Boccherini's body : an essay in carnal musicology / Elisabeth Le Guin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Le Guin, Elisabeth, 1957-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Boccherini, Luigi, 1743-1805--Criticism and interpretation.

Boccherini, Luigi.

Music--Interpretation (Phrasing, dynamics, etc.).

Music.

Physical Description:

xxiv, 350 pages : illustrations, portraits, music ; 24 cm + 1 audio disc (digital ; 4 3/4 in.)

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2006]

Contents:

The origins of this project

Boccherini's generally acknowledged merits

Some less generally acknowledged qualities

"Carnal musicology" as based in the performer's viewpoint

Brief digests of each chapter to come

Excursus: historicizing the terms of embodiment

Kinesthesia

Condillac

Fact and fiction

1 "Cello-and-Bow Thinking": The First Movement of Boccherini's Cello Sonata in E, Major, Fuori Catalogo 14

Reciprocity of relationship between performer and dead composer

Framing the cellist-body

A carnal reading of the first half of the movement in question

Thumb-position

Pleasure in repetition

Cellistic bel canto

The predominance of reflective and pathetic affects

Communicability and reciprocality

Rousseau on the role of the performer

Subjectivity as a necessity

The second half of the movement

Relationships between musical form and carnal experience

Boccherini's "celestial" topos

Carnality and compositional process

The importance of the visual

In conclusion: the necessary ambivalence of my descriptions and analyses

2 "As My Works Show Me to Be": Biographical 38

Boccherini's self-representation in his letters

The lack of solid first-hand biographical evidence

The divergence of his performer and composer identities

Period anxieties over those identities

Early years in Lucca

Familial emphasis on dance

Travels to Vienna, 1757-63

Possibilities of further touring

Possible Viennese influences on Boccherini

Paris, 1768: the musical and cultural climate

Parisian virtuoso cellists

Circumstantial evidence of meetings between Boccherini and Jean-Pierre Duport

Boccherini's especial success with Parisian publishers

Spain, 1769

Boccherini's first court post, 1770

The Spanish musical and cultural climate

Boccherini's adeptness at finding a place within it

3 Gestures and Tableaux 65

The importance of visuality to period reception

Its subsequent decline

The effect of this decline on Boccherini's posthumous reputation

Spohr: "This does not deserve to be called music!"

A passage that might have provoked such a reaction

Boccherinian stasis and repetitiousness

Boccherinian sensibilite

The paintings of Luis Paret

The predominance of soft dynamics

Hyper-precision in performance directions

The lacuna as sensible strategy

Boccherinian abandonment of melody in favor of texture

The influence of acoustics

Tableaux in period theater and painting

Their relations to sensibilite

Absorption

Suppressed eroticism

Tragedy and the tableau

The reform body: Angiolini's classifications of motion styles

Spanish dance and gesture

Seguidillas, boleros, and fandangos

Boccherini's complex relations to Spanish style

"Instrumentalist, what do you want of me?": problems in the relation of performance to text

4 Virtuosity, Virtuality, Virtue 105

A theatricalized reading of the Cello Sonata in C Major, G. 17

Cyclicity in Boccherini's Works

Inter-generic recycling of themes and movements

Unconscious recycling of subsidiary passages

The influence of tactile experience on this level of composition

Etymologies of the word idiom

The sonatas within Boccherini's oeuvre

Virtuosi

Philosophical problems posed by virtuosity

Virtuosity contra sensibilite

The grotesque

Actorly virtuosity

The automatic and mechanical

Bodily training toward perfection

The paradox of the actor

5 A Melancholy Anatomy 160

Reports of the 1993 exhumation and autopsy of Boccherini's body

TB, the "white death"

Musical melancholies

Boccherinian melancholy

Edward Young's Night Thoughts

A melancholic reading of the String Quartet in C Minor, op. 9, no. 1, G. 171, Allegro

Melancholic labyrinths

From Galen to Descartes

Sympathetic vibration as a cause of or cure for melancholy

Various consumptions

Life and art: some animadversions

Satiric melancholy

The performance direction con smorfia

Other consumptions

Enlightenment anxieties about nocturnal pollution and consumption

The Marquis de Sade

A melancholic reading of the String Quartet in G Minor, op. 8, no. 4, G. 168, Grave

Hypochondria as an aspect of musical hermeneutics

6 "It Is All Cloth of the Same Piece": The Early String Quartets 207

An overview of Boccherini's work in this genre

Style periodization: Boccherini's relatively unchanging style

Woven music: his penchant for texture over melody

Recycling the idea of recycling

The problem of "repetition" in ensemble contexts

Sublimated caresses

The rococo

Address to a sforzando

Two analyses of the String Quartet in E Major, op. 15, no. 3, G. 179

Peculiarities of the work

The first analysis (relatively conventional)

Readerly relationships to analysis

The second analysis (experimental)

7 The Perfect Listener: A Recreation 254

Boccherini and Haydn's attempt at correspondence

Period comparison of the two composers

Using carnal musicology on composers other than Boccherini

The Perfect Listener: re-creating "listener performance practice"

The Perfect Listener attends a performance of Haydn's G-major keyboard sonata, Hob. XVI:39

Cadential remarks

Appendix Chronological Table of String Quartets 271.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 331-344) and index.

The compact disc includes very brief excerpts from the composer's Cello sonatas, performed by Le Guin, cello and Charles Sherman, piano, and from his String quartets, performed by the Artaria String Quartet. The first track is the complete Allegro from his E♭ cello sonata, fuori catalog i [not among the cello sonatas in Gérard]. Complete list on p. xv-xx.

ISBN:

0520240170

OCLC:

61261294