Constituting the Body-Instrument Through Touch and Movement

Alex South
University of Glasgow (affiliate)

Talk delivered to the third annual conference of the Royal Musical Association Music and
Philosophy Study Group, ‘Embodiment and the Physical’, London 19th July 2013.

Introduction
Today I will speak about the experience that players of musical instruments have of their
instruments, and in particular about how an instrument can cease to be just another material object
for the player, becoming, in some sense, part of the player’s own body. As I proceed I’m going to
describe this phenomenon, and draw from the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in an attempt to
understand it a little better. Translating from Merleau-Ponty’s French, in English we can use the
term ‘incorporation’, that is – brought into the body – to refer to this phenomenon. As we’ll see, in
unpacking the meaning of incorporation we won’t only be investigating the body-instrument
relation, but also the meaning of ‘body’. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Husserl, the body is much more
than the material object studied by the physicist, physiologist, or physician, and referred to by
Husserl with the term Körper. According to the phenomenological method, to gain insight into a
phenomenon we first have to ‘bracket’ our presuppositions, and one of the chief presuppositions we
must bracket here is that the body is nothing more than a biological machine. Husserl and Merleau-
Ponty both insist that although we can of course study the body in this way, this is an abstraction
from our lived experience of the body, in which it appears as the sensing and sensitive organ of
perception, action and feeling, in Merleau-Ponty’s words “our general medium for having a world”
(2002, p.169). This lived body is termed Leib by Husserl and le corps propre by Merleau-Ponty.

Touch and Kinaesthesis

But let’s return to the practice of music. I suggest that in searching for an understanding of
incorporation there is a clue to be found in the Spanish verb used for the playing of a musical
instrument – tocar – which literally means ‘to touch’. It is noteworthy also that the French
composer Couperin named his influential harpsichord method L’art de toucher le clavecin, that
from the Italian verb tocare we have toccata form, and finally that in English we often speak of the
touch of a pianist. What should we read into this clue? I propose that it should lead us to consider
the somewhat counter-intuitive view that touch – and not hearing – is the most important sense for
the performing musician. After all, with conventional instruments, the musician is always in contact
with her instrument: chiefly through the hands and mouth, but additionally for various instruments
through the feet, shoulders, knees, chin, belly, thighs. We touch and manipulate the keys, strings,
bows and sticks of our chosen instrument, but in addition the sounding and resonant body of the
instrument is in direct or indirect contact with our body and its vibrations pass into us through
wood, metal, ivory, flesh and bone. Immediately, I’d like to go beyond the traditional notion of
touch as the sensory modality which gives us only the tactile properties of external objects –
roughness and smoothness, heat and cold, and so on – and recognize it under a second aspect, as
what a contributor to Diderot’s 18th century Encyclopedia referred to as ‘interior touch’. This inner
sense has been known by various names, including muscle sense, kinaesthesia (Husserl’s term) and
proprioception (introduced by Charles Sherrington), and is still the subject of terminological debate.
Here I’ll follow Stillman (2002) in using kinaesthesia and proprioception as synonyms. Its
importance for the practising musician is not often highlighted, but is recognized in the therapeutic
work of the Alexander Technique: in his ‘Indirect Procedures’ Pedro de Alcantara provides a useful
summary of the domain of this ‘interior touch’: “Proprioception encompasses all aspects of
muscular activity: orientation in space, relative position of body parts, movement of body and
limbs, the gauging of effort and tension, the perception of fatigue, static, and dynamic balance,” and
goes on to conclude that “If you're void of proprioception... it’s impossible for you to make music.”
(1997, p.37)

Here I don’t claim that external touch and proprioception are varieties of the same sense, but it is
noteworthy that some subcutaneous sensory receptors have a role to play in both senses.
Furthermore, in precise motor skills involving our hands both senses can deliver us information
about external objects.

“In the unique combination of explorative and manipulative performances of the

fingers, with their refined motor control and dense cutaneous innervation, the distinction
between proprioception and exteroception seems almost to vanish.” (Moberg, 1990, pp.
133-4, quoted in Stillman, p.670)

In other words, when I turn an object around in my hand, touch tells me about its texture and
temperature, and proprioception tells me about its shape and size – but both senses are used in
identifying or recognizing the object: this combination is sometimes known as ‘active touch’.1

Merleau-Ponty and Incorporation

I shall come back to kinaesthesia or proprioception shortly, but come now to Merleau-Ponty’s
claim, startling on the face of it, that musicians incorporate their instruments, that their instruments
become part of their own bodies. His discussion comes within the chapter on spatiality and motility
1 See useful discussion in Gibson (1962).
in his Phenomenology of Perception, where he offers a description of the way in which an organist
rehearses and becomes familiar with a new instrument.

