all as a tool for revealing, as through music time is given meaning through the execution and witnessing (or, in the case of recorded music, producing) of organised body movements. Movement, then, can be said to be the true object of music theory. And precisely because of this, music itself is often talked about in terms of movement, even though there is clearly nothing in the phonic content of the event itself that suggests any kind of movement. Musical pedagogy is full of metaphors relating to movement, melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically. The fact we say that notes move, that we regard a series of notes as a line, as a path traced by some imaginary moving point in musical space, and that we see harmony as movement, as a cycle of tension and release, with a clear directionality, or that we think of rhythmic subdivisions as essentially “pulling back” or “pushing forward” in time, are all instances of this physical[3] theory of music. Furthermore, this type of quantitative understanding of music, which today has wildly proliferated, especially in what we regard as “serious music”, has largely contributed to concealing many other meaningful aspects. Think for example of timbre.
The only understanding of timbre that shows up as meaningful to us today is the one afforded to us by the tool of vibrational physics. This is extremely at odds with actual musical practice, which by definition requires an understanding of timbre grounded in our own experiences of embodiment. This becomes clearly evident in aural musical traditions, the pedagogy of which is heavily centered in this sort of minute understanding of the physical (embodied) acts that go into music making. The body itself, in virtue of its producing a certain sound through the tool and toy that is the instrument, is revealed in these instances to be, while in a way somewhat at odds with our extremely evolved theoretical conception of music, one of the essential layers of meaning that we are reluctantly forced to strip music of when considering it from a theoretical standpoint, as our minds and technical languages alas deal very badly with bodies. And yet it is clear to most that such a layer of meaning is present, and even when it is not ulteriorly observed it informs our understanding of the musical phenomenon fundamentally, as the body itself is the place in which the musical phenomenon takes form. This opens up the possibility for meditations much more original than those quantitative observations grant us. We should not be asking how to make music, but what it means to be making music.
A further incentive to do so is the consideration that the order that is created as theory becomes instrumental to revealing certain truths[4]. Think of Schenkerian analysis, with its claim to anUrlinie, a primordial melody from which different layers can develop in arbitrary ways atop of one another, effectively the universal genetic code of music itself. Or of the idea of the evolution of the public’s ear, present throughout much of the history of Twentieth Century classical music[5]. Or, in a way pervasive in music theory and education, considerations of normativity, of value being attributed to products of non-Western cultures (objects) in virtue of their adherence to the theoretical standards set by Western culture (the subject). Theory decides for us what, about music, is meaningful. A certain body of theory might very well differ from another, showing discrepancies as radical as the rules for the classification of pitches and intervals, the way in which time is ordered, and the symbolic meaning of notation[6]. In short, the embodied nature of the musical phenomenon is, I believe, essential to a meaningful discourse around music, both as an individual experience and an element of culture. This work seeks to be a descriptive account of the embodied dimension of music in its various forms.
[1] As the Greek techne encompasses both the realm of technology and that of art.
[2] Cf Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technique.
[3] In the modern scientific sense.
[4] Cf N. Brown: The Flux between Sounding and Sound: Towards a relational understanding of music as embodied action
[5] Cite sources (Arnold Schoenberg, Baricco)
[6] The claim being, of course, that notation is essentially a symbol representing an embodied act concerning a performer and an instrument.
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