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

Edited by N. Reyland Edited by R. Thumpston

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

Extent: 365 pages

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Subjects: Music & Performing Arts

Series: Analysis in Context. Leuven Studies in Musicology

Series volume number: 6

Language: English

Hardback (Out of print)

(November 2018)

ISBN: 9789042936416

Price: $119.00

In stock

eBook (Out of print)

(November 2018)

ISBN: 9789042937345

Price: $149.00

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.


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.

  • Edited by N. Reyland
  • Edited by R. Thumpston