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Body and Force in Music: Metaphoric Constructions in Music Psychology

2024; Duke University; Volume: 68; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00222909-10974815

1941-7497

Will Mason,

Music Therapy and Health

embodiment has become a near-ubiquitous analytic frame across humanities scholarship, including in music studies. Embodiment's appeal to music analysts is clear: it promises to ground analysis in relational modes of engagement rather than in objective universals, it gives analysts new tools for describing and explaining phenomena like timbre or affect that traditionally have been low analytic priorities, and it potentially broadens analytic discourse by incorporating non-Western epistemologies.1 Because embodiment has become so pervasive in music scholarship, the concept risks becoming so flexible and so capacious that it could lose much of its explanatory value. Conversely, embodiment—and especially "the body"— may risk becoming a universalizing framework of its own, of the very sort that early interventions into bodily musical experience grounded in feminist thought were trying to challenge. In either case, scholars enthusiastic about the study of the intersections of music and the body must take pains to avoid assuming that the body and embodiment are terms with agreed-on or transhistorical meanings.Youn Kim's Body and Force in Music: Metaphoric Constructions in Music Psychology (2022) presents a careful, historically grounded study of body and metaphor in musical description and analysis. Kim's focus is on musicological and psychological writing from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making the book a welcome contribution not only to contemporary work on music and embodied metaphor but also to the history of music and psychology. "The human mind, which is the subject matter of psychology, is not given but constructed by the practitioners in the field," Kim writes. "The same idea may be applied to music; music is constructed by the practices of its practitioners, including composers, performers, listeners, and theorists" (9). As such, Body and Force in Music both calls on theorists to historicize their assumptions about music and the body, and does this for claims about music, body, and force made during psychology's rapid efflorescence in the turn of the twentieth century.Chapter 1 walks the reader through the fascinating history of metaphors of the human body as a motor, particularly in the body's transduction of force (or vitality) into energy (or action). The scholarship that Kim's narrative weaves together paints a fascinating picture not only of emerging theories of rhythm perception, but of the (often negative) impact that processes of industrialization and modernization were thought to have on the human psychological and corporeal subject. The "body as motor" metaphor may be clearest in Charles Sears's studies of timing variations between pianists' movements, which he described in terms of expenditures of force, including inefficient force: "Irregular forming of activity or unrhythmical movements are in a much greater sense consumers of energy in that every new operation demands a new action of the intellect" (Sears 1902: 22, qtd. p. 19). Kim suggests that rhythm in Sears's account experiences a transformation from a "purely mental experience of successive minima sensibilia" (20) to something embodied, corporeal, and vital. Not merely a sequence of symbolic representations on the page, rhythm exists in these pedagogical treatises as a by-product of movement. Further, such movements can be evaluated as an indicator of well-conserved energy from the performer, or else of their inefficiency.Kim discusses German scholar Karl Bücher's Arbeit und Rhythmus ("Labor and Rhythm" 1896), which explicitly connects nascent psychological theories of rhythm with modern processes of industrialization and automation. Bücher contrasts the mechanical rhythm of the factory with the rhythms of the work songs of the Naturvölker (Kim 2020: 21). For Bücher, rhythm was part of economic development, increasing worker productivity even while it stood as an aural synecdoche for the alienation of the working person from their labor in the era of mechanization. Kim traces the influence of Bücher's work on rhythm in the work of German psychologist Ludwig Klages, a "notoriously outspoken anti-semite" (23). Klages's scholarship shares with Bücher's the glorification of romanticized pastoral life that would come to characterize one strand of Nazi anti-modernism. Kim carefully reads Klages's work to show how his vitalist philosophy led him to argue that the human body was not properly like a motor at all, and that rhythm was not the mere product of a mechanical succession of elements but was "associated with the irrational and its essence is a continuum" (23). From Klages, Kim moves to Rudolf Bode, a Nazi whose pedagogy of gymnastics was built on the significance of rhythm. For Bode, "Modernization was seen as a process of 'de-rhythmification' (Entrhythmisierungsprozeß), the gradual repression of a primal rhythm" (24). The rhythms of the body had to be liberated from the rhythms imposed by mechanization, technology, and the orderings of industrial life. Kim's account of the work of Bücher, Klages, and Bode is a highlight of the book and a valuable addition to recent musicological work on interpenetration of eugenics and racism into early music-psychological research at the turn of the twentieth century.Chapter 2 looks at the primacy of the voice in early music psychology, and particularly at what Kim calls the "music-voice-nature nexus" (34). Today the voice remains at the center of debates about the origin of music, whether it be in the musilanguage of Steve Brown (2000), or in neuroscientific