A&HHE Special Issue August 2016
The Body in (Early) Music
Peter Spissky
Musikhögskolan i Malmö (Lund University)
Abstract
This essay reflects on my experimental projects in historical performance practice that explore possible ways of embodied reading of a musical score. Through the assimilation of gestural patterns derived from dancing, acting and speech-delivery into the body of a violinist, I attempt to develop an embodied approach to historically informed performance, where the focus shifts from the sound producing body towards the dancing, speaking, and gesturing body. Through my video analysis, two contrasting strategies came to light, which I termed Gesturist and Soundist. The gesturist-violinist reads the indications in the score as gestural events, manifested directly in body movement. The soundist-violinist translates the score into sonic images that trigger the necessary sound-producing body movements. While this schematic division worked well initially in the enquiry, my analysis suggests that it is necessary to find a combination of these strategies, where the physicality of the gesturist’s body is guided by the soundist’s ear.
A video essay (“Sancho’s punishment”) demonstrates my attempt to merge the violin-sound-producing movements with the physical gestalt movements of throwing and lifting.
Keywords
Historically informed performance, baroque violin, embodied, gesture
When I finally …
…confessed my terrible sin of playing baroque violin in the late 1980s, while studying modern violin in the class of a famous teacher at the Music Academy in Bratislava, the reaction was not completely what I expected: ‘…Nooo! What about your beautiful vibrato! Such a pity!’ came from my fellow violinists. ‘Why would you do that! You can easily get a job here with us! You don’t need to give up your career and do the “baroque thing”!’ came from the Slovak Philharmonics. My famous teacher refrained from comment. He simply resigned his teaching post at the Academy…[i]
Obviously, in my young naïve mind, I tried to recognize at least some of these varied reactions as compliments, but it was not easy. Even though there were hints of praise, all the various perspectives seemed to ultimately indicate fatal outcomes: it was not only the classical vibrato I would lose, but also a regular job and a famous teacher. Perhaps the most devastating message was only subtly implied in these comments: Baroque violin is not a serious professional instrument or a real career. It is just a hobby for those who cannot manage to get through the auditions and competitions for modern instrument players.
Some twenty years later,
…as an established baroque violinist, I can look back with the benefit of hindsight. Such attitudes were partly nourished by the way the HIP movement presented itself in practice back then. It may well be thanks to the vehemence and sharpness of debates about the paradoxes of historical authenticity launched by Peter Kivy (1995) and Richard Taruskin (1984) that the HIP community in the end not only survived, but also became a thriving commercial success and, most importantly, a much-needed refreshment for the whole classical performance community. But in the 1980s nothing was yet clear, and I was inevitably stepping into unknown territory that could only deliver uncertain outcomes.
As a young modern …
…violin student at the Academy of Music, my first objective was finding a proper authentic Baroque SOUND. I was encouraged by my more experienced fellow HIP students who already knew that it should sound shorter, more articulated, clearly pointed and structured, no vibrato, faster, brighter. These sound qualities were quite clearly defined negatively in relation to the “modern” sound. The idea of Baroque sound was simply built on how it should differ from this “normal” modern sound.
It was only later, when I had mastered a “proper” baroque sound and was finally accepted into the inner circles of the HIP environment, that I started to ask: but why? Why should it sound like that? Why should it differ from the normal sound? Is it just because the gut strings and baroque bows make it sound like that? Should the instrument really dictate the music and style? I did feel that the baroque sound, on whatever grounds it might have been constructed, made sense and did justice to baroque music. I just wanted to go deeper into the real premises of this sound, to go beyond its cosmetic surface appearance based on a negative response to the traditional modern sound– i.e. shorter than, faster than – to find a genuine basis for expressing real feelings with real bodies. I realized that the baroque sound was a language I had learnt to pronounce without understanding what I was saying with it.
Then there was a revolution …
…both, in my country – Czechoslovakia (1989) – as well as in my HIP orientation. The freedom to travel allowed me to study in Sweden at the Malmö Academy of Music. It came as a great surprise to meet people who not only spoke baroque, but also understood what they were saying! It must have been quite amusing for them to converse with me in baroque; me sounding fluent, but without having any clue to what they were saying, or even what my own sounds meant. Through this awkward encounter I discovered the connection between baroque sound on the one side, and speech, gesture, and action on the other. Baroque sound is based on the imitation of words, dance patterns and physical action.[ii] The articulation and accentuation is derived from the underlying structure of spoken syllables, dance movements, or acting gestures. For me, this was the beginning of a long retrospective process of filling in the meanings to the already mastered and automatized (proper) baroque sounds.
Being a soundist …
…during my initial HIP years was not something I was aware of until I became a gesturist. The contrasting concepts of GESTURIST and SOUNDIST crystallized early in the work I began for my (on-going) doctoral thesis “Ups and Downs, or the Violin Bowing as Gesture”.[iii] From the perspective of a performer, I became committed to exploring soundism and gesturism as two contrasting approaches to reading a musical score.
A Soundist reads the score
…as a set of sonic indications. These are realized in a kind of sound-sculpturing way, by means of articulation, accents, shaping of the sounds, and dynamics. The movement strategy of a soundist is grounded in, if not completely reduced to, the sound-producing movements. These are directly linked to the imagined sound picture. Rhythm is based on, and to a great extent equivalent with, the pulse.
A Gesturist reads the score …
… as a set of gestural indications. Rhythmical structure, melodic shapes and harmonic relations are translated into physical gestures derived from dance, speech and acting. The regular pulse is transcended; the rhythm and timing are based on durations (time) and shapes (space) of body actual movements.
Producing the inventive sound images in order to evoke an aesthetic experience of something, i.e. dance movement, will appear as a logical strategy for a violinist. What would happen if we reverse this strategy? Is it possible to employ the genuine dance movements as a starting point for the sound production?
