Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology

by Elisabeth Le Guin

Overview

In this elegant study of the works of the undeservedly neglected composer Luigi Boccherini, Elisabeth Le Guin uses knowledge gleaned from her own playing of the cello as the keystone of her original approach to the relationship between music and embodiment. In analyzing the striking qualities of Boccherini's music—its virtuosity, repetitiveness, obsessively nuanced dynamics, delicate sonorities, and rich palette of melancholy affects—Le Guin develops a historicized critical method based on the embodied experience of the performer. In the process, she redefines the temperament of the musical Enlightenment as one characterized by urgent, volatile inquiries into the nature of the self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520240179
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/09/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Elisabeth Le Guin is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an internationally respected Baroque cellist.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Music Examples
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. “Cello-and-Bow Thinking”: The First Movement of Boccherini’s Cello Sonata in E Major, G. 566
2. “As My Works Show Me to Be”: Biographical
3. Gestures and Tableaux
4. Virtuosity, Virtuality, Virtue
5. A Melancholy Anatomy
6. “It Is All Cloth of the Same Piece”: The Early String Quartets
7. The Perfect Listener: A Re-creation

Appendix: Chronological Table of String Quartets
Notes
Bibliography
Index