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Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology.

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Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. By Elisabeth Le Guin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [374 p. ISBN 0-520-24017-0. $39.95.] Illustrations, music examples, compact disc.

Instrumental music of the second half of the eighteenth century is, by nature, an abstract art form. Barring a specific reference by a composer linking his or her work to a text, image, or idea, the analyst has traditionally turned to an objective approach in studying a work. One reason Jan LaRue's Guidelines for Stylistic Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970) has worked so well for so many is that it provides a common and straightforward vocabulary which can be used to discuss a composition. Small-, medium-, and large-scale levels with regard to texture, harmony, melody, surface rhythm, and the like can be distinguished, and comparisons with other compositions by the same composer as well as others are imminently possible.

In her Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology, Elisabeth Le Guin offers a different methodology. Drawing from cultural ideas of the eighteenth century, and incorporating theories and concepts from the fields of art, dance, and theater, the author proposes an approach which relies heavily on the subjective and physical nature of performance, one which she refers to as a performance- and body-oriented musicology. Boccherini's Body is a personal statement of the author's approach to Boccherini, informed as much by the physicality of the act of performance as the intellectual thought of the day. To...

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