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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
Elisabeth Le Guin. Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xxiv+350. $39.95.
As an intellectual practice and as a department of the modern research university, musicology is a young discipline. Not until 1885 did Guido Adler attempt to define its areas and methods of study; not until the 1930s did American universities begin to produce doctoral dissertations analyzing music on historical and theoretical principles. Small wonder, then, that musicology has tended to borrow from disciplines with longer histories. As Leo Treitler points out, it has depended upon "art history for its historiographic paradigms and literary studies for its paleographic and philological principles" ("History and Music," New Literary History 21.2 [Winter, 1990]: 299-319 [299]). Yet by borrowing terminology and methods from its sister disciplines, musicology has shortchanged performance. A painting or a novel does not depend on a performer to bridge the gap between creator and consumer, but a piece of music does, and younger musicologists have served their discipline well by developing methods that pay more attention to the experiences of performers and listeners. The recent interest in "performance practice," which has led some modern musicians to master old instruments and seek a performance style informed by historical research, is a step toward establishing a discourse about music that is more attentive to performance, but the direction of that discourse has been onesided. Historical scholars are happy to instruct performers on how to play in an "authentic" style, but do not always recognize what they in turn might learn from performers.
Elisabeth Le Guin's remarkable book is a quantum leap forward. As a well-trained musicologist, a gifted writer, and an effective professional performer on the cello, Le Guin offers not only painstaking historical research into Boccherini's career as composer and virtuoso performer, but what she calls "cello-and-bow thinking" about the experience of rehearsing and performing his works. "No music I have ever played seems so to invite and dwell upon the nuances of physical experience as does Boccherini's," she argues; "one can count on tiny variations of position, weight, pressure, friction, and muscular distribution having profound structural and affectual consequences" (5). Le Guin's is the first extended work of musicology I have read that gives real analytical weight to how a work of music feels "both to the ear and under the hand" (2). In bringing her physical, "carnal," sensual, and inevitably emotional experiences as a performer to bear...
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