4Music and the body

The sociology of the body

In the realm of common sense, the body is paradoxical. At once selfevident and mysterious, biologically ‘given’ yet modifiable, the body is characterized through contradiction. Exploring these contradictions helps to open many deeper questions concerning the relationship between bodies and the material-cultural settings of their existence. Perhaps the best place to begin is by exploring the questions of where ‘body’ ends and ‘environment’ begins. What kind of a line should be drawn, for example, between ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ bodily features?

This definitional conundrum is by no means merely academic. On the contrary, it has bearing upon the very questions that can be posed about bodily matters. In recent years it has been given new impetus through studies that focus on the reflexive relationship between body and society. Calling into question the axiomatic status of ‘the’ body, and its associated dualisms (mind/body, culture/nature, particular/universal, subject/object), recent perspectives within sociology, history and cultural studies have proposed a conception of the ‘body’ as a socialized entity, configured at – and serving also to demarcate – the interstices of nature, culture and technology (Birke 1992a; 1992b; Featherstone et al. 1991; Haraway 1985; Jaggar and Bordo 1992; Turner 1984). These perspectives o er great potential for medical science, but do not square with medical institutions and institutionalized practice as these are currently configured. They interact well with complementary medicine (Sharma 1992), however, through their focus on the body as a construction. This focus shifts away from what the body ‘is’ (and what can be done ‘to’ it), to a focus on what the body may become as it is situated within di erent contexts and viewed from within di erent terms of reference.

Thinking about the body as a construction involves much more than thinking about how, in the superficial sense, it is ‘represented’ (see Shilling’s critique of social constructionism and body matters, 1993). At

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its most powerful, it leads to the question of what the notion of the body- as-culturally-constructed actually means in the real time and local space of social practice. There is little work to date on the cultural and microsocial processes through which bodies are configured in the here and now of social life. And yet, if the body is indeed a hybrid or ‘cyborg’ of some kind, if its physical properties are ‘made’ through interchange with materials that lie outside it, then should we not be able to observe this process and to document the mechanisms of this making? To do so is to theorize the matter of how culture works at the level of embodied action and to develop theory that can be applied to practical bodily problems and procedures. In short, by moving away from discourses of the body and moving towards a focus on body–culture interaction, on temporal body practices, a grounded theory of the body’s cultural constitution has the capacity to move well beyond semiotic readings of bodily meanings. This capacity is potentially profound in so far as it is able to ‘enter’ the body in ways that articulate with (and even at times transform) medical and physiological perspectives.

By its very nature, though, the exploration of body–culture interaction cannot proceed hypothetically. Instead, the pursuit of body– culture interaction entails a slower kind of work; it is built up case by case, through empirical attention to the explicitly temporal matter of bodies in action (in real time). This project entails a grounded theory of the body as social and it depends upon intimate observations of bodies as they interact, from moment to moment, with the materials that come to ‘discipline’ them. Thus, just as the previous chapter featured the intersection of culture and action as it generates emotional and biographical dimensions of agency and action trajectories, this chapter deals with the ‘musical composition’ of agency’s embodied features. These features include energy, comportment, co-ordination, timing, arousal, motivation, endurance, and homoeostatic features such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, and the self-perception of pain and bodily pleasure. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it serves to highlight some of the many features normally excised from sociological conceptions of agency and agency’s parameters. The following discussion seeks to illuminate some of these features as they emerge in and through reference to aesthetic and, in this case, musical materials and as they provide a map or framework against which the body is organized. It is linked to a theory of culture as something much more than a decorative overlay for bodily phenomena but as intrinsic to the constitution of the body and its physical processes, as something that can enter into and formulate bodily realities. With regard to music, such a theorization of cultural power extends well beyond the usual

Getting into the rhythm of life

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concern with the meanings of art objects as it conceptualizes their power at a more existential level of human being where body, consciousness and feeling intertwine.

