Music in the Body – The Body in Music

The body matters in the humanities and within social and cultural studies. It is variously understood as a knowledge store and transmitter, as a node of perception and cognition, as a site of discipline and power and as a locus of identity and agency. But how is the body integral to our concept of music? With increasing interest, Musicology is discovering the epistemological role of the body and its potential as analytical tool, pursuing avenues such as affect studies, performance studies, gender in music and musical perception and cognition.

This volume of collected works draws on an international conference, held at the Department of Musicology at the University of Göttingen in 2019, that aimed to bring together various theoretical perspectives relating to the body and evaluating its present musicological relevance. It explores pathways into a fundamental debate on the body as a central musicological category and reflects on the relevance of this category in the application of diverse musical objects and practices. Composition and performance, aesthetic discourse and sociological analysis, perception and production are all discussed in relation to bodily knowledge, bodily practice and bodily norms. Historical, contemporary, analytical, ethnographic and artistic-experimental approaches reflect the richness of the musicological discipline and its forays into the musical body.

The publication contains twelve different approaches to the body in music in German and English by Sylvain Brétéché, Max Ischebeck, Werner Jauk, Jasna Jovicevic, Moritz Kelber, Tobias Knickmann, Ina Knoth, Madeleine Le Bouteiller, Alastair White, Martin Winter, Stefanie Schroedter and Martin Zenck.