Bringing Music Alive: The Embodied Nature of Musical Style
In my teenage years, whilst muddling through my first experience of severe mental illness, I felt compelled to explore different musical sounds. Music has always been my place of refuge and my biggest pillar of support, but as in other aspects of my life, I had started to feel restricted and boxed in by the musical traditions that I had grown up with. I was pulled towards understanding other cultures as I realised that here lay the possibility of perceiving, feeling, and embodying the world in ways that my own culture had neglected. From a young age, it was particularly evident to me that emotion, and the freedom to allow the body to express emotion, was a tricky subject in UK culture. Several traumatic events in my childhood, which resulted in me being punished for crying and expressing distress, outlined this. Subsequently, my efforts to secure help when I was experiencing severe periods of mental illness in my teenage years were more or less dismissed.
I needed an environment and a set of relationships which would enable me to make sense of my suffering; I needed a new language with which to express myself. My interest in ethnomusicology then, amounted to an exploration into ways of embodying new perspectives on my own personal predicament, and on the world at large.
If I became interested in other cultures as a way to explore those parts of human experience that were neglected in my own culture, then I was attracted towards music and dance in order to restore the sense of rhythm and connection that I had lost to trauma. As trauma expert Bessel Van der Kolk observes,[1] the nature of both the cause and the symptoms of trauma is disconnection; it involves being out of synch with the people and the environment that surrounds us. If being in synch with our environment and community means ‘resonating through sounds and movements that connect’,[2] then music, dance and ritual can offer effective routes out of trauma. Since the beginning of recorded history, music, dance, ritual and theatre have been used to provide a container for powerful feelings, and to forge a sense of collective identity and community.
By encouraging rhythm and movement, music, dance, and ritual are mediums that involve the body in crucial ways. As D. Robert DeChaine argues ‘… to underplay the significance of the body in our efforts to account for the power of music does a great disservice to our knowledge of our selves’.[3] Music, and the performing arts more widely, offer a space where bodies can be recreated and performed in order to explore alternative ways of being, or to express parts of ourselves that may not otherwise be fully acknowledged in daily life. Music awakens our visceral sense of being-in-the-world, it tunes into our emotions, and it calls out to our physical desire to move.
This understanding of music as a deeply visceral experience was not echoed by the musical culture of my upbringing. The emphasis lay on the musical work, on musical form and structure, rather than on the bodily experience that it creates. As Christopher Small (1998: 4-5) remarks, in the classical tradition:
‘What is valued is not the action of art, not the act of creating, and even less that of perceiving and responding, but the created art object itself. Whatever meaning art may have is thought to reside in the object, persisting independently of what the perceiver may bring to it’.[4]
This view of music felt completely out of alignment with everything that I valued in music. For me, music is a collective effort, where composers, performers, listeners, and the physical environment come together to create. One in which the body, emotion, and sensation are the driving forces. It made little sense to me why I was being asked to spend so much time and energy experiencing music with my eyes and my intellect. Why was I encouraged to analyse and interpret visual symbols with my mind, when everything that I loved about music came to me through my ears and my body? I was passionate about classical music, but I wanted to absorb its beautiful secrets by experiencing it, and by feeling it in my body. Countless analyses and discussions about written marks on a page left me feeling disconnected and disillusioned. And so I endeavoured to find and develop an alternative conception of music.
I started to explore the ways in which my instrument, the clarinet, is used in music across the world. I was totally captivated by the Turkish clarinet and so I decided to visit the master clarinetist, Selim Sesler, in Istanbul. During this time, as well as gaining new insights into language, music, and culture, I also cultivated a new relationship with my instrument.
I had begun to learn music aurally through my previous explorations of jazz and Balkan music at university, and by the time I visited Istanbul, I had gained a sense of how music feels on my instrument in relation to how it sounds. I was no longer focused on visually interpreting musical symbols from a written score, and so I could now pay attention to the feel of my instrument against my body, as my instrument and I worked to produce sound together. Music-making became a collaborative project between me and my instrument, rather than an instructive one (from the manuscript to me, and then from me to my instrument). Musical sound became correlated with bodily patterns and shapes (rather than with visual symbols), and music took on a much more deeply embodied form for me. This was an aspect of music-making that I had not fully accessed before, as the musical score had taken up most of my attention.
This new, more body-centred, experience of music led me to question the validity of the teaching methods that had schooled me in western classical music culture. The over-emphasis on learning to read notation in my musical education had actually acted as a barrier against successfully internalising an intuitive and embodied knowledge of my instrument. As Monika Andrianopoulou notes:
‘It appears that, when a musical score is approached as a set of instructions to be executed, unconnected to an aurally familiar musical culture, it does not fulfil its purpose: instead of becoming a bridge between the performer and the music, it can become a wall that obstructs a more direct relationship between them and hampers the development of important musical traits’.[5]
Realising this led me on further quests to develop my understanding of music as a fundamentally embodied practice. I was drawn towards the music of Epiros, in north-west Greece, as here, music is interwoven into the rituals and routines of everyday life. It is a process defined by the interaction between people, place, and memory. It is not an object to be analysed or consumed. This music also expresses deep longing and sorrow and it seemed to encapsulate and embody the feelings and sentiments that I needed to express.
It was certainly not by coincidence that I ended up in the remote Greek mountain village of Parakalamos learning to wail and sob down my clarinet.
I lived in the Romani Gypsy community in the village for several months over the course of a few years, spending time with the musicians and slowly learning the clarinet style. During this time, it struck me how intertwined music was with the character of the village and of the everyday life of the inhabitants. The embodied actions and interactions involved in music-making in Parakalamos are dependent upon the conventions and idiosyncrasies that constitute cultural and personal identity, and vice versa. As ethnomusicologist Fiona Magowan writes, ‘it is through an environment of cultural practices that the body is endowed with specific expression’.[6] Yet, these conventions and idiosyncrasies develop and change in response to relational dynamics. They are not a fixed set of ritual actions that unfold in exactly the same way at every musical event.
