Embodied music cognition considers the human body as the natural mediator between mind and physical environment. It explores how music perception is based on action; how movement (i.e. dancing to music) provides corporeal meaning. In contrast, a disembodied approach to music cognition is concerned with how cerebral meaning is formed through perception-based analysis of musical structure.
Composer Harry Partch [1901-1974] with his instruments. Source link here.
Inspired by the colourful costumes, elaborate masks and dramatic gestures of East Asian performing arts, writer and theatre director Antonin Artuad [1896-1948] challenged the conventions of European theatre. He described his newly conceived Theatre of Cruelty as “a new theatrical language of totem and gesture – a language of space devoid of dialogue that would appeal to all the senses.” Modern theater for Artuad was to be a visceral spectacle of light, sound and gesture.
Some years later in America, composer Harry Partch [1901-1974] similarly challenged euro-centric conventions of spectatorship and performance, stressing instead the importance of music as a multi-sensory experience involving the body:
“[…] the music itself, elusive to words. I call it corporeal, because it roots itself with other arts necessary to civilization, in a unity that is important to the whole being - mind and body. Even the visual element of seeing the instruments played is a vital one.”
Concurrent with Partch’s idiosyncratic music, Jazz pianist and composer Sun Ra [1914-1993] was busy on the East Coast with his Arkestra band. Together they were developing their own type of Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner's notion of a total artwork incorporating all other art forms). These increasingly elaborate performances unfolded in a ritual-like atmosphere and involved costumes, visual art, dancers and collective drumming.
Despite working at different times and places, these three maverick artists shared an interest in the embodied, corporeal dimension of their work. Performance for them was a powerfully visceral, multi-sensory spectacle.