'Blood Piano': Music, Femininity and the Abject – A Practice-Led Enquiry

Abstract

Recent theoretical study in the field of musical analysis asserts that music performance may be understood as a transgressive encounter based on the writings of George Bataille (Bataille, 2008 [1957]; Rebelo, 2006; Waterman, 2008). Through identifying an overlap between choreographic methodology and the examination of instrumental gesture, I propose ways in which these theoretical findings may be translated into practice-led research. Arising within the context of gesture-based research as a stimuli for choreographic activity, I discuss musical practice as a mode of simulation marked out by physical mimesis. I propose the manifestation of effort through physical gesture in music performance as an expressive component conducive to live art interpretation where the performer's body plays a key role. Richard Leppert's discussion of music and femininity as historically synonymous furthers this research by contextualising the abject within the framework of the transgressive (Leppert, 1995 [1993]; Kristeva, 1982 [1980]). The gestural repertoires developed through instrumental practice with particular reflection on piano performance are well documented by Henry Shaffer, Francois Delalande, Jane Davidson, Eric Clarke and Mark Thompson (Shaffer, 1976, 1981, 1984; Delalande, 1988, 1995; Davidson, 2007; Clarke, 2006; Thompson, 2007). The kinds of gestural scores generated in such analyses - such as Delalande's classification of gesture types based on the playing of Glenn Gould - would usefully lend themselves to a choreographic interpretation (Delalande, 1988). Indeed, annotations of musical scores with gestural motifs, such as Thompson's analysis of Gould's playing of the 'Goldberg Variations' by J.S. Bach are redolent of the gestural scores generated in workshops led by choreographer Jonathan Burrows. Burrows, in collaboration with composer Matteo Fargion, has explored a number of choreographic interventions informed by musical structure. In a Burrows/Fargion workshop as part of the Bodysurf project at Findhorn in 2009, participants were encouraged to develop score-based exercises adapting rhythmical frameworks arising within John Cage's 'Lecture on Nothing' (1959). Within this framework, individuals were encouraged to explore different combinations of sitting gestures, vocal sounds and text while at the same time adhering to patterns in keeping with Kevin Volans's notion of variability. 1 However, it has yet to be explored how gestural analyses within music performance research might be usefully translated into choreographed material that could be used to comment upon the physical aspects of music making, with special attention to ways in which material could be made available to non-instrumentalists.