Music in Parakalamos is a deeply embodied process that materialises out of the relationships between musicians and instruments, between people (including listeners and dancers as well as musicians), and between body, sound and place. In other words, music is ‘an emergent phenomenon that develops through shared active involvement in the musical event [and the culture as a whole]’.[7] Rather than viewing the musical ‘work’ as the site of musical meaning, music is understood as an active process – as a set of relationships – and it is out of these relationships that meaning arises.
My determination to learn the klaríno style of Epiros required me to immerse myself in the wider culture, and to allow my body to slowly recalibrate to the demands asked of it. Approaching the music with an analytic mindset, and intellectually examining and separating the music out into components such as ‘melodic structure’, and ‘ornamentation’ may have permitted me to gain a superficial understanding of the music very quickly, but it did not help me embody the deeper and richer knowledge of cultural style that I was seeking. In fact, it hindered my progress in this regard.
Music is not only about a cognitive understanding of sound and a regular practice of instrumental technique. It involves social interaction, the embodiment of cultural and historical meaning, and visceral experiences of emotion and feeling. The performance of musical style is a relational process that involves the previous musical and cultural experience of the performer, as well as the social and cultural expectations of the current musical environment.
Paul Berliner discusses the importance of early musical experiences in the shaping of a musician.[8] He notes that these early experiences are where the child learns their culture’s definition of music, and therefore, they form the child’s notion of what music is or ought to be. Through his research with jazz musicians, Berliner found that the process of musical acquisition, for these musicians at least, is an osmotic process. Style and genre is absorbed gradually and intuitively over a lifetime of musical experience.
It was natural for me to break music down into formal structure, melody and ornamentation when learning a new musical style, as this was what my musical education had taught me to do. However, as I immersed myself in a greater variety of musical cultures and styles, my understanding of music changed and I was able to adjust to a less analytical and more holistic, embodied, and intuitive approach. Not only was I learning a new musical style, I was also redefining for myself what music is and how it can be learnt.
In her study on the musical practices of the Yolngu indigenous people of north Australia, Magowan notes that, for the Yolngu, musical knowledge is gained through a ‘cultural ecology of learning’.[9] This means that music is learnt by ‘sensing and feeling the environment’ on a practice-centred (rather than cognitive) basis. Through this process, the sounds and movements required to make music become intuitively embodied. Yolngu learning methods thus use ‘tacit’ knowledge, rather than a more explicit cognitive process, that involves a bodily awareness of the environment.
I found that a similar mode of learning was necessary in Parakalamos. It was by playing with musicians at the local festivals, and by watching how they behaved and performed that I really learnt how to embody the style. In more ‘formal’ lessons the little tricks of the trade that make the klaríno style come alive were usually not mentioned or shown. As my most long standing teacher from Parakalamos Thomas Chaliyiannis once said to me, ‘you don’t need to have lessons in order to play klaríno well’. He noted that the most important thing was the ability and opportunity to listen to and observe musical performances, coupled with hours of personal practice. He told me that when he was learning, his father did not teach him ‘pieces’. Instead, he showed him a few technical exercises to familiarise him with the instrument and then left him to his own devices.
In short, a narrow focus on the intellectually measurable components of musical sound and structure, without pertaining to the social and cultural contexts in which music is performed, is not enough to effectively understand a musical style. During my ethnomusicological fieldwork in Parakalamos, I realised the importance of immersing myself in all aspects of local life. I had to learn how to be fully present in Parakalamos before I could truly access the music of Parakalamos. My experiences in this village highlighted how disconnected we are from life as a holistic and flowing entity in modern (and especially western) society and culture. In particular it emphasised how dissociated I had become, personally, from my body and myself, due to traumatic events which were directly related to the disconnection that is prevalent in my culture of origin.
Exploring other cultural styles enables us to see our own culture more clearly. It allows us to recognise the modes of expression and behaviour that are lacking, or dominant, in the cultural environment in which we were brought up. It may lead to a new appreciation for what our own culture has given us, or it may lead us to challenge the validity of certain cultural norms.
Personally, learning different musical styles gave me a new conception of what music actually is, and of its value in human life. Music became a much more embodied, emergent, and intuitive thing – it was not an intellectual endeavour, nor was it ‘organised sound’ that could be picked apart and analysed. It became a flowing manifestation of relationships – between body and instrument, between members of a community, and between people and place.
[1] Van der Kolk, B. 2015. The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, p. 84.
[2] Ibid., p. 122.
[3] DeChaine, D. R. 2002. ‘Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience’. Text and Performance Quarterly, 22:2, 79-98, p. 81.
[4] Small, C. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, p. 4-5.
[5] Andrianopoulou, M. 2019. Aural Education: Reconceptualising Ear Training in Higher Music Learning. Abingdon UK and New York: Routledge.
[6] Magowan, F. 2007. Melodies of Mourning: Music and Emotion in Northern Australia. Oxford, UK: James Currey, p. 14.
[7] Schiavio, A. and H. De Jaegher. 2017. ‘Participatory Sense-Making in Joint Musical Practice’. In Lesaffre, M. P-J. Maes and M. Leman (eds). The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, p. 34. Material in square brackets is my addition.
[8] Berliner, P. 2009. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, p. 22.
[9] Magowan, F. 2007. Melodies of Mourning: Music and Emotion in Northern Australia. Oxford, UK: James Currey, p. 44.