Oskar Schlemmer - Mensch und Kunstfigur, 1921.
This drawing has been on the wall above my work desk for the last two years. It is a study for Schlemmer's famous work "Triadisches Ballett" is a beautiful visualization of embodiment, the human body related to time and space.
So, what does embodiment mean to me and how do I think about it in terms of my own artistic practice?
They way I think of it is that as artists and musicians working with an instrument, the ideas and material we are working with is understood not only with our intellect, but equally understood with the whole body. I like to believe that intelligence, knowledge and senses exists in our entire bodies. The relationship between a human being and an instrument is thus a beautiful example of embodied knowledge. Practicing a musical idea or perhaps a certain instrumental technique is something we do in order to absorb it physically and get it into our bones as well as it is to analyze and understand it with our intellect. We know we are getting there when the material we are working on starts to feel right. And when it feels right to us, there's a good chance it will transport somebody who is listening too.
In a performance situation I strive to let my pre-conscious non-verbal body guide my performances. This to me involves clearing my mind and opening my ears, and maintaining this state of consciousness throughout the performance. To paint a picture, I think of music as a big flowing river that I can tap into, and join that flow, until I stop playing and tap out of the river again. I have been practicing Transcendental Meditation for some years, and have found this method to be a good way for me to get to practice this state of being when I'm not playing music, where beforehand I almost only reached it while listening or performing. Transcendence and embodiment are closely knit together to me.
“Because all of the primary senses are lodged in the skin, on the outside of the body, one might say that in literal terms they are connected to each other by a membrane of tactility, and that this is reproduced in the way in which we experience them.” - Steven Connor, in his paper “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing”.
When reflecting on Steven Connor’s quote above, in relation to myself and the research I have been doing, I get this picture of the omni-directional speaker set up you saw on the front page, which is engaging the room through projecting invisible sound waves against the walls. Does the walls of the room become the membrane of tactility then? Do we embody the room with the sounds we produce? I like the thought, and I like to think that we do.
“Embodiment means the body in space. The body as it interacts with physical and social environment…it is not just that he body shapes the embodied mind, but that the experiences of the body in the world also shape the embodied mind" - Pauline Oliveros.
Are your headphones positioned as comfortable as you like?
Are you comfortably seated?
The video below is from a concert in July 2020. The whole concert was 58 minutes long, in one continuous improvisation.
I've chosen an 18 minute passage for you to enjoy.
“Embodiment refers to the biological and physical presence of our bodies, which are a necessary precondition for subjectivity, emotion, language, thought and social interaction.” - Pauline Oliveros, 2009.
“…Moving away from traditional reductionist accounts of the body as a biological object detached from the mind, the self and the social, the project instead seeks to account for bodies through their porosity and relationality (Blackman). From this perspective the body is no longer an object bounded by the skin, but is rather a process (Gendlin) or a network (Latour). Such bodies are not self-evident but performative (Butler), enacted through webs of power relations; bodies which are done, redone or undone through everyday practices and rituals (West and Zimmerman). Such bodies are always moving and affecting (Sheets-Johnstone), always becoming (Deleuze and Guattari) and have more in common with hurricanes than statues (Di Paolo, De Jaegher et al.)” - From the website of the ongoing research project “Social Acoustics”.
There's much more to be said about embodiment. But let's stay with the observations above for a bit.
Listen to the music in the video above, enjoy the full length of it.
As you do, I recommend closing your eyes and thinking about one of the things you have just read.
Just for a little while.
Try to picture what you read, visually.
Stay with it as long as you like.
Then, open your eyes and perhaps read it again.
Did the words transform when your eyes were closed?
Pick another text fragment, and do the same thing over again.
And again.
Perhaps look at one of the pictures this time?
Take your time.
The video is 18 minutes long.
Are you listening with your whole body?
Does your listening change depending on your eyes being closed or open?
One of my first note book entries at the very beginning of my research at RMC in 2019. A sketch for a composition for a six piece ensemble, in a specific room formation.
When I came across this quote by Emily Dickinson, whom I greatly admire, I was quite stumped. I'm still not sure how she can separate the self from the body, not to mention from space and time. But the challenge of grasping this thought has led me to return to it often, and has been inspirational in my own thinking about embodiment and sound connected.