The Body in Musical Performance

This volume offers a groundbreaking exploration of musical embodiment across time, geography, and genre, bringing together thirteen essays that reframe the performing body as a site of knowledge, creation, and critical reception. From early modern opera to nineteenth-century improvisation, from experimental multimedia theatre to contemporary performance analysis, the contributors reveal how gesture, physical technique, proprioception, and symbolic constructions of the body shape, and are shaped by, musical meaning. Uniting historically grounded inquiry with performance theory and cognitive approaches, the essays cluster around four main axes: the embodiment of musical meaning in the interaction between performer and listener; the body as cultural and ideological construct in gendered, stigmatised, and national identities; the transmission and reactivation of embodied knowledge in historical performance; and the creative body as agent in composition, pedagogy, and ritual. Drawing on sources as diverse as early wax-cylinder recordings, liturgical chant, zarzuela reviews, and postwar ballet-opera hybrids, the volume foregrounds embodiment as both material and epistemic. Rather than treating the body as an expressive vehicle alone, these essays demonstrate that musical works themselves — whether composed, improvised, or remembered — are shaped through the performer’s somatic intelligence and the listener’s imaginative co-presence. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioner-researchers, this collection sets a new standard for interdisciplinary studies of musical performance. It will be essential reading for musicologists, performers, theorists, and historians of the body seeking to understand how music happens in and through the body, across eras and expressive systems.

Marcello Mazzetti, Introduction

I. Embodiment and Musical Meaning: From Performer to Listener

Hamish Robb, The Role of Embodiment in Forming Aesthetic Judgements of Musical Recordings

Sandra Oman Farren, Embodying Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Based on Lived-Experience Interviews and a Live Performance Survey

Luís Bastos Machado, “[…] any unnecessary movement was discouraged”: Bodily Gesture and the Ideology of Artistic Autonomy in Early Twentieth-Century Pianists

Wayne Heisler Jr., The Sound Body: Choreographic Embodiment and Richard Strauss’s Lieder

II. Embodied Identities: Gender, Stigma, Nationality

Daniel Martín Sáez, The Stigma of Castration: Medicine, Sex and Women in the Life of the Singer Carlo Broschi Farinelli

Jonathan Mallada Álvarez, Body, Music and the Stage: The Role of Corporality in the Shows at the Teatro Apolo in Madrid (1890–1913)

Aurèlia Pessarrodona, Boccherini and the “Spanish Body”: Reflections on Popular Dance and National Identity

III. Historical Embodiment: Transmission, Performance, Recording

Inja Stanović, (Re)constructing Julius Block: Embodied Responses to Early Recordings

Berthold Over, Embodiment and Disembodiment in Musical Sources of the 17th and 18th Centuries

IV. Creating through the Body: Pedagogy, Improvisation, Dramaturgy

Roberto Cornacchioni Alegre, The Art of Preluding: Body and Technique in Nineteenth-Century Piano Improvisation

Antonella Manca, Roman Vlad, Carla Fracci, and the Dancing Body

Maria Incoronata Colantuono, From the Body and to the Body: Performativity and Sensory Experience from Liturgical Rites to the Cantigas de Santa Maria