Being in the Body, Being in the Sound: A Tale of Modulating Identities and Lost Potential

Author(s): Eleanor V. Stubley

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 93-105
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3333388
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Being in the Body, Being in the Sound: A Tale of
Modulating Identities and Lost Potential

ELEANOR V. STUBLEY

It is dusk in the desert-that bewitching hour when the intensity of t

day's unrelenting heat suddenly lifts with the hint of a breeze and a pr
ise of darkness. Worn and weary with dust trailing my every movemen
am inexorably drawn forward by the distant sounds of drums and co
munity. I am curious to see what lies ahead, but for one brief minute I
back from where I have come. A single window penetrates the gloom.
opens on a small room, cluttered with mementos celebrating a long hist
of great artistry. I feel the weight of this history, even at this distance; b
what captures my attention is the music making in the only uncluttered c
ner of the room where four musicians are poring over a recently discov
score of a late Beethoven string quartet. While the music making appear
be motivated and bound by the score, it is as if the musicians are search
for something that lies beyond the score. At times, the searching seem
question the shape or presence of a particular note or melodic motive;
other times, it appears to be a quest for "the work," the string quartet wr
ten by Beethoven. As I continue to eavesdrop, I am struck by the way
which the searching in both instances ultimately seems to evolve into
question of ensemble. It is as if the musicians are not only trying to discov
the music implied by the score notations, but also trying to find themselv
trying to get a sense of who they are in relationship to this music. It i
phenomenon that I have encountered frequently in my travels, and I w
der, as the sounds in the distance reenter my consciousness, why of all
possibilities the window of my mind opened on this particular room.
My thoughts, however, quickly turn to the sounds drawing me forwa
for they are quite unlike anything I have heard before. I am filled with
by the rich variety of drum timbres and have a strong sense of order; yet
asked to explain this sense, I am at a loss, for I can discern neither mel
nor harmony, neither meter nor form. Indeed, my first impressions seem

Eleanor V. Stubley is an associate professor on the McGill University Faculty of Mu

She has recently contributed an essay to Critical Reflection in Music Education (edit
by David Elliott) and published articles in Musical Studies, Philosophy of Music Ed
tion Review, The British Journal of Music Education, and this journal.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter 1998

?1998 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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94 Eleanor V. Stubley

focus almost entirely on the way in which the musicians are moving.1 It is
as if they are joined to their drums and are making music with their whole
bodies. I have experienced sound and movement as one many times in my
travels; but here there is something more, for it is as if the movement moti-
vates and sustains the music making, filling the musicians with energy and
drive. In some instances, the musicians appear so immersed in their bodies
that their movements seem to define their total sense of being or self-aware-
ness. This strikes me as odd, for it seems as if many of the musicians are
simply repeating the same patterns over and over again, and it is difficult
for me to understand how such repetition can be so all-absorbing. As I con-
tinue to watch and listen, though, I begin to sense that the music lies not in
the patterns, but in the play of patterns as they merge, coalesce, and are
challenged by interjections from what appears to be the drum master.
While the musicians may be repeating a pattern over and over again, they
are not immersed in the body movements through which those patterns are
articulated per se, but in the way in which those movements feel and define
their sense of being as the play unfolds. With this realization, I catch a hint
of Beethoven in the breeze and I am reminded of the searching at the heart
of the string quartet's music making. The memory, however, escapes me,
for the scene before me suddenly shivers like a mirage and is gone.
It is again dusk in the desert-that bewitching hour when the intensity
of the day's unrelenting heat suddenly lifts with the hint of a breeze and a
promise of darkness. I am where I began-or am I? I raise the question be-
cause philosophical discussions of the nature and value of musical perfor-
mance have, particularly in Western thought, typically begun with the mu-
sic made in performance as product-that is to say, as a musical work, an
interpretation, or an improvisation.2 I now, however, find myself reflecting
on the activity of the musicians I have just observed and what it actually
means to make music in performance. I do not wish to abandon the knowl-
edge and insights proffered by my predecessors,3 but the juxtapositions
and allusions evoked by my dreamlike experience appear to have reori-
ented my thought, giving my seemingly aimless wandering a new purpose
and direction. As the minutes pass, though, my vision remains somewhat
clouded, and I find myself wondering how to proceed. The difficulty ap-
pears to lie with my vantage point as an observer looking in on perfor-
mance from the outside. If I am truly to understand the connection between
the searching of the string quartet and the "musical play" of the African
drummers, I need to discover a way to get inside the action as it develops.4
To this end, I find myself attempting to enter the field that creates the
space or potential for action in musical performance. The task is a formi-
dable one in that a field defines an entire way or manner of being in the
world5 and, as such, ultimately requires me to traverse three interlocking
areas: one being that part of the physical world taken up by the body and
through which the body moves; two being the invisible and intangible area

