Interdisciplinary Rewards and Challenges

Abstract

The editors of Musicology and Dance: Historical and Critical Perspectives desire to encourage a “dance-attentive musicology” that explores “how physical expression might inform musical expression—as well as how music might inscribe new meanings onto the moving body” (pp. 8–9). This volume of ten wide-ranging essays is divided into three parts: “Conceptual Studies,” “Case Histories,” and “Critical Readings.” Within each part, the essays offer contrast with respect to subject matter, critical methodology, and perspective; in so doing, they demonstrate the potential for growth within this neglected area of interdisciplinary engagement. Part 1 opens with “J. S. Bach and the Dance of Humankind,” in which Bach scholar and conductor John Butt reveals how the composer’s music embodies the physicality of dances from the period, not only in pieces with dance titles, but also, to give just two of his examples, in the saraband-based final choruses of the St. John and St. Matthew Passions and the third, gigue-like movement of the fourth Brandenburg Concerto. He writes that “most commentators tend to gravitate towards the notion of music as disembodied thought when contemplating Bach’s achievements” but that “we also share a sense of physicality with our ancestors that is arguably just as important, if not more so, than the mental process” (p. 21). Butt cautions, however, that perception of these relationships in Bach “presupposes that the physical allusions and memories are somehow felt in the body of the listener rather than merely intellectualized” and that “such an experiential framework . . . may or may not complement the range of experiences the listener draws from [the music]” (p. 46). The next chapter—and the only one not to focus on a particular composer, choreographer, dancer, musical work, dance type, or genre—is Suzanne Aspden’s “Dance as ‘Other’: Contrasting Modes of Musical Representation.” In her introductory paragraph, Aspden quotes anthropologist Ruth Finnegan’s observation that “popular and ‘other’ music, in the