edited by Arnie Cox, Turnhout, Brepols, 2025 (Applied Music Studies, 1).
For most of its history, as one might reasonably imagine, music has been or has involved composites of sounds and the bodily actions that produce them.
To whatever extent this proposition might be accurate, it suggests that music has been, and to varying extents remains, a genre of theatre.
But the possibility of separating sounds from their visible, corporeal sources — as in listening to singing that is performed in a dark cave or performed behind a rood screen, or in listening to LP recordings in one’s den — became a distinct way of experiencing, understanding, and teaching music, especially in various forms of higher education.
By contrast, the current interest in embodiment, branching off from gender studies, invites us to appreciate the roles of corporeality in shaping musical experience, which this collection of seventeen essays explores in the genres of opera, theatre, contemporary classical post-tonal music, the music of Jimi Hendrix, and the role of album cover art in shaping listening experiences.
Beyond repertoire are essays on innate, acquired, and culturally imposed bodily limitations; Eurhythmics; human-computer integration exercises; the cognitive semiotics of musical motion; and the corporeal bases of aesthetic evaluation of musical experiences.
Arnie Cox is the author of Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling and Thinking (Indiana University Press, 2016). He studied under Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon, and taught music theory at The Oberlin Conservatory of music from 1998 to 2022. He is currently writing a book on the bodily bases of musical value.
