'... Any Unnecessary Movement Was Discouraged.'

Bastos Machado, Luís

http://hdl.handle.net/10362/177187

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Bastos Machado, Luís

Resumo(s)

The idea of absolute music has pervaded the Austro-German tradition since the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the concept became aligned with a more formalist outlook with spiritual overtones. Those sustaining this autonomist perspective considered the performing body an external element to the work, raising fundamental questions on the problematic relationship between an idealized composition and its performance. Could the idea of the work be satisfyingly achieved in sounds through physical gestures? If so, how could a performer minimize their bodily interference in its objective, ideal nature? In short, how was the ideology of absolute music, in its early twentieth-century form, cultivated in the gestural language of performers? For Philip Auslander, the gestural dimension is a fundamental part of the performative act beyond the mere sound phenomenon: it is a source of potential social, cultural, and personal readings of the performer’s persona. Furthermore, musical meaning is not only conveyed by the ‘purely technical’ gestures that materialize the notated music, since both the spectator’s musical experience and the performer’s own conceptualization are also influenced by movements often considered to be merely ancillary and interpretively ‘neutral’. In light of these considerations, we shall look into performance-driven discourses and practical examples in pianists who were active in the first half of the twentieth century, and explore ways in which the aesthetics of absolute music became entwined with specific views on the physicality of performance. We propound that this ideology expressed itself as a gestural phenotype often with audible interpretive consequences: the performer’s body was muted, gestures reduced to what was perceived as bare essentials, as part of an attempt to strip subjectivity from performance. For those performers, the negation of the body as a producer of meaning was a way of cultivating in (the reduction of ) gesture their ideological principles.