Barthes: The Sensuality of Musica Practica

"The music you play depends not so much on an auditive as on a manual (hence much more sensuous) activity; it is the music you or I can play, alone or among friends, with no audience but its participants...it is a muscular music; in it the auditive sense has only a degree of sanction: as if the body was listening, not the soul..."

This piece demonstrates the embodied-ness of musica practica that Barthes speaks of. In this piece, hree men stood over three massive drums called “daiko,” each holding two sticks, called “bache” in their hands. They began by standing incredibly still and upright as they took their uniform positions in synchrony. Positioned in a triangle formation, their stance was wide, and their knees were bent deeply, bringing them close to the earth. Their right legs were slightly behind their left, rooting them in a stable cross-lateral pattern. Their arms began low, in line with their hips. They began to strike the daiko with the bache in a left-right left-right cross lateral pattern, first keeping the movement small and the bache close to the drum’s face. But as their tempo quickened, the movements became bigger and the force exerted on the drum was stronger which sent a thunder-like sound throughout the concert hall. Viewing the lead drummer from the back, I noticed that the motion of striking the daiko moved successively through the drummer’s body. He would first yield into the earth with his back leg then push down the leg. The power from the yield-and-push would flow through the rest of the body, up through the back, through the core, down the arm, and through the elbow and wrist, finally connecting with the bache and the drum face in one movement phrase. It seemed as if the drum responded to this strike because once the bache made contact with the daiko’s face, it seemed to throw the drummer’s arm back into the air with reciprocal force as if the drum and the drummer were equals in a conversation. There was a circular continuity to how the drummers moved. As one arm fell to the drum, the other rose in a mesmerizing pattern. I could not believe how long the performers were able to maintain their rhythm and with such vigor.

The power of the drummers’ movement translated into the rhythms they created. The deep sound of the drums completely filled the theater and I could feel the reverberations come up through the floor and into the soles of my feet. I felt as if the sound was so full bodied that it took up a physical space in the room. It seemed as if there was almost no space for me and I felt physically pushed in by the weight of the sound.