Disembodying from the embodiment: a research into music performance and its physical dramatisations

Dr Nellie Seng

/ Music

Nellie Seng is a pianist, pedagogue and mother. A graduate of the Juilliard School and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Nellie is currently the Head of Keyboard Studies at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. Her key interests in research include healthy technique and the post-injury recovery of musicians; as well as the study of movement and sound.

Under the auspice of the DAR:E project, Nellie’s study on artistic embodiment was an exploration on how physical embodiment became a performer’s Achilles heel to music performance.

Performative Research

From what research is

To what research does

This research has sought to raise awareness of the alignment between physical embodiment being action, and sound. Quite often, one hears the comment: “looks so musical” in a concert or in a performance class. In short, the embodiment of a feeling; the act of musical performance has become a physical manifestation of that feeling which has eventually been taken to the forefront of the stage. It could be said that an audience now expects visual excitement, but visual excitement may detract from the focal point of music being a highly auditory sense. Ironically, audiences no longer listen but rather, they watch music.

From (centered) subjects to relations

As a musician and teacher, I have often commented that students have not “embodied a musical work and its meaning”. However, is it not odd to ask for music to be embodied since the auditory sense is essentially invisible? In this research project a black screen was put up to block the performer from the audience. Therefore, the audience could not “watch” the performance during performance class, they could only listen to the performance. When students were asked to comment on what they heard, their reply was they felt the performance was musically ‘bland’, or that they heard aspects that were not desirable. Yet the actions that might have ‘caused’ these undesirable aspects of sounds were deemed to be visually exciting. The intent of this exploration is to bring students’ focus back to listening, and through that focus bring about an awareness of their physical movement as a platform for sound production and to consequentially think further about embodiment.