Music in the Body: Musicality Book Club, Week 2
We’re now on Chapter 1 of Mathieu’s Bridge of Waves: What Music Is and How Listening to It Changes the World, which is tantalizingly titled Music as Body. This chapter is a nice segue from the introduction last week when Mathieu and I wrote about how the upper and lower body connote spirituality and groundedness (read last week’s post here). Before we go further, let me just give a quick update: By request, I will now be including page numbers at the end of quotes from the book in case you want to go back and find the appropriate section; feel free to do the same in your comments if you’re quoting something new from the book. Okay, let’s begin…
My impression is that Mathieu’s biggest intended take-away from this chapter is the idea that music is energy that comes from within the body rather than outside of it. He writes of the harm to this idea by modern society’s specialization in the field of the music among others:
…music has largely become, for most of us, a commodity made for mass consumption and manufactured by specialists. We don’t make music, we buy it… When the resonances of music are experienced as traveling from out there to in here, we become estranged from the rhythmic and harmonic states that arise naturally from our own bodies. One of the hard truths of my own American life is that it’s been decades since I’ve heard “Happy Birthday” sung in a restaurant in tune. What has happened to us?…
[O]verall, we know better how to consume music that how to physically participate in the making of it, and the trend of specialization continues. So as an individual in a society remarkably cut off from its own music-making body, how does one go about making the body connection? [pp. 4-5]
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