Dear all,
Next week's colloquium (9 November, 5pm, Recital Room) will be given by Dr
Bettina Varwig, whose paper will be entitled '"Mein Herze schwimmt im
Blut": Early Modern Physiologies and Metaphors of the Heart'.
Bettina Varwig is Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. After
completing her PhD at Harvard University, she was a Junior Research Fellow
at Magdalen College, Oxford and held a British Academy Postdoctoral
Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on German
musical and cultural history of the early modern period, including
compositional and listening practices as well as the history of the
emotions and the body. Her first book, Histories of Heinrich Schütz, was
published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. She received the Jerome
Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association in 2013 and the William H.
Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society in 2016.
*Abstract*: What did it feel like, in 1714, to have a heart swimming in
blood? And how could music be implicated in generating or ameliorating such
a condition? Using J. S. Bach’s Cantata 199 as a focal point, this paper
explores how musical sound was thought to operate within and upon the human
body as constituted in early eighteenth-century scientific and theological
discourses. The tangled notions of corporeality in contemporary accounts of
music’s affective power complicate a Cartesian dualist model of human
nature, instead suggesting a fluid body-mind continuum easily infiltrated
by sense perceptions and affective motions. The somatic archaeology I
develop here aims to move beyond the shorthand appeal to ‘Pietist’ modes of
expression in Bach’s works, and the familiar preoccupation with text
expression in Baroque repertories more generally. In recovering some of the
intensely physical dimensions of the Lutheran worship experience, I hope to
enable a more comprehensive reconstruction of the historical
phenomenologies of music and the body that underpinned these early modern
acts of musicking.
We hope to see many of you next Wednesday (9 November) at 5pm in the
Recital Room, Faculty of Music, West Road. The colloquium will be followed
by a drinks reception in the Faculty foyer.
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