Baermann's Body: Understanding Embodiment in Historically Informed Performance

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The Historically Informed Performance of western classical music (HIP) sits at the crossroads of historical research, practical experimentation and professional performance. Expert HIP musicians working in professional ensembles, conservatoires and universities develop rich insights into past musical practices and cultures through daily physical engagement with historical musical instruments and repertoires. However, the subjective nature of these insights sits uneasily with the culture of academic musicology, which prefers claims to be grounded in explicit textual evidence. As a result, the expertise of professional HIP practitioners remains underrepresented in scholarship. This is a stark contrast to fields such as theatre and dance, where practitioners have long been at the heart of academic research but are only beginning to grapple with the kind of knowledge created by historical practice research, an area where HIP has a long history of critical discourse.The Baermann's Body project, led by clarinetist Dr Emily Worthington, will use current theories of embodied knowledge from across the performing arts to better understand the role of the musician's body and practice. Embodied knowledge includes both the physical technique of playing an instrument, and sensory and mental processes such as aural perception, musical imagination and style. This knowledge structures everything that a musician does, develops alongside their artistic practice, and is shaped by their cultural context. The embodied knowledge of past musicians is explicitly described in written sources, and tacitly encoded in compositions, editions and instrument designs. HIP has always been a form of research into the embodiment of past musicians, conducted into and through the embodiment of current practitioners. Theorising it as such will help achieve a more nuanced understanding of how HIP musicians cultivate embodied knowledge by doing and feeling.The Baermann's Body project is based around a case study of the 19th century clarinetist Carl Baermann. The embodied practice of 19th century wind playing remains particularly poorly understood, because historical texts alone are unable to convey the invisible work that goes on inside wind players' bodies. The case study will show how traces of Baermann's embodied practice encoded in pedagogical materials, editions, compositions and instrument designs can guide embodied research. Audio-visual documentation and reflective methods will be used to build a multi-media online resource tracking the progress of the research, showing how embodied research yields new insights into historical sources, and how historical artefacts help build new embodied knowledge.The project will advance understanding of 19th century wind playing, make an important contribution to our wider understanding of 19th century music performance and culture, and provide a model for historical practice research in other disciplines. A strategic use of existing social media platforms will be used to engage existing international communities of independent researchers, practitioners, educators, and students with the project's ongoing embodied research. Peer-reviewed publications will situate this work in a broader theoretical context, addressing crucial questions about the subjectivity and transmissibility of embodied research that are current in music, history, theatre, dance, and beyond. A series of workshops and events will be used to engage with professional practitioners and researchers from a wide range of fields. A training programme and an online toolkit will allow practitioners in HIP and the wider performing arts to adapt the methodology to their own work. By placing embodiment at the core of HIP research and modelling the communication of embodied insights, Baermann's Body will lay the foundations for mutually beneficial, non-hierarchical relationships between scholarship and professional practice in HIP and beyond.