|
|
The body has a crucial role to play in this mutual tuning in relationship for it is the body, in Schutz’s work, that serves as the external orienter to what occurs ‘inside’ the other. It is in and through sound, gesture, gait, stance and expression that the mind, the consciousness, the very inner of the self, is made outer and, from then on, made known, appreciable, interpretable, to the other; the self and the other know in and through these outer signs that they are ‘tuned in’, inside. This split between inner and outer realms is ‘odd’, as Zaner (2002, p. 4) notes, especially because subjectivity (or here, the ‘inner’) is understood as essentially temporal. The essentially temporal vests itself in an inner location, which must somehow
Here, the body is all too easily understood as an outer surface upon which the inner life of the person is displayed. But what if the body was rather more central in the practice of tuning in? What if there was no distinctive separator of the inner realm of the mind and the outer realm of the body? What if mutual tuning in was embodied? If it were, we might have to pay closer attention to what, in fact, was embodied in the process of tuning in. We might have to look very closely at the structure of comportment in (not only) playing music. If we did that, we might also have to look at the possibility that audiences and musicians have different experiences of music because the embodiments implied in playing as a performer and listening as an audience member are different. This might also be a good place to look for the involvement of music in power.
John Blacking (1984) argued that emotions were the specific linkage between audiences to and performers of music and that they were so because emotions, in his view, are structured inner movements of the body that acquire and are given meaning, which is shared in any given cultural context. Music and emotions both are forms of bodily motion that are assigned culturally specific meanings and are thusly expressions of feelings.