Becoming Bach, Blaspheming Bach: Kinesthetic Knowledge and Embodied Music Theory in Ysaye's "Obsession" for Solo Violin

Abstract

This essay explores kinesthetic musical knowledge: what can it tell us about the music, the performer, or the composer? In discussing my own experience of performing "Obsession," the first movement of violinist-composer Eugene Ysaye's Sonata No. 2 for Solo Violin, op. 27 (1923), I'll articulate some of the observations I made while learning to play it. These insights in turn inflect and clarify my relationship with Bach, whose violin music is the object of Ysaye's obsession. In the course of practicing and performing "Obsession," I have developed a reading of this piece as depicting not only Ysaye's purported obsession with Bach, but also his possession by (a demonic) Bach. Some aspects of my interpretation are readily audible, while others stem from my physical knowledge of the music. An embodied analysis such as I undertake here may uncover musical meanings apparent only to the performer, demonstrating that "the score is not the work to a performer; nor is the score-made-sound the work: the work includes the performer's mobilizing of previously studied skills so as to embody, to make real, to make sounding, a set of relationships that are only partly relationships among sounds" (Cusick 1994:18). Many feminist scholars have observed that the body is too often written out of the academic study of music. For instance, Philip Bohlman sees this erasure writ large in musicology's disinclination to study dance (1993:431). Suzanne Cusick's critique of mainstream musicological practice aims to rehabilitate "the inextricable presence of the body in music--a presence both musicology's and music theory's focus on the intentions and the texts of the composers scrupulously denies" (1994:15). Feeling that she is not meant to speak as a performer when teaching musicology, she has written of her efforts to resolve this apparent disjunction: "as a performer, I act on and with what we ordinarily call music with my body; as a musicologist I have been formed to act on (and with?) what we ordinarily call music with my mind, and only with my mind" (9). Recognizing in the act of music-making a resolution of this apparent mind/body split, Cusick argues for a more embodied analytical practice, calling for a "theory of musical bodies" (18). Elisabeth Le Guin has demonstrated the historical and interpretive insights that can be gained from such an embodied analytical practice, using her own performing body to explore the music and life of Boccherini (2002; 2006). Her methodology, which she calls "carnal musicology," links her experience as a performer to the eighteenth-century notion of sensibilite and shows how knowledge originating in her sensate body can motivate an interpretation of a piece. In the past two decades music scholars using feminist and queer theories have focused attention on musical bodies in their analysis and criticism. Relating performative knowledge of a piece to aspects of the music's structure is one such approach. A more common feminist methodology seeks connections between personal identity (the composer's or the performer's), and musical structures and/or performance. We can fuse these approaches by thinking about how subjectivity might be inscribed upon a music-making body. For instance, in studying vocal performativity, Cusick (1999) considers how our voices embody (perform) our gender, sex, ethnicity, etc. She hears in the timbre of Eddie Vedder's singing an assertion of his heterosexual male American subjectivity. His characteristic snarl, suggesting tightly constricted throat muscles, demonstrates his resistance to the discipline of song by physically limiting culture's penetration into the innermost spaces of his body; context for this analysis includes her observation that singing is a normative behavior in our culture for women but not for men. In another example of work that connects music and identity through the music-making body, Philip Brett relates Schubert's presumed homosexuality to the composer's four-hand piano music. …