Music at Hand OXFORD STUDIES IN MUSIC THEORY Series Editor Steven Rings Studies in Music with Text, David Lewin Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music, Kofi Agawu Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791, Danuta Mirka Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied, Yonatan Malin A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice, Dmitri Tymoczko In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music, Janet Schmalfeldt Tonality and Transformation, Steven Rings Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature, Richard Cohn Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, Seth Monahan Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, Roger Mathew Grant Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music, Daniel Harrison Music at Hand Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition Jonathan De Souza 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: De Souza, Jonathan, 1982– Title: Music at hand : instruments, bodies, and cognition / Jonathan De Souza. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] | Series: Oxford studies in music theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016039254| ISBN 9780190271114 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190271145 (oxford scholarly online) | ISBN 9780190271138 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Music—Performance—Psychological aspects. | Music—Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC ML3838 .D32 2017 | DDC 784.1/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039254 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America This volume is published with the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For Heather CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix About the Companion Website xi Introduction 1 1. Beethoven’s Prosthesis 6 2. Sounding Actions 28 3. Idiomaticity; or, Three Ways to Play Harmonica 51 4. Voluntary Self- Sabotage 83 5. Compositional Instruments 109 6. Horns To Be Heard 145 References 169 Index 187 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS While writing this book, I benefited from many conversations— some long and ongoing, others very brief. In particular, I wish to thank Emily Abrams Ansari, Shawn Allison, Andrea Bohlman, Seth Brodsky, Chelsea Burns, Mark Butler, Christine Carter, Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Arnie Cox, Emily Dolan, Kimberly Dority, Helen Fielding, Michael Figueroa, Abigail Fine, Michael Gallope, Luis- Manuel Garcia, Robert Gjerdingen, Jessica Grahn, Shannon Heald, Mark Hopwood, Bryn Hughes, Sarah Iker, John Jenkinson, Ingrid Johnsrude, Alisha Lola Jones, Mariusz Kozak, Trent Leipert, Anabel Maler, Jairo Moreno, Roger Moseley, Katie Overy, Marcelle Pierson, Scott Richmond, Matt Schneider, Kris Shaffer, August Sheehy, Peter Shultz, Pete Smucker, Daniel Smyth, Martha Sprigge, Steve Van Hedger, Lee Veeraraghavan, Dan Wang, Kevin Watson, and Mark Yeary. I am also grateful to the Press’s anonymous reviewers, to reading groups at the University of Chicago and the University of Western Ontario, and to audiences who responded to portions of this book at conferences and colloquia hosted by Cornell University, the University of Glasgow, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Northwestern University, the University of Toronto, and Rice University. These interlocutors’ questions and comments have greatly enriched my thinking. Tips from Bob Kessler and John Kregor shaped Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. And I have learned much from my musical collaborators, includ- ing LeRoy Bach, David Brackley, Lance Brown, Mim Eichmann, Doug Lofstrom, Dan Lopata, Mark Kluemper, Dan Pearce, Ed Sullivan, Hans Vanderhill, and the late Ed Hall. This project first emerged at the University of Chicago, and I would like to think that it bears the mark of that place. Faculty members and fellow students at Chicago both challenged and encouraged me; Thomas Christensen, Berthold Hoeckner, Steve Rings, and especially Larry Zbikowski served as perceptive, gen- erous mentors. The book has taken its present form at the University of Western Ontario, where my students and colleagues form a stimulating artistic and aca- demic community. At Chicago, my work was supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Mellon Foundation. At Western, Dean Betty Anne Younker and the chair of my depart- ment, David Myska, facilitated a term away from teaching that helped me com- plete the manuscript. Suzanne Ryan has been a wonderfully enthusiastic, patient editor. Along with Steve Rings (in his role as series editor), she helped me develop and define the book. x Acknowledgments T At the Press, Adam Cohen, Jamie Kim, and Andrew Maillet promptly answered questions about various publication- related details, and project manager Damian Penfold guided the book through the production process. C. F. Peters Corporation and Breitkopf & Haertel gave permission to reproduce musical excerpts by John Cage and Helmut Lachenmann, respectively. My brother- in- law Scott Brandon created the motion-capture images in his lab at Queen’s University, and my father, Greg De Souza, produced the videos for the companion website. My parents, sisters, and in- laws also provided babysit- ting, birthday cake, and other much-needed diversions. Growing up in a home filled with instruments made me a musician, and this background still colors my interests as a music theorist: my father’s father played harmonica (the focus of Chapter 3), while my mother’s mother played organ (discussed in Chapters 2 and 5). Likewise, I am inspired by the musicality of my incredible daughters, Rilla and Audra. But most of all, I want to thank Heather, my partner in music and in life. She has both supported me personally and contributed to the book’s content, offer- ing critical insights on bowing patterns in Bach, brass performance, piano peda- gogy, and countless other topics. I could not have written this book without her. ABOUT THE COMPANION WEBSITE www.oup.com/ us/ musicathand Like many texts in music theory and analysis, Music at Hand invites readers to listen, watch, and play. The book’s companion website presents audiovisual examples, comprising performances by the author, motion- capture videos, and music- analytical animations. These online examples are indicated in the text with the symbol . To access the website, enter the username [Music5] and password [Book1745]. Much of the music discussed in the book, however, is not represented on the companion website. In such cases, recordings can generally be found in libraries and online. And readers of all levels of musical expertise are encouraged to try out examples at an instrument, as the website unfortunately cannot replicate the feel- ing of fingers on a keyboard or lips on a harmonica. Music at Hand Introduction Music is fleeting. It disperses as it is heard. And though I sometimes feel its vibra- tions, I cannot touch, cannot see, and cannot hold them. Because of this, music has often been considered the most abstract, most metaphysical art. Yet at the same time, music is bound up with physical things: upright pianos and electric guitars, tambourines, turntables, violas, bagpipes, microphones, headphones, and iPhones, sitars, French or English horns, marimbas, flutes of metal, bone, or wood. And all of these, in turn, are bound to human bodies. Music at Hand investigates music’s corporeal grounding. This, in itself, is not especially original, for questions of embodiment are hardly new to music stud- ies. In the 1990s, for example, some musicologists asked about music’s role in the history of the body (e.g., Leppert 1993; McClary and Walser 1994). Attending to the embodiment of sexual and racial differences, their work recognized music as “one of the means by which people learn about their bodies— how to move, how to feel, how (finally) to be” (McClary 1998, 87). Contemporaneous theorists, drawing on psychology and philosophy, argued that embodied knowledge shapes musical concepts (more about this in Chapter 1). These perspectives, which are often com- bined, are complementary: where the first showed how music mediates bodies, the second clarified how bodies mediate music. A third, related approach considered aspects of musical organization and meaning that may be felt by performers but not always heard by listeners. Suzanne Cusick (1994,