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 Being in the Body, Being in the Sound 95

where the mind works,6 and three being that occupied by the will or spirit,
the sense of sameness or self-identity that permeates and encapsulates all
awareness.7 Eventually, however, my efforts are rewarded, and I find my-
self deep within the field, constructing the experience like a performing
musician, while at the same time free to explore.8

The Field of Musical Performance

The change in position is initially quite disorienting, for the field appears to
blur the sensations and perceptual boundaries distinguishing the bodies
and minds making music and the instruments through which that music is
heard and articulated. In both ensembles, musician and instrument appear
to be experienced as one, with the strings, bow, or drum seemingly organi-
cally fused to the fingers and body parts that control them. It is, to adapt the
words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as if musician and instrument are symbi-
otically tuned to one another, with each affecting the other as parts of a sys-
tem that collectively demonstrates the property of "mind."9 This observa-
tion produces a tingling of excitement and awareness in my outer
extremeties that helps me better understand what Susanne Cusick means
when she describes performance as a form of thinking through one's
body.l0 There is, she argues, a fundamentally different manner of being in
performance than in other forms of musical activity in that the music is ex-
perienced, not as something given to the body, but as something done
through and with the body. Cusick does not mean to imply that the activity
is mindless, rather that the mind acts through the space carved out by the
body as the symbiotic relationship between musician and instrument is
forged and sustained.
As I become more familiar with my new vantage point, I notice that the
field also forges a similar symbiotic relationship between the different mu-
sicians in each of the ensembles. While the musicians have their own indi-

vidual spaces, the boundaries distinguishing those spaces appear to be

blurred by an awareness of the activity of the ensemble as a whole. Driven
by a common goal-be it musical excellence, the work, or a shared sense of
community- the musicians in both ensembles seem to work together like
the different organs in a living body, with each individual action taken
tuned to and affecting the actions of all others. This tuning seems to unfold
through the music making and appears to be driven by a movement of
mind that enables the musicians to reach through their bodily actions and
experience the outer edge of the sounds being shaped and articulated, not
as actions already taken, but as possibilities that might be.11 It is as if each
moment has a spatial dimension that extends between "the here and now," a
spatial dimension that gives the musicians a bodily presence in the sounds
themselves.12

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96 Eleanor V. Stubley

This presence is consistent with my observations from outside the field

in that it ultimately makes the sounds and the movements initiating them
seem as one. The union, however, has an underlying tension that I had not
noticed previously, a tension seemingly grounded in the fact that the space
created by the field appears to be in a constant state of flux.13 I initially find
this flux difficult to assimilate in that I had assumed a common goal would
imply a relatively fixed space characterized by a certain homogeneity of ac-
tion. As I move around the field, though, I quickly begin to realize that the
musicians' awareness of this goal is itself subject to the tuning it drives. The
field, in this sense, constantly seems to be regenerating itself; indeed, it is as
if the space it creates has a temporal dimension that lets each moment circle
back on itself and become an ever-developing present.l4
Not surprisingly, given the differences in the nature of the music being
made, the space created by the field at any given moment varies signifi-
cantly in both size and formal configuration as I move between the two en-
sembles. The boundaries, moreover, are not something I see, but something
I feel as a sense of "otherness" or resistance. The sensation is difficult to de-

