Music and Embodiment Seminar Series (MESS) is an online event featuring academic presentations by and discussions with distinguished scholars in the field of music and embodiment.

Join us for our second event, where we welcome Dr Youn Kim.

Time: Monday February 6th 2023, 12pm-1.30pm GMT

This seminar will take place on zoom. Zoom link will be sent to registered attendees a few days before the seminar.

Title: Piano Fingering: Expressing Bodily Efforts and the Performing Agency

Abstract: Despite the obvious connection between music and the body, only recently has the body been "brought back in" (Frank 1990) in musicological discourse. With the late-20th-century "performative turn," the performer’s body, in particular, has been investigated in various fields, including physiology, biomechanics, psychology, and music performance analysis. Earlier empirical studies of music performance tended to focus on how performers manipulate performance parameters to "bring out" compositional structures, and compare various sonic interpretations of a given score. Instead of assuming a single authoritative score, the present study proposes to consider both plural score editions and diverse performances to highlight the performer’s agency in music performance analysis. The "performing editions," which were prepared and edited by pianists and pedagogues of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often contain suggestions for audacious fingering that contradict the standard fingering and require greater bodily effort from the pianist. Recognizing the performer’s agency as both a "writing" and "performing" musician (Cook 2013), the fingering indications in these editions as well as various recordings of the scalar passages selected from Beethoven's piano works will be explored, collated, and analyzed to illustrate how the performer expresses the physical exertions and dynamic shaping. They express the paradox of virtuosity, both transcending the boundary yet remaining within the realm of the natural (Deaville 2008). At the intersection of performance and analysis, the fingering of scalar passages presents a rich source of embodied music cognition.

The event is co-organised by Dr Maria Witek, University of Birmingham, and Dr Andrea Schiavio, University of York, UK, and funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Music and Embodiment Seminar Series (MESS) 3: Youn Kim