Moving to music: A theory of sound and physical action

Music unites with physical movement in many everyday practices, including dance, musical performance, and other activities. This dissertation seeks to comprehend the role of music in such unions, and to use this standpoint for a general theoretical understanding of music. The study divides into two parts. The first develops an original theory of musical power over and for movement. This theory allows investigations of music as something that inspires, generates, and controls bodily movements. The second part illustrates such investigations in analytical case studies. These case studies draw upon a range of perspectives from ethnomusicology, history, and philosophy and thus develop the potential of the theory for inter-disciplinary studies of music.; The first chapter establishes the importance of the listener as an equal partner with music in the activity of listening. The second then uses an idealized model of a listener who taps to a drumbeat in order to elucidate the fundamental structures that music needs for union with movement. Drawing on Christopher Hasty's theory of meter, the study explains musical power over and for movement with reference to the potential music possesses to project repetition into the future. When such projection fuses with a listener's desire to move, the result is what this study terms a "repeating." The third chapter and first case study considers dance movements in relation to musical control. A discussion of a French treatise of 1664, Guillaume DuManoir's Le mariage de la musique avec la dance, provides historical context for analyses of music by DuManoir and Lully from contemporary ballets de cour. The fourth chapter treats the role of music in performance. Analyses of Franz Liszt's etude "Mazeppa" and two songs by 1970's punk group the Sex Pistols explore ways in which diverse performers create identities in sound. The last chapter considers solo practice. An analysis of repeatings in a keyboard prelude by J. S. Bach joins to issues in phenomenological philosophy, through a discussion of self and consciousness in the activity of playing.