scribe in that it can vary markedly from moment to moment in both inten-
sity and source, seemingly stimulated at times by a sour note or rushed
rhythm, at other times by an inability to continue a particular phrasing or
expressive nuance as a melodic idea moves from one musician to another.
In both ensembles, however, it seems to involve the play of three forces: the
musical voice, style, and trust. I use the term "musical voice" to denote the
persona or musical identity that emerges as the musicians tune themselves
to their instruments and the activity of the ensemble.15 Defining a musi-
cian's manner of filling or being in the sound, this force shapes the various
inward, outward, backward, and forward movements of the self at the
body-sound interface, as the musicians reach through their actions and the
space created by the field circles back upon itself.16 I sense its power through-
out the field in that each musician appears to bring a personal history of
past musical and life experiences, which affects how they approach their in-
struments and relate to one another as the music making unfolds. Its power
seems to be particularly potent, however, where the ongoing music making
widens or goes against the grain of the field through an experience of other-
ness that requires immediate accommodation or that creates, like the
searching of the string quartet and the interjections of the African drum
master, an opportunity for individual musical identities to be asserted.
The actual size of the space in which individual musical identities may
be asserted at any given moment appears to be defined primarily by the
stylistic conventions and performance practices that distinguish the West-
ern art music tradition of Beethoven and that of the African drummers as

distinct approaches or ways of making music.17 Focusing my attention on

particular tonal colorings, structural nuances, and ensemble interactions as

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 Being in the Body, Being in the Sound 97

musical goals, I realize that the power of these conventions and perfor-
mance practices seems to be ritualistic in nature.18 I discover this power first
in the string quartet's music making, in part perhaps because of my earlier
experience outside the field where I felt the history of the great artistry cel-
ebrated by the clutter in the musicians' work area bearing down on me. I
have no sense, however, of this weight within the field, for it seems as if the
past has become embodied in the musicians themselves.19 To borrow a
phrase from Erving Goffman, I feel somehow "set apart," as if the embodi-
ment gives the actions defined by the adopted stylistic conventions and
performance practices a new identity and importance, not simply as the
way things are done at any given moment, but as musical achievements
having a life and ongoing history of adaptation and appropriation all their
own.20 The dynamics of this "setting apart" are slightly different in the Af-
rican ensemble in that the ritual enabling embodiment seems to develop out
of a respect for the achievement of the drum master and the types of bodily
interactions and sense of community that his leadership engenders. The
repetition and stylization of action that are its essence, while not without a
sense of the past, seem to be more grounded in the present, ultimately
evolving through the "play" between the musicians and the drum master
as the music making unfolds.21
In both instances, however, the formal integrity of the field, what I have
described earlier as its grain, seems to be maintained by trust.22 As in other
forms of social interaction, I experience this trust as a sense of "being apart
together,"23 as a bodily/thought process that establishes a belief in a com-
mon motivation and that details the degree of freedom and variation allowed
in the interpretation and realization of the goals defining that motivation. In
the case of the string quartet, this bond appears to be forged to a large de-
gree through the musical score. Extending the horizon of the field to make
the presence of the composer felt, the score seems to demand a commitment
on the part of the musicians to the work envisioned by the composer,24 a
commitment particularly apparent in the early phases of the music making
where the musicians make a consistent effort to rediscover the quartet as if
they were reading the score and hearing for the first time the music it im-
plies. In the African ensemble, in contrast, the bond seems to be a conse-
quence of the musical roles or functions associated with the different
drums. Indeed, it is as if the drums function like a team uniform, indicating
the intentions of the musicians and the types of musical patterns they are
likely to articulate as the music making unfolds.25

The Play in Musical Performance

I almost trip over this analogy, for the reference to team uniforms seems to
bring me back full circle to the thought that led me to enter the field of