“He sits on the seat, works the pedals, pulls out the stops, gets the measure of the
instrument with his body, incorporates within himself [s’incorpore] the directions and
dimensions, settles [s’installe] into the organ as one settles into a house.... During the
rehearsal, as during the performance, the stops, pedals and manuals are given to him as
nothing more than possibilities of achieving certain emotional or musical values, and
their positions are simply the places through which this value appears in the world....
[H]is movements during rehearsal... draw affective vectors, discover emotional sources,
and create a space of expressiveness.” (2002, p.168)

What Merleau-Ponty intends to show us here is clear – that getting to know a new instrument is not
achieved through an intellectual analysis or representation – and that the way that the various parts
of the organ appear to its player is not in the way that a detached observer would perceive them.
The stops, pedals and manuals are given to the organist as “possibilities of achieving” values, and
his movements “create a space of expressiveness”. Here I am reluctantly going to set aside the
mention (very important, for aesthetics) of expressive space and musical value, and focus on
possibility, as being more relevant to my inquiry into incorporation. What does Merleau-Ponty
mean by this? The question cannot be answered without considering the fact that for Merleau-Ponty
every investigation must begin from the realization that we are always already in a situation, that
fundamentally our existence is that of engaged being-in-the-world. In this case, the organist is
already a skilled player, for whom the parts of the instrument are significant not just because he has
an intellectual knowledge of how an organ is made up, but because the parts of the instrument form
the essential complement to his own know-how or practical skills. Without the organ, his own skills
are meaningless; without a skilled player the organ is useless. 2 Together, they form a dynamic
system which can lead to the creation of musical value. When the organist comes into contact with
an instrument, it offers him possibilities of actions and value-creation which are peculiar to him
alone, for that instrument, at that moment in time. The organ summons his skills, calls upon his
abilities, draws him into the moving dance of music-making. The word Merleau-Ponty uses for skill
and ability is l’habitude, usually translated as ‘habit’ – where we must understand the term to be
devoid of the connotations of blind automaticity or mechanicity. 3 L’habitude, he writes, “expresses

2 Here I raise the question, but only to set aside, what other necessary conditions there may be – for example the
presence of a repertoire.
3 Compare to John Dewey’s distinction between ‘routine’ and ‘intelligent’ habit made in his Human Nature and
Conduct (2007, p.51)
our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh
instruments.” He applies it also to the example of the blind man’s stick, and describes how the stick
is no longer felt as such once the blind man has learnt to use it, but becomes an extension of the
sensing body:

“But habit does not consist in interpreting the pressures of the stick on the hand as
indications of certain positions of the stick, and these as signs of an external object,
since it relieves us of the necessity of doing so. The pressures on the hand and the stick
are no longer given; the stick is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an
instrument with which he perceives. It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily
synthesis.” (2002, p.176)

Another frequently used and important concept is that of the body schema (schéma corporel), not to
be confused with body image.4 To learn a new skill, whether motor or perceptual, is a
“rearrangement and renewal of the body schema” (2002, p.164). My body schema comprises the set
of bodily skills which I experience in my lived body, which in a given situation, with a particular
equipment to hand, offers me a range of bodily possibilities for actions in the world. Having
acquired the skill of how to play an organ, I encounter an organ in a different way, finding that it
offers me (or affords me, in James J. Gibson’s term), a new range of possible actions. My lived
body is not experienced as something over and against my Cartesian thinking ego, it is precisely
how I find myself acting in the world. In Merleau-Ponty’s explicit recognition of Husserl’s
influence on him, he writes “Consciousness is not in the first place a matter of ‘I think that’, but of
‘I can’” (2002, p.159). This ‘I can’ expresses possibility, and is also what Husserl means by
‘kinaesthetic consciousness’ – as Elizabeth Behnke puts it, “not as a consciousness ‘of’ movement,
but as a consciousness or subjectivity capable of movement.” (Behnke, 2011, Sect.5)

Behnke was a conservatoire-trained violinist before she became a philosopher, and has written
vividly about the experience of playing the violin. Here she describes how she comes to form a
unified ‘sounding body’ with her instrument.

“[W]hen I pick up the violin and the bow, I do not experience them as objects over
against me but gather them in to my body schema, so that they become articulated parts
of a freely moving whole. They are not separate things that I manipulate, but specialized
organs of a sounding body that retains the possibility of awareness in all its members.

4 See Gallagher (1996?)

 For example, I can not only feel the strings through the bow, but can also sense, without
looking, whether the bow hair itself is too tight or too loose, in the same way that I can
sense the degree of tension in my own hand.” (1986, pp.57-8)

I use this example because it expresses very well how a musician’s experience of her instrument
undermines any subject-object dualism – not just in how we act with the instrument, in doing
something with it, but also with regard to our perception. In this case, the bow is being experienced
in much the same way as the cane functions for the blind man, where as Merleau-Ponty puts it

“The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for
itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius
of touch, and providing a parallel to sight.” (2002, p.165)

Behnke is also making a second point, concerning our awareness of the bow itself and the direct and
non-inferential way in which we find out about its state. Appearances suggest here that there may be
no difference, phenomenologically speaking, between our sensing of the tension of the bow hair and
the tension in my hand. In both cases the tension is felt as being ‘mine’. For my own instrument, the
clarinet, a similar state of affairs holds for the awareness I have that the reed needs adjusting up or
down. And I’d add a further observation – when I have my instrument in my hand, I have an
implicit knowledge of the position of the different parts and keys of my instrument just as I do for
the different parts of my own body. With the instrument in the playing position, and my eyes shut, I
can reach up and touch the ligature screw just as I can reach up and touch the tip of my nose. The
former movement is, of course, part of a regular action – that of unscrewing the ligature to adjust
the reed. It might be noted that I’m not nearly so accurate with my left hand, though I’m still pretty
close – typically within about 20mm – and would pass the ‘field sobriety test’ reputedly used by US
police officers to assess whether someone is over the alcohol limit for driving! A quick check shows
that I’m also not as accurate with my left hand when it comes to locating other parts of my body.

