The Body in Musical Performance

Knowledge, Gesture, and Identity

Mazzetti, Marcello (ed.)

This volume offers a groundbreaking exploration of musical embodiment across time, geography, and genre, bringing together thirteen essays that reframe the performing body as a site of knowledge, creation, and critical reception. From early modern opera to nineteenth-century improvisation, from experimental multimedia theatre to contemporary performance analysis, the contributors reveal how gesture, physical technique, proprioception, and symbolic constructions of the body shape, and are shaped by, musical meaning. Uniting historically grounded inquiry with performance theory and cognitive approaches, the essays cluster around four main axes: the embodiment of musical meaning in the interaction between performer and listener; the body as cultural and ideological construct in gendered, stigmatised, and national identities; the transmission and reactivation of embodied knowledge in historical performance; and the creative body as agent in composition, pedagogy, and ritual. Drawing on sources as diverse as early wax-cylinder recordings, liturgical chant, zarzuela reviews, and postwar ballet-opera hybrids, the volume foregrounds embodiment as both material and epistemic. Rather than treating the body as an expressive vehicle alone, these essays demonstrate that musical works themselves — whether composed, improvised, or remembered — are shaped through the performer’s somatic intelligence and the listener’s imaginative co-presence. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioner-researchers, this collection sets a new standard for interdisciplinary studies of musical performance. It will be essential reading for musicologists, performers, theorists, and historians of the body seeking to understand how music happens in and through the body, across eras and expressive systems.