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98 Eleanor V. Stubley

performance in the first place, namely, a sense of connection between the

string quartet's searching and the musical play of the African drummers. I
could conclude, at this point, that this connection is simply a product of the
fact that the boundaries shaping the space or potential for action in each in-
stance are a product of the same three forces. This is not the first time, how-
ever, that I have sensed a potential connection between performance and
play. In fact, I have come across the connection frequently in descriptions of
musical performance where the two terms are often used interchangeably. I
have always assumed that this was a product of the value attached to skill
and virtuosity in both activities. But, as the images of my prior experience
float through my mind, I now begin to wonder if perhaps the connection is
not more deeply rooted in the particular formal configuration of the field
and the experience of self that configuration engenders in both activities.
To this end, I find my attention turning to the open and expanding space
in which play unfolds. Although the action of play is typically interpreted
in terms of a final outcome such as who won or lost, the action as it unfolds
within the field is sustained by an ongoing tuning process in which the self
is experienced as an identity in the making.26 As Carolyn Bereznak Kenny ex-
plains, it is as if the player both fills and is filled by the unfolding action.27
Each moment, she elaborates, is driven by an outward movement that
focuses attention on the ways in which the skill and proficiency brought to
the field can be used to advantage. In so doing, the player is at the same
time filled by a sense of otherness that, when particularly potent or forceful,
seems to explode the player's awareness of the present moment by instanta-
neously redirecting the various movements of self at the player-action inter-
face.28 The redirection may not ultimately be accepted as viable, but that in
itself is part of the experience of an identity in the making in that the self is
defined by both who we are and who we are not.29
The open and expanding space in which play unfolds is, in this sense,
grounded in a form of empathic bonding in which the other is experienced
at the moment of redirection as a potential "I."30 It is as if the explosion
leading to the redirection engenders a meeting of I's at the player-action in-
terface.31 As David Woodruff Smith explains, there is a certain circularity to
the "filling and being filled by" that endows the moment of explosion with
a spatial dimension in which the self seems to meet its own redirection.32
The experience of the other as an I is, as such, not a matter of abandoning
the self, but of momentarily expanding the space in which it moves through
an embodied awareness or acceptance of the presence of an other.
This way of connecting seems to share a certain affinity with the experi-
ences of the string quartet and the African drummers, where the tuning
process driving the music making creates an experience of self as an identity
in the making, that is to say, where the music making creates an experience
of otherness that focuses attention on the musical voice and the way in

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 Being in the Body, Being in the Sound 99

which that voice shapes the various movements of self at the body-sound
interface. In the case of the African drummers, this seems consistent with
my earlier characterization of the activity as musical play, that is, with the
musicians appearing, even from outside the field, to be totally immersed in
the way in which their movements feel and define their sense of being as
the music making unfolds. In the string quartet, it seems to happen prima-
rily as the musicians search for a musical voice through which the ensemble
can speak as one.33 The character of the identity being made differs from that
in the African ensemble in that it builds on an understanding or bodily
awareness of the similarities between musicians. In the African ensemble,
in contrast, it seems to be more rooted in a sense of "unassimilated differ-
ence," with the task of the drum master being to weave the differences into
a multicolored tapestry.34 In both cases, however, it is as if the musicians
both "fill and are filled by" the sounds being shaped and articulated at the
given moment. Indeed, I frequently sense an open and expanding space be-
fore me and feel somehow larger than life, as if I am two I's at the same
time, me and a significant other.

Epilogue: Defining Musical Performance as Subject Matter

The feeling is a powerful one, and I am loath to leave the field; but as I be-
gin to sense the first light of dawn, there appears in my peripheral vision a
student wind ensemble straining under the commanding baton of their mu-
sic teacher to master a version of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." As I redirect my
gaze, the sounds that fill my ears come to an abrupt halt, and the music
teacher announces that the note in the third bar should have been an E-

natural, that the rhythm in the fifth bar was incorrect, and that the phrasing
goes like this. The "music making" resumes, but the teacher's comments
seem to have had little effect. She stops again and repeats her instructions,
this time in the opposite order, but to no avail. In fact, it is as if she has
never spoken. I reach out, trying desperately to bridge the gulf that seems
to separate us, but I feel drained and empty, filled only with a tremendous
sense of loss and an echo of Pete Seeger's tune "Where Has All the Music
Gone."35
I am tempted initially simply to ignore these feelings, wanting to believe
that my travels have merely led me to expect too much on this final leg of
the tour. As I reflect on this possibility, however, my sense of otherness in-
tensifies as I come to recognize that my feelings are not so much a prod-
uct of a lower standard or quality of music making as of a fundamental dif-
ference in the nature or character of the activity itself. It is as if the space
created by the field has simply collapsed, with the musicians blindly aim-
ing at a luminiscent target seemingly freely suspended at an indeterminate
point just above and beyond the teacher. I attempt to penetrate the blackness

