ABSTRACT
In his introduction to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1981), August Wilson says of the blues: “It is hard to define this music. Suffice it to say that it is music that breathes and touches. That connects” (xvi). It is precisely this living, stimulating, and “indefinable” (nonlinguistic) quality of jazz that connected it to the body and made it both threatening and attractive to listeners. While meanings can never be fixed, music as an artistic medium allows maximal space for the listener’s creativity, as it simultaneously implies the artist’s body directly as a part of the consumer’s experience. On music’s subjection to shaping and definition by the more “concrete” semiotic systems, Roland Barthes (1977) has written that “in music, a field of signifying and not a system of signs, the referent is unforgettable, for here the referent is the body…” (xx). When the listener is also the speaker, narrating the musical performance and transforming it into a verbal description make the privileged subjectivity that of the “ear” and not of the “voice.” Certainly this is true in literary and visual depictions of musicality, where the portrayal of musical sound is virtually impossible without the presence or suggestion of a constituted performing body. Because of the temporal nature of musical performance and the intangible nature of its product, the consumption and enjoyment of music have always depended on a discrete physical moment, a corporeal exchange.
