Please join the Department of Music for a guest lecture by Jonathan De Souza. De Souza, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Western Ontario, will present a talk titled “Embodiment in Musical Ensembles” as part of the new Baird Lecture Series. De Souza’s most recent book Music at Hand explored questions of musical meaning through the interplay of musicians and their instruments by arguing that instruments are as much part of the human qua musician as a prosthesis would be.

Embodiment in Musical Ensembles

Many music scholars have examined bodily aspects of listening and performance. Yet they have often prioritized individual bodies. Meanwhile, music-theoretical discussions of social interaction tend to examine small ensembles, such as classical chamber groups or jazz combos, without asking how sonic interplay might be physically grounded. How, then, can accounts of musical bodies and musical interaction be integrated? The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a model here, insofar as his concept of “intercorporeality” connects embodiment and intersubjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, human perception, cognition, and action do not start with isolated minds; instead, such processes are inherently social and physical. We interact with others from birth, and such interactions shape our bodily and perceptual capacities. This means that social relations are fundamentally embodied, and embodiment is fundamentally social. Moreover, many activities are impossible without partners, from early infant-caregiver interactions to various forms of work, sport, dance—and collective music making. From this perspective, an ensemble is not simply a collection of essentially separate bodies. Instead, this approach highlights distributed corporeal structures and fluid boundaries, dynamic networks of bodies sounding together.