Musicality Book Club, Week 2: Music in the Body

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]

One of the biggest hurdles for many dancers is making the transition from hearing music as an object, detached from the self, to feeling music as living, breathing energy. Even the language we use sometimes conveys this idea: “Hitting a break” contributes to a sense of “chasing” the music. But what’s amazing is when we consciously try not to “follow” the music, we generally find it at least a little tough, if not incredibly difficult. It’s like the music is a magnet pulling us into its rhythm, its lyricism, its flow. But the opposite can also happen. When we try to chase the music instead of relaxing into it, we can find it just as hard to be “on the music.”

One thing I absolutely love about dancing is that I feel like I’m actually changing the music every time I dance it. Of course in a literal sense this can’t be true. But when I choose to accent certain parts of the music or draw attention to other parts by pausing or toning down my movement while letting the energy build internally, I am actually participating in how that music gets heard – and therefore felt – by myself, my partner, and anyone else who is watching. Does anyone else experience this?

There are only a few partners who have made me feel this in an obvious way that really thrills me and gets me deeper into the music. But at a base level this is always happening. You cannot help but feel the music through the lens – i.e. the body – of your partner, and this experience is heightened tenfold when you are attentive, listening and inviting of this communication. The challenge is to listen and communicate deeper when you find yourself dancing with someone whose musicality (in whatever form or stage) is not immediately felt or understood. I struggle with this often. When I do get a payoff, it comes in the form of a dance that appears to have three participants weaving in and out of each other in perfect (or delightfully imperfect) interplay.

Mathieu also writes about gravity as one of the keys to connecting music and body:

Gravity is an attractive force; you are alive in a field of desire. The earth wants you, and you want it…

Your mass is innate to your being, and every aspect of your body’s form has been shaped by the attractive force drawing your mass and the earth’s mass toward one another – love in its simplest form. Yet as in any love relationship, one has to learn to be separate as well as conjoined, so you know also how to lift your arms and legs, to rise up against the pull of the earth… When you walk consciously in tune with gravity and your body’s innate response to it, you tend to walk most easily and efficiently, like a marriage going well. [p. 5]

This is a very beautiful metaphor and a very present reality at the same time. Coincidentally, this past weekend our local tango community was lucky to be visited by tango instructor Hsueh-tze Lee for a series of workshops. What I love about both her dancing and her teaching is the emphasis placed on being grounded. Regardless of which concepts and patterns Hsueh-tze teaches, the importance of grounding permeates the movement and the connection. In fact, this weekend she spoke specifically (and often) about the efficiency and fluidity of pushing into the floor (i.e., grounding) with the lower body while lifting with the upper body, which is exactly what I wrote about in response to the introduction to Mathieu’s book last week. So this is a physical and metaphysical reality at the same time, and also provides great metaphorical food for our thoughts and emotions in the context of music. I also find a perfect parallel here for the tango embrace (re-read the quote above, replacing the concept of gravity above with the embrace, and you’ll see what I mean), so that’s even more to think about and discuss.

Continuing with Mathieu’s thoughts on Mind as Body, he goes on to discuss one of my absolute favorite topics, and the first thing that always come to mind for me when I think of the mind-body connection in the context of musicality: the concept of embodied cognition.

Bodily response to a certain quality of sound is called embodied cognition – a way of saying that our minds map what we hear onto our bodies in specific ways…

When you feel your gut respond to a funky bass line, or you shape a lovely melody with your hands, or lift your eyes upward to a soaring violin, that is your private embodied-cognition research. When you notice how your feet seek the floor on the low drum sounds of downbeats (boom), and your body rises against gravity on the high cymbal sounds of upbeats (chick), you are doing boom-chick research – unfunded, perhaps, but no less authentic. How do music, gravity, and human body all become one fluid thing? You yourself are the researcher, and this is your noble science. [p. 7]

What I like about what Mathieu writes here is that he again frames music as something that is generated from within, not imposed from without. Regardless of whether you agree to its literal truth (part of the nature vs. nurture, innate vs. learned debate), this mindset is far more useful in helping dancers past their self-consciousness and negative self talk when it comes to musicality. And it recognizes that while musicality is magical and even mysterious, it is not attainable only for a select few (see also the Everyday Magic section of Born to Improvise). And, perhaps more importantly, it is not something that can only be cultivated through instruction; personal exploration – Mathieu’s embodied-cognition research – offers dancers a way to develop musicality organically.

In my interview with him a couple of years ago, Alex Krebs also recommended this type of personal research:

I recommend dancing on your own and then when you get with your partner sort of bring back that spirit of how you would dance in your kitchen alone if you put on tango music. You wouldn’t just walk and not move your body.

Of course personal exploration doesn’t consist only of dancing around a room by yourself in the hopes that inspiration and understanding will comes your way. There are lessons all around us. Watching other dancers and other types of dancers, listening to different musical styles and genres, watching musicians improvise, playing air guitar or air drums, imagining yourself or others dancing to music, making up your own music while dancing or even doing everyday activities, moving to everything or to nothing, noticing your physical and emotional responses whenever you experience dance or music in any form (including the non-traditional) – all of these activities are opportunities for musical discovery.

Here are a few more examples from Mathieu of how embodied cognition works:

The low/down, high/up metaphor seems to be the most widely shared across cultures, but there are many other ways our minds have of mapping sounds onto our bodies and the spaces around them. Music is slow as a yawn or fast as a blink, and all of its time scales and periodicities are measured against the natural dimensions of the body. Music is languid or energetic, relaxed or tense; our bodies are the measure of these. Melodies step (two successive tones are neighbors in the scale, hence easy to sing) or leap (successive tones far apart in the scale, less easy to sing). Music’s sonorities are full or empty, its textures crowded or spacious; it sounds close up or far away. Notice that these are not emotional or psychological responses, even though they could easily lead to them (we will discuss those in chapter 3). These are cognitive perceptions that correlate musical sounds to your body in space. [p. 8]

Embodied cognition is a fascinating area of study. If you are interested in reading more about this concept, I recommend two books that just came out this year: V.S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human and James Geary’s I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World.

Wow, this isn’t even the shortest chapter of Mathieu’s book, and I definitely have more food for thought than I can delve into here without getting long and winded. But to pose a final question that Mathieu also touches on in Chapter 1:

What similarities do you find between your experiences of…

• music and life cycles?
• music and breathing?
• music and body rhythms?
• music and sex?

So what are your thoughts on any or all of the above, or anything else from Chapter 1 of Bridge of Waves? I look forward to reading your comments so we can discuss further. And don’t forget to come back next Tuesday for Chapter 2: Music as Mind!

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Here’s the next post in this series:
Musicality Book Club, Week 3: Organic and Created Patterns Through Pulse