Husserl’s kinaesthetic consciousness

This investigation into the way the body is given to one (how it is ‘constituted’), compared with
how it shapes our modes of action and perception (how it constitutes our world), leads us back from
Merleau-Ponty into Husserlian territory. As noted by Richard Shusterman (2005) and others, while
Merleau-Ponty shows us very well how we as bodily subjects are “through and through
compounded of relationships with the world” (2002, p.xiv), he tends to downplay the role of bodily
sensations themselves.
Husserl’s strategy, on the other hand, is to begin with a layer of bodily sensations of all kinds
(pressure, movement, temperature, pleasure and pain, “energetic tension and relaxation,” inner
restraint, etc.), which are then built them up into a constituted and constituting body. In particular,
he claims that the lived body is not only experienced as a kinaesthetic consciousness – i.e. as the
experience of the capacity for self-movement, but that it is defined by the existence of localized
touch sensations. In Ideas II, he pays close attention to the these sensations, and prioritizes touch
over sight and the other senses. He claims that unlike in the cases of the other exteroceptive senses,
every touch sensation which gives us something of the external world (texture, temperature,
vibration), can also be attended to in a different mode which provides us with a bodily sensation –
both in active and passive touch.

“Lifting a thing,” Husserl writes, “I experience its weight, but at the same time I have
weight-sensations localized in my body” (1989, p.153)

This is important because it supports Husserl’s claim that in my perception of my body (as a
material object) I am also given an apperception – an implicit perception – of my body as a sensing
organ, and that this apperception is a result of possessing a sense of touch.

“If my hand is touched or struck, then I sense it... [the hand] is apperceptively
characterized as a hand with its field of sensation, with its constantly co-apprehended
state of sensation which changes in consequence of the external actions on it, i.e., as a
physical-aesthesiological unity.” (1989, p.163)

The lessons that Husserl draws from this are, firstly, that

“the touch-sensing is not a state of the material thing, hand, but is precisely the hand
itself, which is for us more than a material thing” (1989, p.157)

and secondly, that

“A subject whose only sense was the sense of vision, could not at all have an appearing
Body” (1989, p.158)
This is only to scratch the surface of the Husserlian picture (for example I have ignored the
important fact that the body is given to us as the ‘zero-point’ of orientation, the “central ‘here’ from
which all theres are ‘there’” (Behnke, 2011, Sect.4a)). But I wish to bring us back to our use of
musical instruments. To the best of my knowledge Husserl makes no mention of our motor
interaction with material objects, and has no notion of incorporation, so here we can’t look to him
for precise descriptions or analysis. However, a productive strategy – as I hinted at above with the
description of how I have a tacit awareness of the position of my ligature – could be to start with his
descriptions of the lived body and to see how far they also apply to the sounding instrument-body.

Proposed Structures for Investigation

I’ll conclude with an incomplete list of experiential bodily dimensions which I’d like to investigate
more thoroughly in the future – these are areas which may or may not turn out to be important for
the phenomenon of incorporation, and furthermore, for the player’s relationship to the sounding
music itself:

• Relative size of instrument and player

• Amount of body focally involved in performing on the instrument
• Kind of contact with instrument – indirect vs direct
• Degree of competency and stage of learning
• Number of different instruments regularly performed on by the player
• ‘Fidelity’ of player to instrument (contrast the ‘monogamous’ relationship of a concert
violinist to her instrument with the ‘promiscous’ relationships that a pianist enters into with
the various instruments she performs on)
• Location of sound source relative to the player (this may be at a distance, e.g. for a church
organist)
• Use of breath – e.g. wind versus strings
• Pitch/unpitched and means of control over pitch (e.g. frets versus unfretted fingerboard)

I also hope to open out my study to the experience of others. This is hard to do, but alongside the
relatively recent rise in interest in ‘consciousness’ and subjective experience in the cognitive
sciences, new techniques are developing for the study of subjective experience. Right now I’m
excited by a promising approach currently under development in Paris by Claire Petitmengin, Pierre
Vermersch, and Michel Bitbol – that of elicitation interviews. 5 Generally referred to as a second

5 See, for example, Petitmengin (2006).

person method, the aim is to use very open questions to bring an interviewee back to her lived
experience, and to elicit details which very often were unnoticed at the time. Comparison between
interviewees should allow invariant structures to be elucidated. Especially important for a cultural
phenomenon such as music will be to investigate the experience of musicians across a range of
cultures, and here there is no doubt much for me to learn from the field of ethnomusicology.

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