Listening to Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III: A Multi-perspective Examination of the Singer’s Embodied Experience

Abstract

The musical performer’s embodied experience is an aspect of the performing process that has yet to be adequately considered in music scholarship. The embodied experience is relegated to the realm of the inaccessible and subjective, rather than being considered a valuable source of information for both the music analyst and performer. This thesis contends that the performing body can provide deep insights into musical meaning and can act as a resource for developing musical understanding. The sensations and experiences of the performer’s body during the process of creating music can lead to the recognition of important moments and fundamental meanings within a musical work. Engaging with scholarly literature from a variety of disciplines, this thesis will explore the classical singer’s embodied experience from the three primary perspectives of phenomenology, ecological perceptual theory and body communication theory. Each perspective is explored in and through a comparative listening analysis of Luciano Berio’s work for solo voice Sequenza III per voce femminile (1966) in order to illuminate specific aspects of the singer’s embodied experience. This embodied approach to musical analysis considers the singer’s body as a contributor to not only the production of sound but also to the creation of musical meaning, and can thus offer rich insights into that which is discovered through traditional analysis.