Analyzing from the Body

Abstract

On Thursday, 7 March 1996, Evelyn Glennie performed Veni, Emmanuel/' a percussion concerto by James MacMillan, with the New York Philharmonic. One reviewer of the concert described Ms. Glennie as quite simply a phenomenon. The phenomenal aspects of the performance include, as the reviewer points out, that Ms. Glennie is profoundly deaf. The fact of Ms. Glennie' s performance, to say nothing of its success, calls into question the idea of music as sound alone.1 If a musically successful performance can take place when one member of the performer /listener dyad cannot in any literal sense hear the music, then an integral part of musical meaning must derive from something other than sound itself. Glennie's performance highlights the central role of bodily activity in the projection, apprehension, and constitution of musical meaning. Within the last few years, a number of authors have taken up issues pertaining to the bodily enaction of musical meaning from a wide variety of perspectives. Here we propose a methodological framework for analytic close-reading and present two instances of what analyzing from the body might entail. Further, we establish in the briefest of terms, the philosophical context that situates not only our approach but also the various perspectives taken by prior authors in order to clarify distinctions between them.2 The article is in three parts. The first is a primer on the philosophical foundations upon which various non-musical and musical approaches to embodied meaning rest. Considering writings from such diverse fields as philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and gender studies, our discussion here is meant to give only a taste of the central tenets of the relevant philosophical perspectives and of the disciplinary approaches each has generated, including those in music. This primer will illuminate both the choices we have made in shaping the general methodological framework for analyzing from the body and the specific avenues pursued in the exemplifying analyses. We consider this primer an

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