Boccherini's Body

"In this 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, obesessively nuanced dynamics, delicate sonorities, and rich palette of melancholy affects - Le Guin develops a historicized critical method based on the physical 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." "Le Guin's discussion is historically grounded in the medicine, dance theory, and philosophy of eighteenth-century Paris and Madrid (the main cities of Boccherini's maturity) and approached through a range of voices - including minutely detailed phenomenologies of sensation, allusive episodes modeled on opera seria and the dialogues of Diderot, and the CD of sound examples performed by the author with harpsichordist Charles Sherman and with the Artaria String Quartet that is included with the book. Offering a fascinating view of music is role in the Western sense of body and self, Boccherini's Body also provides brilliant insights into the shifting dynamic among composers, performers, and audiences."--BOOK JACKET.