Dis-eased Musical Bodies
Chair(s): Remi Chiu (Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University)
From pre-Socratic philosophy to recent neuroaesthetics, music has been widely discussed in terms of its beneficial effects on human bodies, minds and spirits: harmonious, morally uplifting, community-building, and so on. It is only in recent years that musicologists have begun to attend more systematically to music’s potentially harmful or hurtful inherent qualities (Kennaway 2012). Praising or “loving” music, to quote William Cheng (2020), can actually be pushed “til it hurts”. Approaches from, for instance, postcolonial, disability and queer studies have opened up various new perspectives on how to examine the ways in which music hurts in different historical and cultural contexts.
The three papers in this panel engage with this injurious aspect of music from interdisciplinary perspectives that link historical musicology with praxeology, performance studies and histories of the body, medicine, experience and emotions. Collectively, our papers build on the concept of “dis-ease”, as proposed by Boddice and Hitzer (2022), referring to “ways in which people think about, feel about, experience their bodies in illness and health in a general and ongoing way”, in contrast to “disease”, which is commonly construed as a clearly defined, specific illness. Looking at music that hurts through this lens reveals how dis-eased musical experiences push at the limits of those “stable though not immobile norms about what is normal, healthy, beneficial or morally sound” (Boddice/Hitzer 2022).
Compared to disease, dis-ease is temporally and spatially more disparate; like musical experiences, dis-eased experiences are “frayed at the edges” (Boddice/Hitzer 2022). This disparateness invites the exploration of dis-eased musical bodies beyond the context of actual disease: those times and places where music acts beyond the normative, the beneficial or the morally sound; where music is complicit with dis-ease; where musical bodies are fearful, hurting or bent. Our panel thus proposes attending more broadly to these instances of dis-eased musical bodies and practices even in ostensibly untroubled times.
Presentations of the Symposium
Bodies in Pain: Dis-eased Musicking in J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion
Bettina Varwig
University of Cambridge
In Western modernity, disease has commonly been construed as an abnormal disturbance or impairment of the function of (a part of) the body or mind. The notion of dis-ease (Boddice and Hitzer, 2022) extends this state of impairment to encompass the ‘embrained, embodied and encultured thoughts and feelings about medicine, medical authorities, illness and health.’ My paper proposes a radical rethinking of these concepts in relation to early modern music-making practices, using J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion as my key example.
Early modern Christian experiences of illness and dis-ease were grounded in the notion that original sin had rendered human bodies on earth fundamentally disordered and discordant. Drawing on contemporaneous medical and theological literature, I show that a dis-eased condition constituted the normal state of being for early modern Christian believers, leaving them in a perpetual state of physical discomposure and anxious longing for salvation. Pain, in turn, figured as a psycho-physiological manifestation or exacerbation of this normalised dis-eased condition.
In this context, music could act as an effective agent of bodily transformation, either as an analgesic or as a catalyst for necessarily painful catharsis – and thereby as a form of biopower. In order to prepare their dis-eased bodies for receiving God’s grace, Bach’s congregants first needed to feel the pain of remorse and penitence in their bones and innards. I argue that some of the physically challenging music-making in the St. John Passion had the capacity to expose, modulate and moderate this thoroughly dis-eased nature of early modern humankind. A properly situated understanding of these historical experiences of dis-ease, pain and musicking, then, will require dislodging some of our foundational assumptions about (normal) bodies and how they functioned in the world.
Fearful Bodies – Fearful Sounds? Musically Navigating the Dis-ease of Plague
Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
‘Our’ pandemic was full of music: Within days of Covid-19 reaching Europe in early 2020, music became one of the most important and prominent mediums for expressing, navigating (Reddy 2001) and shaping emotional pandemic experience. If we turn to the past, though, we find that not only was the music much more muted when the bubonic plague repeatedly struck Europe, but that the emotions that marked the pandemic were also different. At the center of plague treatises is “fear”: as a bodily state, it is named as one of the most significant risks for contracting the plague. Fear-avoidance strategies were therefore high on the list of plague control measures: to prevent and protect before the disease occurs, to reduce the risk of contagion and increase the chances of recovery during an outbreak, and to strengthen resilience after it was over.
This paper examines how music was ingrained in these strategies of navigating the plague though fear avoidance. The concept of "dis-ease" provides the theoretical lens, defined by Boddice and Hitzer (2022) as the “ways in which people think about, feel about, experience their bodies in illness and health in [an] ongoing way [and] the fears that accompany the idea that one might be unwell, or that attend an epidemic disease that has not yet touched us directly, but which is nonetheless out there”; the Great Viennese Plague from 1679 serves as the historical case study. Sources suggest that music, in various bodily and material configurations, was involved in all three stages of dis-ease: before, during and after the disease. They account for imagined funeral music as a precursor to Plague; the ringing of bells to disperse and dispel poisonous air (miasma); and church music as an act of thanksgiving. They also show that, when it comes to fear, music was sometimes complicit, competitive and at times downright contradictory.
By focusing on the convergence of fearful bodies and fearful sounds during plague dis-ease, this paper ultimately aims to elucidate the ambivalent relationship between music and dis-ease beyond pandemics and even times of crisis in general.
Bent Bodies: Dis-ease in Heinrich Biber’s Scordatura and Joni Mitchell’s Alternate Tunings
Mark Seow
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
For centuries, the plucked and bowed string instrument has been used as a metaphor for the human body. The resonant harmonic series of normative tunings has been associated with good health and ableness, cosmic order and spiritual balance. Yet this metaphor is at odds with reality, both then and now. In 1713, Johann Mattheson described the “eternal tuning” of lutenists, and how snapping gut strings meant that playing a lute cost just as much as keeping a horse. When Joni Mitchell paused her 1968 performance at Club 47 to tell the audience that “I’m really scared I’m gonna break that string”, the moment was a calibration of tension: tune and risk injury, or continue in safety but with soured intonation? Countless snapped strings later, the necks of Mitchell’s guitars became warped in ways that mirror her polio-infected spine. Perfect health afforded to these different musical bodies appears out of arm’s reach.
Scordatura, as a purposeful de-tuning of the normative, embodies a practice with which to interrogate the cognition-focused and ableist narratives of the instrument-as-body metaphor. By drawing on the concepts of "crip virtuosity" (Jones 2019) and temporalities of “dis-ease” (Boddice and Hitzer 2022), this paper reconfigures scordatura as an embodied dynamic of bentness between the bodies of an instrumentalist and their instrument. It brings together two near-rupture moments of “scordatura” practice: Mitchell’s “alternate tunings” during the aforementioned performance, and the violinist Rachel Podger’s 2015 recording sessions of Heinrich Biber’s so-called Mystery Sonatas, a work that involves extreme re-tunings. Both these re-tunings have largely been framed as stuff of the mind. Mitchell’s “chords of inquiry” have been collapsed under the trope of her disembodied, hippy imagination (Wilson 2017), and Podger’s recording, too, polished over any traces of psychological and organological pain.
By re-evaluating scordatura not only as a de-tuning of instrument, but also as an embodied dynamic of bentness, this paper seeks to further the “carnal” call in musicology (Le Guin 2006) through conceptualisations of musical performance as physical and psychological “dis-ease”.
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