Congreso Internacional: Música y Corpografías / International Conference: Music and Body Matters
Stacey Sewell (University College Falmouth, UK)
‘Dem Bones’: Excavating Bodily Presence and Action in Recorded Performance.
Neil Luck’s Ground Techniques (2010) explores the possibility of using the composer’s body as a score. Performers are required to follow physical (rather than musical) trajectories, exploiting the inherent physicality of performance practice. The work attempts to map the artist’s body using a variety of performance and compositional techniques. The bodily sounds that can be heard on the track are Luck’s, but numerous other bodies also leave aural traces in their production of instrumental gesture. In this paper I explore how perception of these sounds troubles the live/recorded binary and how such bodily presence and gesture may contribute to an analysis of the work. I propose a methodology for an embodied analysis, drawing on work on embodied cognition (Cox 2001; 2006), and musical gesture (Fisher and Lochhead 2001; Godøy and Leman 2010). However, this method must also take into account the status of the work as a recording that is pieced together from live actions; there is no live, visibly present performer, and no score in the traditional sense. Instead, the listener is left to untangle the actions of the performing body through its sonic traces. I explore to what extent it is possible for the listener to engage with another body through its sonic presence, and the implications of this for an embodied analytical model. Following Sanden (2009) I suggest that recordings can offer the listener a potentially increased engagement with corporeality.
