Embodiment in Music Performance

Abstract

This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first, current literature on embodied cognition is reviewed, and important themes drawn out. These themes—gesture, the embodied self, social interaction and joint action—are discussed as they appear in the broader literature and as they might be applied to studies of music, and in this way a broad theoretical model of embodied cognition in music is built up. In the second part, specific ethnographic moments from the authors’ fieldwork in India are discussed with reference to this theoretical framework. In the first, the embodied nature of a raga’s meaning is discussed; in the second, the somewhat different ways in which Indian classical music can be embodied as ‘abstract’ design are addressed.

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