Contextualizing Music and the Body: An Introduction

Abstract

The presence of the phenomenological body is central to music in all of its varieties and contradictions. With the explosion of scholarly works on the body in virtually every field in the humanities, the social as well as the biomedical sciences, the question of how such a complex understanding of the body is related to music, which has its own complexity, has been investigated within specific disciplinary perspectives. The present handbook brings together these particular aspects of such relationships in a broad context and provides a platform for the discussion of the multidimensional interfaces of music and the body. This introduction first discusses the multiple definitions of the body and raises a set of fundamental questions in the general context of body studies. Thereafter, it contextualizes the topic within the discourse of musicology and identifies six different yet related aspects of music and the body, namely, the moving and performing body, the brain and psyche, embodied mind and embodied rhythm, the disabled and sexual body, music as medicine, and the multimodal body.