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100 Eleanor V. Stubley

that separates the musicians from their target, but once I am beyond the
score, I find only a void, a sense of total spacelessness.
The experience shocks my body, contradicting what I see with my eyes
in that the void seems to engulf the teacher, even when the brilliant glow of
the target is at my back. While the teacher's comments appeared to have
little effect on the students' performance, her singing did reveal a certain
level of musical understanding and expertise, a sense that she, at least, was
"making music" as she sang. My disorientation becomes even more pro-
nounced when I discover that the target represents "Ode to Joy," a musical
work written by Beethoven.36 It is in itself not as foreign as my experience
of otherness suggests, another musical work by Beethoven having been at
the heart of the music making of the string quartet. I quickly come to real-
ize, however, that while the value attached to the work may be similar in
the two ensembles, the brilliance of the glow illuminating the work as tar-
get in the students' performance seems to have frozen time, making it im-
possible for the field to circle back upon itself. The outward movement of
the students as they take aim, consequently, is not a matter of "filling and
being filled by," as was the case with the string quartet, but a tossing action
that, once completed, leaves the body behind.
The difference seems to be grounded in a distinction between the musi-
cal work as object and the musical work as an idea that shapes the way in
which music is made in performance, that is to say, as a space within which
musicians work.37 As Lydia Goehr has so richly detailed in her recent trea-
tise The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, the work is what it is in the
Western art music tradition not because of any particular distinguishing
characteristics as object, but because of the regulative power it came to as-
sume as idea through a particular set of historical circumstances that gradu-
ally transformed the fundamental nature of musical experience.38 There
were not, Goehr writes, suddenly musical objects where there had been
none before. Rather, the idea of the work made it possible to experience
music in a new way, as having an inherent value independent of the context
in which it was made and heard.

This being the case, I find myself wondering how the space created by
the idea of the work could become the seemingly fixed object sought by th
students. My attention turns almost immediately to the space behind th
target and the source of its brilliant glow,39 namely, the epistemologica
constructs that have shaped and driven the definition of musical perfor-
mance as subject matter. I find the roots of (some of) these constructs in the
seventeenth-century philosophical developments that, going back even fur-
ther to Plotonius' definition of beauty as "a glimmering of ideas," recog-
nized the perception or immediate apprehension of beauty as a mode of
knowing.40 These developments endowed music with the capacity to illu-
minate and, in so doing, transformed the musical work into a shining

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 Being in the Body, Being in the Sound 101

beacon, something in the distance sought for the wisdom and insight its
light affords. In effect, by separating the musician from the sounds shaped
and articulated in performance, this distancing fixed not only the identity of
the work,41 but also the way in which the score, as an objective representa-
tion of that identity, was approached. It was, as Goehr explains, as if the
need for truth and certainty imposed closure, giving the sounds constitut-
ing the work an independent existence that could be known only through
the score. Since the score, as a physical object, was subject to the laws of
empiricism and therefore equal to the sum of its smallest parts, to learn to
make music, that is to say, to learn to perform the work, was very simply to
learn to get the notes correct.42
Having arrived at this conclusion, I begin to make my way back to the
target, only to discover that the laws of empiricism also had a profound im-
pact on the way in which the body was conceived in musical performance.
The connection seems to stem from a single root having two branches, one
representing the mind, the other the body. The separation appears to have
reinforced the distancing of the work (as a source of insight) by subjecting
the body to the gaze of the mind's "eye" as if that "1" were outside the
body. This vantage point-which made it impossible for the body to be
seen as anything but a muscle to be trained-camouflaged the transforma-
tive powers of musical performance, the sense in which performance en-
genders a meeting of I's at the body-sound interface as a musician both fills
and is filled by the unfolding music making.43 Learning to perform, conse-
quently, while requiring correct notes and technical facility, is ultimately a
matter of learning to experience the self as an identity in the making, of learn-
ing to reach out and create a playful space in which the self is open to the
possibilities of an other. The teacher, as such, must go beyond the score and
the identity of the work actually to make music with the students,44 to
weave within the space defined by the relevant stylistic conventions and
performance practices a multicolored tapestry that, like the one woven by
the drum master in the African ensemble, encourages a growing under-
standing of the self as similar and different, yet always connected.45 With
this realization, I feel the full dawn of the morning sun explode within me,
as if I am suddenly two I's at once, the teacher, the giver of knowledge, and
the musician who made music while she sang.

NOTES

1. This description is based on the drumming traditions in Ghana as described to

me by Joseph Rasmussen, "Hearing the Drums' Talk," MENC Biannual Confer-
ence, Cincinnati, Ohio, April 1994. The importance attached to movement has
also been documented in other musical traditions. See, for example, John Baily,
"Musical Structure and Human Movement," in Musical Structure and Cognition,
ed. Peter Howell, Ian Cross, and Robert West (London: Academic Press, 1985),