My exploration of gesturism
…has comprised several experimental projects focusing not only on the metaphorical gestalt of dance, text and action in sound, but on the assimilation of gestural patterns of dance (-ing), speech (-king) and action (-ting) into the actual body movement strategy of a violinist. My gestural vocabulary has been accumulated through workshops with dancers, actors and singers, and later applied in several case studies.
In the case study of Telemann’s Don Quichotte I explore the bodily assimilation of actions representing horseback riding, sword fighting, or throwing heavy objects up in the air. Each action is studied in various contexts: alone in a studio, teaching, rehearsing, and performances.
Sancho sounds like he is flying …
…in the fifth movement of Telemann’s suite. He is being continuously thrown up in the air by a joyful but somewhat mean company of students.
The music is suggestive in its graphic representation, evoking the action of lifting or throwing; but would work sufficiently with a straightforward sonic realization.
The ascending five-note figure represents a throw, while the octave leap downward is Sancho’s smashing (hopefully) back on the blanket. The energetic up-bow motion flies off the string while the following down-bow sounds like a harsh landing.
But we are still in the “soundist” zone at this point: the extended sound-producing movements realize the sonic image implied in the score.
To make Sancho fly for real …
…I will suggest a different body movement strategy. As a gesturist, I embody the ascending five-note figure as a real physical action of throwing. The activation of the body-floor relation will trigger the centrifugal and centripetal forces creating a dynamic gravitation field which will in turn influence the sound producing movements and induce the resulting sound by the physicality of the real action.
Video Essay “Sancho’s punishment”
Embodying a musical score
…can be understood as reaching out to the initial physical gestures that inspired the metaphorical elaboration in the notation. From this perspective, the score cannot be considered as the primary source for a gesture, but rather as an attempt to capture the gesture already existing prior to its fixed form in the notation. The traditional assumption that a musical work is equivalent with the musical score is highly problematic in music before 18th century (Goehr, 1992). Not only does a lack of specific performance indications disqualify baroque scores from such definitions of a “musical work”, it is precisely this omission of such authorial indications (enhancing the creative role of the performer), which characterises a work from the 18th century (Östersjö, 2008).
The process of inferring the “missing” information in the score will therefore divide performers according to their respective gesturist or soundist approaches. The soundist will ask how short or long; loud or soft; articulated or legato should the particular note be. This will be often marked in the music as dots, dashes, arrows, and lines, as a reminder of the intended sonic image.
Similarly, a gesturist will annotate the music with arrows, dots and lines, but the implication of the markings will differ. Instead of applying to the quality of the sound, they reflect the quality of the body movement.
These penciled markings of gestural trajectories in the score bear a striking similarity to Marc Johnson’s embodied gestalt schemata that situate the roots of our mental activities in our basic embodied experiential knowledge of the world. In the following example I visualize the movements of the bow (full lines) in the context of the body movement (dotted line). The body movement (dotted line) “pushes” against the up bow movement resulting in a clash, resolved in a new modified direction.
Video example:
Taken out of the context of the score, the markings will resonate with Johnson’s gestalt schemata of force. The schemata of blockage (Johnson, 1987: 45) relate to our bodily experience of exerting force against an object, when the impact modifies or redirects the force.
(p.46)
The throw-in-the-air gesture in “Sancho’s punishment” comprises two extreme poles: the contained accumulated force (Sancho still on the blanket and the bow still on the string) and the exerted force of the throw (both Sancho and the bow fly up in the air). This is analogous to the image-schemata of containment based on our basic embodied experience of being in the building, in the bus, or in the bed, and using force to get out of the building, out of the bus, or outof the bed. (Johnson 1987:21)
(p32)
The body in sound
My problematization of historical performance practice has evolved from a deconstruction of historical soundism based on the sonic affordances of historical instruments. Rather than focus on the instrument as sound, I have proposed to explore the instrument as a kinetic tool triggering a new body movement vocabulary induced with gestural patterns derived from dance, speech delivery and acting.
But exploring gesturism also revealed its limits. If the physical gesture does not materialize in sound, it cannot be fully enjoyed by the audience. If pushed to the extremes of realism, the next step of a gesturist would be to ride a real horse on the stage instead of gestalting it on the violin, or to grab the nearest viola player and toss him up in the air.
For the final part of my doctoral project[iv] I will explore a possible synthesis of the gesturist and soundist approaches. Employing some gesturally less obvious case studies – such as Bach’s solo sonatas, Vivaldi’s virtuoso concertos and a new-composed piece – I will leave my comfort (gesturist) zone and explore the territory where gesturism and soundism cannot remain a dichotomy, but become combined into a unified strategy enhancing the expressivity of a performance.
Footnotes
[i] I do admit this is an exaggeration in order to enhance the drama of my opening section. My decision to play Baroque violin was surely neither the last nor the biggest factor in causing the resignation of my teacher; rather it was his busy career as a performer.
[ii] Courses and workshops with Tragicomedia ensemble (Stephen Stubbs and Erin Headley) and harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen
[iii] Doctoral program at Malmö Academy of Music, Lund University
[iv] My dissertation is scheduled for June 2017
References
Goehr L (1992) The imaginary museum of musical works: an essay in the philosophy of music. Oxford: Clarendon.
Johnson M (1987) The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kivy P (1995) Authenticities: philosophical reflections on musical performance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Östersjö S (2008) Shut up ‘N’ Play: negotiating the musical work. Lund: Malmö Academy of Music.
Taruskin R (1984) The Authenticity Movement Can Become a Positivistic Purgatory, Literalistic and Dehumanizing, Early Music, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 3-12.