To develop this perspective for music and embodiment, we may begin at the beginning of the human life-cycle, with the medical sub-field of neonatology (infants of thirty-seven weeks of age or less) and the recent turn, within that area, to music as a therapeutic medium (Hicks 1992). Considering music’s active role in the promotion of neonatal ‘state integrity’ (that is, the normalization and regularization of bodily processes) helps to illuminate music’s role as a device of corporeal ordering, at all stages of human life, as a medium that may have e ects long before it is ‘meaningful’ in a cultural sense. Accordingly, examining music’s ‘force’ at this early stage in the life-cycle simultaneously points to new ways of conceptualizing the links between human and non-human members of the animal kingdom (Birke 1995).

Getting into the rhythm of life

The first music we hear is inside the womb:

The sound that dominates the unborn child’s world is its mother’s heartbeat. Other voices and familiar sounds add harmony to the already progressive composition of the uterine symphony. From the 24th week on, the unborn child listens all the time. He or she has lots to listen to, as the pregnant abdomen and uterus are very noisy places. (Hicks 1995:31)

This ‘intrauterine symphony’, as it has been termed in the medical literature, consists of the mother’s heartbeat, her voice as she speaks or sings, and any other sounds from the outside world, such as the voices of others. In the sonic foreground of this sound environment is what has been described within the literature as a ‘rhythmic “swooshing” of the blood as it rushes through the placental vessels’ (Collins and Kuck 1990:24).

One of the key indicators of health is an infant’s ability to achieve homoeostasis, the regularization of physical and behavioural processes such as breathing, blood pressure, heartbeat and sleep. Increasingly, neonatologists have come to conceptualize this ability as linked to environmental factors. ‘State organization’, as it is called in the literature, is described as the result of ‘both its own internal endogenous processes and exogenous influences from the environment’ (Thoman et al. 1981). In this respect, neonatology is in the medical vanguard with its emphasis on holistic perspectives.

One of the key mechanisms for establishing homoeostasis is entrain- ment, the alignment or integration of bodily features with some recurrent

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features in the environment. This point is made repeatedly in the literature on neonates. For example:

Not only must the environment be conducive to physiologic homeostasis, but, according to Keefe, ‘the pattern of infant state cycles must become harmoniously integrated with the salient recurrent features of the environment’. (Kaminski and Hall 1996:46)

In recent years, neonatologists have begun to pursue the matter of how to produce an environment conducive to entrainment and regularization, an environment that helps infants achieve homoeostasis. Within this set of concerns, there has been a growing emphasis on music and its potential in the neonatal unit. In particular, music is thought to facilitate state organization by encouraging entrainment.

Musical entrainment

Perhaps the most straightforward example of musical entrainment in relation to the body can be found when music is used as a basis for marching in step or otherwise synchronizing bodily movement, such as skipping rope (with lessons about ‘normal’ adult sexual orientation literally drummed in via the text!):

I like co ee, I like tea,

I like the boys

And the boys like me. (Children’s skipping song)

Musically entrained, the body and its processes unfold in relation to musical elements (in these examples, its regular pulse); they are aligned and regularized in relation to music, they are musically organized, musically ‘composed’. A more complex example can be found in dance, where the body is not only entrained rhythmically (the 1-2-3 of the waltz, for example) but also engages in stylistic manoeuvres in orientation to the music (the clenched fists in relation to some rock or pop music, the angle of the neck and chin in ballet, or the pelvis during the cha-cha-cha). This alignment, between music and body, often occurs subconsciously or unconsciously and it may entail normally imperceptible micromovements, such as how one holds one’s eyebrows, cheekbones or shoulders, the tension of one’s muscles. As a series of bodily gestures, then, dance and more mundane and subconscious forms of choreography are media for the autodidactic accumulation of self and gender awareness. Movement – aesthetically oriented – is, as Irigaray put it in her essay on ‘The Gesture in Psychoanalysis’ (1989), a means for constructing the spaces of the subject. It is the source, as Angela McRobbie put it in her pioneering essay on gender and dance, of bodily aesthetics in everyday life (1991:191).