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102 Eleanor V. Stubley
pp. 237-58; Robert Kauffman, "Tactility as an Aesthetic Consideration in African
Music," The Performing Arts: Music and Dance, ed. John Blacking and J. W.
Kealiinohomku (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979), pp. 251-53; Bell Yung,
"Choreographic and Kinesthetic Elements in Performance on the Chinese
Seven-string Zither," Ethnomusicology 28 (1984): 505-17; Steven Scheck, "Devel-
oping an Interpretive Context: Learning Brian Ferneyhough's Bone Alphabet,"
Perspectives in New Music (Winter 1994): 132-49. Arnold Berleant also makes ref-
erence to the tactile dimensions of artistic experiences, noting that sight and
hearing have been considered as the only true aesthetic senses for too long. See
his "The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 23 (1964): 185-92.
2. See, for examples, Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1990); Michael Krausz, The Interpretation of Music:
Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); D. Carrier, "Interpreting
Musical Performance," The Monist 66 (1983): 202-12; Randall Dipert, "Toward a
Genuine Philosophy of the Performing Arts," Reason Papers 13 (Spring 1988):
182-200; Paul Thom, For an Audience: A Philosophy for the Performing Arts (Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Philip Alperson, "On Musical Improvi-
sation," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1984): 17-30; Nelson Goodman,
Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968); Charles Fowler, ed., The
Crane Symposium: Toward an Understanding of the Teaching and Learning of Music
Performance (Potsdam, N.Y.: State University of New York, 1988).
3. It is recognized, as subsequent sections of this article will reveal, that this activity
can never be fully separated from the music made.
4. Phenomenologists describe this change in position as the difference between
conceptual or abstract thought and lived experience. Marianne Kielian-Gilbert
describes it as a movement from the positional to the personal, characterizing
the former as poietics, the latter as poiesis. See her "Of Poetic (sic) and Poiesis,
Pleasure and Politics-Music Theory and Modes of the Feminine," Perspectives
in New Music (Winter 1994): 44-67. Varela and others speak of the need to recon-
cile the different types of knowledge obtained through these two different ways
of encountering or being in the world. See, for example, Francisco J. Varela et al.,
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Humanl Experience (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1992).
5. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it, "The world is not what I think, but what I
live through" (Phenomenology of Perception [New York: Humanities Press, 1967],
p. xvii).
6. See ibid. for further elaboration of these areas.
7. It must be noted that Merleau-Ponty does not make direct reference to the spirit
or will in this sense in Phenomenology of Perception, but it is implicit in his use of
the word 'body', the body being more than the experience and the feeling, even
the perception of doing. Without it, as Varela notes in "Harre and Merleau-
Ponty: Beyond the Absent and Moving Body in Embodied Social Theory" (Jour-
nal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 24 [1996]), there would be no place for the
idea of "person" in Merleau-Ponty, the sense in which both the body and the
bodily intention have significance.
8. Technically, I cannot enter the field as if it were an abstract space, something
that exists independent of the individuals constructing it. I can, however, con-
struct it with those individuals, as one of the performing musicians. I retain the
"I," therefore, as a literary device to emphasize the break with past explorations
of musical performance.
9. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 145. Later, in reference to instru-
ments or tools in general, he writes, "Once the stick has become a familiar in-
strument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer
skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick" (p. 152). In vocal performance, this
relationship unfolds within the body through a particular orientation or focus
that enables the performer to experience the vocal cords as an instrument, as
something with which and through which he or she connects as musician.

