Body musicality:the visual, virtual, visceral voice
Benjamin Jonathan Macpherson · 2015
In 1938, German musicologist Alexander Truslit published Gestaltung und Bewegung in der Musik (“Shaping and Motion in Music”), a work which explored the relationship between what musicians and performers see, hear and experience in the production of music. Truslit’s work was in many ways ahead of its time. It included the concept of the “inner motion” of music (innere Bewegtheit) which he suggested was more than simply the intrinsic properties of the sound: “[m]usical motion is internal and encompasses the whole human being” (Repp 1992: 267; added emphasis).1To demonstrate his thesis, Truslit developed the concept of visual curves to represent such motion (Figure 11.1). Interestingly, Truslit takes care to emphasize that the “curve as such is not important [ … ] it is only an aid to visualizing the motion” (Repp 1992: 270). The visual representation of musical motion, then, is secondary to the motion itself; a motion which is internal and visceral. This hierarchy of the bodily experience of music claiming primacy over the visual representation provides the starting point for this discussion.