Body and Force in Music

Our understanding of music is inherently metaphorical, and metaphoricity pervades all sorts of musical discourses, be they theoretical, analytical, philosophical, pedagogical, or even scientific.

The notions of body and force are the two most pervasive and comprehensive scientific metaphors in musical discourse. Throughout various intertwined contexts in history, the body–force pair manifests multiple layers of ideological frameworks and permits the conceptualization of music in a variety of ways.

Youn Kim investigates these concepts of body and force in the emerging field of music psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The field’s discursive space spans diverse contexts, including psychological theories of auditory perception and cognition, pedagogical theories on the performer’s bodily mechanism, speculative and practical theories of musical rhythm, and aesthetical discussion of the power of music.

This investigation of body and force aims to illuminate not just the past scene of music psychology but also the notions of music that are being constructed at present.