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 Being in the Body, Being in the Sound 103
10. Suzanne G. Cusick, "Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Prob-
lem," Perspectives in New Music (Winter 1994): 8-27. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
develops an even more precise formulation of this notion in reference to dance.
See her "Thinking in Movement," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39 (1981):
339-407.
11. I derive this from Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 137ff, where
he discusses how "we perform our movements in a space which is not 'empty'
or unrelated to them," but which in actuality is "determined and filled by
them." Roland Barthes makes a similar observation in reference to musical per-
formance in "Musica Practica," in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on
Music, Art, and Representation (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), pp. 261-77. In
practical terms, all other things being equal (that is, while you are actually mak-
ing music), one experiences a tone coming into pitch, a melodic tone leading to
its neighbors, and so forth. This futuristic orientation has also been posited as
one of the defining characteristics of sport. See, for example, William J. Morgan,
"An Analysis of the Futural Modality of Sport," in Sport and the Body: A Philo-
sophical Symposium (Philadephia: Lea and Febiger, 1979), pp. 108-17.
12. Merleau-Ponty describes this spatiality as a "temporal thickness." See Phenom-
enology of Perception, pp. 140ff, 275, and 398.
13. Merleau-Ponty describes distance, the ultimate measure of "space," as a tension.
See ibid., pp. 302ff.
14. David Antin captures the nature of this experience well in his poem, "Tuning,"
in Talking at the Boundaries (New York: New Directions, 1976). It is also consis-
tent with Merleau-Ponty's observation that "time is not a line, but a network of
intentionalities" (p. 417). It must be noted, however, that Merleau-Ponty does
not deal specifically with the construction of a "social" body. But Charles Varela
points out, he does leave room for the development of such an extension in his
discussion of the interconnections between language and gesture. See Varela,
"Harr6 and Merleau-Ponty," pp. 167-84.
15. My use of the term "musical voice" is consistent with the early Latin origins of
the word 'persona' in the phrase per sonare, meaning "to sound through" in that
the "mind" which Merleau Ponty describes as linking body and musical instru-
ment to form an integrated system, must have a voice through which to speak.
For further information on this derivation, see James W. Carlsen, "Persona, Per-
sonality, and Performance," Studies in Interpretation, vol. 2, ed. Esther Doyle and
Virginia Floyd (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1977), pp. 221-32. In using the term,
as such, I refer to the way in which the musician uses the particular color or
capacity of an instrument actually to make music, not the sound or voice as a
physical organ per se.
16. Albert William Levi describes these movements as the four dimensions or faces
of self: heritage, creativity, self-reflection, and self-revelation through inter-
subjectivity. For further discussion, see Mervin Lane, ed., Black Mountain College:
Sprouted Seeds (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).
17. Merleau-Ponty writes that "a style is a certain manner of dealing with situations"
(Phenomenology of Perception, p. 327).
18. See, for example, Christopher Small, "Musiking-A Ritual in Social Space" (Pa-
per presented at the Sociology Symposium '95, Norman, University of Okla-
homa, April 7, 1995); Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture
and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Margaret Drewal, Yoruba
Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
19. Indeed, it is often as if my body (my aural and tactile senses) intuitively knows
the appropriate path of action to follow. The past can be embodied in the
present through the circular action of the space created by the field as the field
regenerates an action that is essential if the musicians are to be able to retain the
immediate past as a sense of the music that has been made to that moment as a
whole, as "a performance."
20. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City,
N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967).

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104 Eleanor V. Stubley
21. This type of ritualistic embodiment can evolve within the music making of the
string quartet as well. I am speaking here in broad generalities.
22. I derive my use of the term 'grain' here from Barthes ("Musica Practica") in that
the formal integrity of the field is maintained by a sense of consistency in the
way in which the musicians fill the space their bodies are carving. The visual
image of the pattern or "grain" in a board also adds depth to the metaphor.
23. Building on my earlier use of Erving Goffman's "setting apart," I borrow the
phrase "being apart together" from Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the
Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p. 12.
24. Lydia Goehr describes this bond of trust in The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), as a bond of fidelity or loyalty.
25. The roles assigned to different instruments in a string quartet by a composer can
function similarly. I have decided to treat them as related but distinct processes
here, because ultimately these functions are assigned by a composer within the
given stylistic context.
26. The phrase "an identity in the making" is mine, but the idea has led many schol-
ars to characterize play as a formative process, a matter of self-discovery. See,
for example, Carolyn Bereznak Kenny, The Field of Play (California: Ridgeway,
1989); Anna K. Nardo, The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
(New York: SUNY Press, 1991); and D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New
York Basic Books, 1971).
27. Kenny, The Field of Play, chap. 1.
28. I borrow the idea of the "exploding" moment from David Woodruff Smith, The
Circle of Acquaintance (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). Randy Mar-
tin describes the same phenomenon as an "overflowing body." See his Perfor-
mance as Political Act (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1990).
29. Martin Buber, "Elements of the Interhuman," in Knowledge of Man, ed. Maurice
Friedman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).
30. The I need not be an other in the sense of another person; it could be, as is often
the case in musical performance, an imaginary I, a way of being in the action
that has not been tried before but which suggests itself on the basis of the way in
which the self is currently relating to the unfolding action.
31. I derive this from Woodruff Smith's phenomenological analysis of empathy in
The Circle of Acquaintance, chap. 4. James Carlsen describes this effect as the self
returning with a difference. See his "Persona, Personality and Performance," p.
223. Martin describes it as a body "overflowing socially constructed constraints"
in Performance as Political Act, p. 16.
32. Merleau-Ponty describes this circularity as an "entre-deux," a space in between.
33. These examples represent only two of the levels on which one can experience a
sense of both filling and being filled by musical performance. One can experi-
ence it at the pure level of sound in terms of one's relationship to one's instru-
ment, in terms of one's relationship to the composer, another improviser, a con-
ductor, an audience, a culture as represented by a style, other performers who
have achieved under similar circumstances, and so forth.
34. This difference is implicit in Iris Marion Young's discussion of the idea that a
community can be built on the acceptance of difference as well as the ways in
which others are or can be similar. The metaphor of the city as "strangers-being-
together" is a classic example. See Young's "The Ideal of Community and the
Politics of Difference," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New
York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 300-23.
35. Peter Seeger, "Where Has All the Music Gone," in the Joan Baez Songbook (New
York: Ryerson, 1964). This loss includes not just a sense of the lost music mak-
ing, but a sense of the way in which music education is marginalized within the
larger musical community.
36. Technically, "Ode to Joy" is not a musical work, being only a tune from the
larger work. It is presented in method books and approached in instruction as a
work. This tendency to equate a tune with the work is a rich area for discussion.

