Musicking Bodies by Rahaim Matthew;

Author:Rahaim, Matthew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

The Musicking Body

A young boy is sitting in front of my teacher for the first time, flipping through a notebook in his lap, looking for something to sing to show what he can do. Hunched over his book, fingers rubbing the edges of the page, he tentatively sightsings a sequence of syllables from the page: “ye-e-ri . . . a-ali. pi-yaa bi-naa, aa, aa, sa-khi.” My teacher interrupts him by singing the phrase more forcefully, with more melodic direction. He pulls the word yeri vigorously from below, with both hands, as though snatching a sheet from a bed. When he gets to piya bina, which stabilizes around a single pitch, he holds the syllables ringingly in place with pursed fingers. After an hour and a half of singing, we take a break; the newcomer relaxes visibly and assumes the more familiar disposition of chitchat. While the rest of us debate the merits of the previous night’s concert, one advanced student keeps singing quietly, gazing at her hands, gently shaping the air in front of her face. Somebody asks her a question, and she sits up, turning quickly to him as though breaking out of a trance; her hands fall to her lap, and she gives a short answer. We leave her alone, allowing her to slip back into music.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 investigated ways in which the moving hands and the moving voice work together in a flow of musicality. The body in this musical state sometimes feels so different than it does when chatting or reading the newspaper that beginners are often noticeably awkward when first learning and look for any excuse to wriggle out of it, as though it were an uncomfortable garment. Skilled musicians, on the other hand, are often much more at ease musicking than doing anything else. It happens often that a musician, when asked a question about raga structure, will stop talking for a moment and hum several phrases of the raga at hand, consulting the intelligence of their musicking body before jumping to conclusions. This chapter is an attempt to understand this musicking body and the various kinds of virtual objects, fluids, and materials that extend it.

It should be clear by now that we are no longer considering gesture or the voice separately, but the whole-bodily practice of singing: the swooping voice; the hands tracing shapes in the air; the navigation of temporal and modal structures; postures that align the arms, eyes, and vocal organs; practiced stances of the body and voice from which melodic action is possible.

Still, the objection may remain: how can the motion of the body and the motion of the voice be doing the same thing? Aren’t the body and the voice made of utterly different substances? It is tempting to presume that they are. This separation would seem to account for the experience of an audience member seeing a beloved singer live for the first time, for whom vocalization is heard (but not seen) and gesture is seen (but not heard).

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