Music, Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments

How do our embodied experiences of music shape our analysis, theorizing,

and interpretation of musical texts, and our engagement with practices

including composing, improvising, listening, and performing? Music,

Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments

is a pioneering and timely essay collection uniting major and emerging

scholars to consider how theory and analysis address music’s literal and

figurative bodies. The essayists offer critical overviews of different

theoretical approaches to music analysis and embodiment, then test and

demonstrate their ideas in specific repertoires. The range of musics

analysed is diverse: Western art music sits alongside non-Western

repertoires, folk songs, jazz, sound art, audio-visual improvisations,

soundtracks, sing-alongs, live events, popular songs, and the musical

analysis of non-musical experiences. Topics examined include affect,

agency, energetics, feel, gesture, metaphor, mimesis, rehearsal,

subjectivity, and the objects of music analysis - as well as acoustic

ecology, alterity, class, distraction, excess, political authority,

sensoriality, technology, and transcendence.