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 Being in the Body, Being in the Sound 105
37. Merleau-Ponty describes this difference in terms of the "spoken word" and the
"speaking word." See Phenomenology of Perception, p. 197. Morris Goldman de-
scribes the distinction in terms of a moral tension, there always being in perfor-
mance of the work a tension between the needs of the work in a particular stylis-
tic context as expressed by a composer and the needs and characteristics of the
individual voice. See his "On Moral Obligation in Music," in What Is Music? An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip Alperson (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).
38. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works , pp. 69-86. She attributes the ten-
dency to view the work as object to the inherent problems of definition as a
means of understanding a phenomenon or activity. See also Carl Dahlhaus, The
Esthetics of Music (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
39. This space is created by the field that defines the nature of education as the
transmission of knowledge at all levels of instruction and degrees of musical
sophistication and complexity.
40. Some scholars trace this development back to Nicholai Listenius' tripartite clas-
sification system in Musica: Ab authore denuo regnita multisque novis regulais et
exemplis adaucta (fascimile, ed. G. Schumann, Berlin, 1927). It could be argued on
another level that the idea of the musical work is beginning to lose its hold,
given some of the twentieth-century experimentation with chance and aleator-
ism. Its grip is still very strong in education, though, largely because of the epis-
temological constructs that have shaped the concept of knowledge as something
fixed and lasting. An example lies in the way in which transcription of impro-
vised solos in jazz instruction has recently begun to give the improvisation an
identity as "work."
41. If the work was to be a source of knowledge, the sounds constituting the work
had to have an existence independent of their performance, they had to exist
someplace out there. Thus, the tossing action in the students' performance is a
matter of trying to hit the right bells, so that the resonance of their ring will
somehow make the sounds constituting the work sound for themselves.
42. As a physical object, the score was subject to the empirical conceptions of truth
and certainty, both in the sense that one could know only what one could objec-
tively verify through repeated observations and the sense that the whole is
equal to the sum of its smallest elements.
43. As James Fernandez puts it in Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in
Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), performance is to be un-
derstood as a set of transactions by which pronouns, the foci of identity, are
moved about in quality space with the help of metaphorical operations (in this
case, the filling and being filled by sounds).
44. Emphasizing the "with," I want to make a clear distinction between making
music with the students and making music for the students. The teacher's sing-
ing is an example of making music for, albeit with the intention that the stu-
dents would soak up the teacher's knowledge of phrasing and filling out the
sound.
45. Carole Gilligan and Martin Buber make the point that difference and similarity
are ways of being connected. See Carole Gilligan, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J.
Hanmer, Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma
Willard School (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Martin
Buber, "EIements of the Interhuman," in Knowledge of Man, ed. Maurice Friedman
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965).

This research was made possible through generous funding from Fonds pour la For-
mation Chercheurs et l'Aide a la Recherche, Quebec, Canada. I am grateful for the
bibliographical assistance of Ms. Jolan Kovacs and Mr. Raymond Luk. A version of
this paper was presented at the 1996 MENC Biannual Conference in Kansas City,
May 1996.

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