studies showing overlaps in neural-processing resources for perception of music and speech (e.g., Patel 2008; Fiveash et al. 2021). Kim (2022: 36) suggests that "what is noteworthy in the nineteenth-century attribution of the origin of music to voice was the shifting notion of nature." In Kim's narrative, music's function shifts from the imitation of an external natural world to the internal expression of emotions and of social desires. Kim discusses Herbert Spencer's 1857 account of music and speech, and his suggestion of a common corporeal grounding of both. "[Certain] muscles," wrote Spencer, "in common with those of the body at large, are excited to contraction by pleasurable and painful feelings. And therefore it is that feelings demonstrate themselves in sounds as well as in movements" (Spencer 1857: 310, qtd. p. 36). Kim contrasts Spencer's corporeally grounded account of music as a language of emotion with the work with speech synthesis undertaken by Hermann von Helmholtz a few years later. Helmholtz's synthesis of vowel sounds "signifies the detachment of the voice from the human body," Kim writes, echoing the work of Benjamin Steege (2012) in arguing that Helmholtz dissociated the voice from its corporeal origin to render it an object for closer study. But Kim (2022: 40) maintains that Helmholtz did not sever the voice from its role as both a site for, and communicator of, emotional subjectivity. "Voice occupies an ambiguous position in Helmholtz's theoretical framework. Voice is simultaneously an object and a subject."Chapter 3 returns to several of the piano pedagogy texts considered in the first chapter's discussion of rhythm. Here is where Kim especially focuses on the metaphor of "force," and particularly the preoccupation with the source of force (Kraftquelle). Kim persuasively argues that piano pedagogy texts were themselves theories of music, and that as a result they evidence the importance of performativity and embodiment in past music theories. For example, Kim argues that the early twentieth century saw the increasing prominence of bodily movement as an externalization of some internal force, directed by, or emanating from, willpower. In a close reading of the work of physiologist and psychologist Johannes Müller, Kim finds regular mention of piano playing to illustrate Müller's vitalist conception of force and movement: "The action of the brain, in the excitation of a certain part of the infinitely many primitive fibers, resembles the play of a multistringed instrument whose strings sound as the keys are touched. The mind is the player or excitator" (Müller 1837: 816, qtd. p. 66). In the tradition of piano pedagogy that emanates from physiological research like Müller's, the source of force was sought internally, as located in the brain and in the nervous system. Müller also becomes a liminal figure in Kim's account, in that he is simultaneously preoccupied by theories of sensation and theories of embodiment avant la lettre. Music's capacity to stimulate the body also leads to observations like James Mursell's, in 1927: "The writer [Mursell] regularly feels the ponderous rhythm of the opening measures of the second movement of Schumann's 'C-Major Fantasy' in terms of a swing of the whole body, while he feels the beat of the 'Minute Waltz' as a sort of rapid chattering of the teeth" (Mursell 1927, qtd. p. 70).Chapter 4 looks at music-psychological studies in the early twentieth century considering photography, and of photographs of the body in action. Kim writes, "These studies of moving and musicking bodies constituted the conceptual background for the emerging emphasis placed on the continuous and dynamic mind and the 'energeticist' understanding of music itself" (79). Kim's thesis is that there is a linkage between energeticist music theorists and these technology-assisted studies of bodily motion. To demonstrate this, Kim begins with a lengthy focus on a surprising figure: French photographer Étienne-Jules Marey. Marey did not write about music but was preoccupied with physiology and with documenting the workings of the human body. Marey's Bergsonian focus on capturing and considering movement via photography is linked by Kim to broader discourses on the continuously moving human body, including those treated in writings in performance and pedagogical study. From Marey, Kim moves to energeticist music theorist Ernst Kurth—he of the famous dictum "melody is motion" (Kurth 1920: 7, qtd. p. 85). Kim describes Kurth's melodic energeticism, with its emphasis on motion and movement rather than on discrete points of arrival, as a listener-evoked sensation: "Unlike the spatial continuum of a line connecting two points, which is passively experienced, a continuum between two tones is artificial and is constructed by an active imagination" (91). Kim returns once again to piano pedagogy, invoking Heinrich Schenker's use of the word portamento to describe a particular set of performance gestures at the piano meant to invoke the continuous connecting of tones. In Kim's reading of Schenker, portamento is a performance technique but also "a kind of commitment to the aesthetic principle of continuous motion" (92), and specifically to the creative and co-constitutional act of hearing.In the last chapter of the book, Kim turns to the mechanisms through which musical force was construed to act on listeners. Kim asserts that in the laws of the physical world as understood by seventeenth-century natural philosophers, "action at a distance was not permitted" (98): there must be contact. Kim cites as an example René Descartes's explanation of magnetism, which held that invisible particles emitted by a magnet behaved like the twisting threads of screws, constituting a form of invisible but no less real contact between objects (98). But by the end of the