Music in the Flesh
An Early Modern Musical Physiology
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Published:9th Jan '24
Should be back in stock very soon
A corporeal history of music-making in early modern Europe.
Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects—composers, performers, listeners—in the long seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon the early modern body; it is described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, and miraculous while affecting “the circulation of the humors, the purification of the blood, the dilation of the vessels and pores.”
How were these early modern European bodies constituted that music generated such potent bodily-spiritual effects? Bettina Varwig argues that early modern music-making practices challenge our modern understanding of human nature as a mind-body dichotomy. Instead, they persistently affirm a more integrated anthropology, in which body, soul, and spirit remain inextricably entangled. Moving with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, and domestic and public settings, Varwig sketches a “musical physiology” that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performance. This book makes a significant contribution not just to the history of music, but also to the history of the body, the senses, and the emotions, revealing music as a unique access point for reimagining early modern modes of being-in-the-world.
“Varwig’s ambitious, highly original, beautifully crafted book dares to attempt a thorough and thoroughly believable phenomenological account of how humans in the long seventeenth century were likely to have experienced and understood music with their bodies as well as with their minds. Music in the Flesh is rich with implications for how we as a culture acquired and reified certain musical values. It is nothing less than a primer in a completely new way of thinking about scores, verbal descriptions of musical performances, and performances both live and recorded.” * Suzanne Cusick, New York University *
“Varwig’s brilliant book brings to life—almost literally—the wonderfully vivid writing of early modern theorists on the entanglement of music with the ‘ensouled bodies’ of its listeners and makers. The result is a gripping account of an astonishing body of historical writing that has prescient connections with twenty-first-century thinking about music and the embodied mind, and which urges its readers to experience the music of that period in richly transformed ways. This is a book that will have wide appeal from historical musicology to the psychology and neuroscience of music and will inform and influence those fields for many years to come.” * Eric F. Clarke, University of Oxford *
“Music in the Flesh helps us understand how the music of the so-called Baroque is as much of the body as of the mind. With a detailed consideration of how contemporary performers and listeners might have felt during a performance, we gain insights that have totally eluded most commentators on the era. This study will become mandatory reading for any scholars interested in the different stages of the relationship between music and the emerging modern world. It will help us to sense new ways in which this music can resonate with our embodied disposition in live experience today.” * John Butt, University of Glasgow *
ISBN: 9780226826882
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 33mm
Weight: 739g
360 pages