Full Description
Our understanding of music is inherently metaphorical, and metaphoricity pervades all sorts of musical discourses, be they theoretical, analytical, philosophical, pedagogical, or even scientific. The notions of "body" and "force" are the two most pervasive and comprehensive scientific metaphors in musical discourse. Throughout various intertwined contexts in history, the body-force pair manifests multiple layers of ideological frameworks and permits the conceptualization of music in a variety of ways. Youn Kim investigates these concepts of body and force in the emerging field of music psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The field's discursive space spans diverse contexts, including psychological theories of auditory perception and cognition, pedagogical theories on the performer's bodily mechanism, speculative and practical theories of musical rhythm, and aesthetical discussion of the power of music. This investigation of body and force aims to illuminate not just the past scene of music psychology but also the notions of music that are being constructed at present.
Contents
Introduction
The human body and musical instruments
Conceptual dimension of metaphoric construction
Force and agency
"Body and force" and "body versus force"
The discursive space and disciplinary identity of music psychology
Metaphors as shorthand for music psychology
Roadmap
Historicizing music psychology
Chapter 1. The Musicking Body-machine
Music, machine, and the body
The emergence of the "human motor" model
Rhythm: "an inevitable corollary from the persistence of forces"
Psychological studies in the era of rhythm
Musical rhythm and labor
Rhythm in the "body culture"
The "irrational," continuous rhythm
Rhythm and the piano-playing body
Concluding remarks
Chapter 2. "A Force of Nature": Tracing Voice
Animal, machine, and voice
Speech theory of music
Voice, the body machine, and the issue of agency
Voice as both object and subject
Voice of the "primitive" soul
Recorded Voice
"Dragging movement"
"How the voice looks"
Concluding remarks
Chapter 3. Motion, Force, and "Rhythm Form"
The "'co-working of motion' with one's own will"
Piano theories
Motion in piano playing
Force and the will
The will, physiology, and piano-playing
Force and posture
Action-perception coupling at the turn of the twentieth century
"Rhythmic massing"
Concluding remarks
Chapter 4. Minding Gaps and Musical Energy
The ball analogy
The human motor capable of locomotion
Capturing the musicking body
Music as streams of energy
Gliding between tones
The agency of motion
Revisiting the ball analogy
Music as motion across disciplines and times
Concluding remarks
Chapter 5. Force at a Distance
Force acting at a distance
In the words of amateur pianists and psychologists
Force affecting the audience
The metaphor of vibratory waves in psychology
Force at a distance and The power of sound
"Brain waves" in communication
Inhibition and waves in music psychology
The vibratory energy of music
"Sympathetic oscillation"
Concluding remarks
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
