Music in the Flesh

“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 *
"One of the most important contributions—and the central tenet—of Music in the Flesh is Varwig’s insistence that we should take seriously the ways early modern subjects conceived of their world. . . . Varwig not only foregrounds early modern beliefs but also uses them to understand musicking as her subjects did: with their bodies. Whereas previous studies acknowledge early modern conceptions of the world and may engage with them as an academic exercise, Varwig dissects the ways seventeenth-century body-souls processed, felt, and understood musical experiences as a relationship between sound and spirit." * Journal of the American Musicological Society *
"Bettina Varwig’s attempt at a ‘historical phenomenology’ of music would certainly be suited to initiating an instructive debate about methods in the field [of musicology], beyond the known and all too predictable. . . The German musicologist (who has been professionally active in England for a long time) has produced a splendid book: It is smart, grounded in sound knowledge of the period, carefully thought through, thoroughly researched, written in a lively style and patently meticulously edited. Even those who don’t agree with it will never be bored and at the end will put down Varwig’s work with gratitude and insights gained." * Die Musikforschung *
"This compelling study stands out among the growing body of scholarly work to shift emphasis from the early modern musical score towards multi-modal engagement with an art and science meant for ear, mind, body, soul, and the mysterious forces that connected them to each other and the external world. . . .  This book is therefore useful for all investigations of the early modern Western intersection between music considered and music practised, especially in terms of human response." * Music & Letters *
"In Music in the Flesh, Bettina Varwig seeks to disrupt the dominant musicological theory of German Baroque music. . . . Varwig contends that scholars need to move beyond a consideration of the ‘signifying function’ of music and lyrics to engage with the ways that early music shaped, and was shaped by, bodies. . . . Varwig’s clear explanations, sharp personal insights and considered use of primary material make Music in the Flesh a largely accessible, insightful and highly original work which skillfully combines analysis of music, theology and medicine. It is of interest for students and scholars working on one, or several, of these aspects of early modernity."
  * German History *