Introduction

As audible music was, for a long time, exclusively brought into existence with the body, the very idea of music being a medium of human expression implies bodily sound making. Indeed, ‘expression’ is, taken literally, a bodily act. If transfi xed in a dream or if paralysed by illness, one ceases to be able to express oneself. To someone in such a state, agonisingly, thoughts or feelings become unshareable. Music as an expressive medium follows on as an extension from the bodily act of expression. This extension seems so natural that it is easily taken for granted that music should be, like bodily expression, a means of psychological expression, in prolongation of emotional expression as given to us via the face, voice and entire body.2 However, the entrenchment of music with the body is also a messy one, not least because the libidinous body colours music as sensuous activity, but also simply because the musician’s performing body is, crucially, an unpredictable entity. Reactions wishing to depart from this entrenchment, seeking for a transcendence or liberation from the body, have been many. Specifi cally, to overcome the fallacies of a musician’s body or the limits of a traditional acoustic instrument intervening during the sonic realisation of a composer’s (supposedly unbound) sonic imagination was one of the driving ideas behind the modernist aesthetic preceding some electronic music aesthetics.3 The hopes of this modernist aesthetic were on the machine, not

only on the noise machines make, but, just as importantly, on the mechanistic production of sound;4 that is, the hopes were tied to the image of the generation of sound using a perfectly suited, untiring and infallible body, or, in stark contrast, no body at all.