nineteenth century, music psychologists were perfectly content to explain music's emotional and communicative impact as waves, vibrations, even telepathy, all acting on listeners not via physical contact (as in Descartes's magnet particles) but from a distance. Kim is particularly interested in the relationship between ninteenth-century metaphors of force and the "non-cognitive aspects of the human mind," particularly the nervous system (105). Vibration was deployed as a metaphor to describe phenomena like sympathy, including sympathetic nervous systems. The companion concept of the "wave" was also invoked in the context of brain waves, but Kim notes that in the pre-electroencephalography era of the nineteenth century, brain waves referred to "a 'psychic force' in spiritualism, which flourished during the time and affected several scientific scholars. . . . In conjunction with music, the notion of brain waves was used to explicate the impact experienced within a body and, beyond that, as a metaphor in social cognition as a means of connecting individual brains" (112–13).The chapter concludes with a wonderful reading of the work of Victor Zuckerkandl. Working in the middle of the twentieth century, Zuckerkandl comes across as remarkably nonplussed by the acoustical knowledge given by tools like the oscilloscope. These waves and lines represent pitch and loudness but not the "dynamic state of the tone" (116). "Tonal movement is psychic, not bodily motion, a motion without a material substratum, nonspatial motion, spontaneous or self motion . . . the movement so heard is 'emotion,' not motion of bodies" (Zuckerkandl 1976: 142, qtd. p. 117). Here I found myself reflecting on a slippage between music as motion and music from motion, the former implying a metaphysics of music not necessarily implied in the latter. But both rest on a co-constitutive listening practice, which Zuckerkandl himself puts as follows: "Listening to music, then, we are not first in one tone, then in the next, and so forth. We are, rather, always between the tones, on the way from tone to tone; our hearing does not remain with the tone, it reaches through it and beyond it" (Zuckerkandl [1956] 1969: 136–37, qtd. p. 118). The force of music, its ability to cause action at a distance, seems in Zuckerkandl to be refigured as an imaginative and creative act of listening.Apart from a focus on particular metaphors rooted in force and embodiment, the book does not present an overarching narrative through line or a single strong thesis. It is a synoptic survey of work—often underappreciated, at times conflicting, always interesting—relating to music, the mind, and corporeal experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But a few threads appeared to me as I read. One is the position occupied by piano pedagogy in music theory and music psychology. These pedagogical texts have not always been afforded value as speculative texts within the disciplinary bounds of music theory or music psychology, and as such contemporary scholars may be losing sight of important ideologies of music from previous eras. It may be the case that we are back-filling our modern disciplinarity onto scholarly work from previous eras; or that we have inherited a problematic disciplinarity from those very same periods. As Kim (2022: 125) argues in the book's conclusion, "The discourse of music psychology was interlinked with other modes of discourse so closely that the disciplinary boundaries were challenged and blurred." In mining pedagogical resources so carefully, Kim not only finds refractions of music-psychological thought but also observes ways in which pedagogical writings prefigured later music-psychological developments. However, the book both centers and privileges the piano and its pedagogues. Such a centering would be unproblematic with sufficient justification, but, given the hegemony of keyboard instruments in the field of music theory, I felt that more reflection on the piano's outsized representation in the book was warranted.A second theme in the book concerns the enmeshment of nascent theories of mind and body with technological advances, and with the hopes and fears connected to those advances. This includes the piano, but extends well beyond it, and chapter 4 in particular brings research into music psychology into fruitful dialogue with shifting accounts of the human sensorium brought about by advances in photography and cinematography. Kim discusses Heinrich Heine's praise of the violin's intimate humanity, contrasted with the mechanistic piano: "The way this piano-playing has got out of hand and particularly the triumphal processions of the piano virtuosos are characteristic of our time and bear most authentic witness to the victory of the realm of machinery over the mind" (72, cited from Phelan 2007: 202). There is much more fascinating work to be done examining the imbrication of new technologies—their genesis, their material workings, but also their affective impact on the general public—and music-psychological thought during this period. Such an inquiry might reveal, as it does in Kim's book, yet more points of surprising overlap between music-psychological discourse and socio-technical shifts underway in the postindustrial West.Youn Kim's Body and Force in Music is a wide-ranging account of early music-psychological work and its guiding metaphors. Many of these metaphors endure today, and all of them are the inheritors, however oblique, of their deployment in this early scholarship. For those who are at work on the history of music psychology and on the history of piano pedagogy, and for those conducting contemporary research on music psychology, Kim's historical account will be a valuable scaffold and a welcome reminder of the long and complex histories from which our contemporary work emerges.