Bach ache

Mainstream classical concert culture today ‘disembodies’ music and distances performers from their audience, a Cambridge academic argues. Drawing on very different ideas about music and the body from the early modern period, and working with professional musicians, Professor Bettina Varwig aims to transform the experience for all involved.

Sopranos wandering freely as they sing. Audiences swaying and tapping along to the music. Tears, sighs, hugs, dancing, and hands on hearts.

This isn’t how classical music is usually performed or experienced in the 21st century. Many might admit that the culture is restrained, except perhaps at the Last Night of the Proms. Critics go further, accusing classical music of being stuffy and uptight.

Professor Varwig is determined to help classical music re-embrace its powerful relationship with our bodies. A new film, released today on the Music in the Flesh project website, reveals the dramatic impact that experimental performances have on participants.

Rachel Stroud, an instrumentalist filmed at a recent workshop at the Royal Academy of Music, said: “It’s been an emotional rollercoaster. On the one hand, there's a sense of brimming over with joy at being able to play like this. And on the other hand, I felt really sad at some moments.

“One performer said this is the first time she's played the piece without physical pain. And another said “'Gosh, I'm normally so repressed in this movement to have to play quietly to balance to the singers'. It almost made me sad hearing how freely and wonderfully and expressively they played.”

She added: “Players are often constrained by traditions inherited from the nineteenth century, from the acoustics of modern concert halls, to conductors, to changing aesthetic tastes. But Bach really understood how to write for instruments, including all their quirks and imperfections, and it’s so liberating to embrace that!”

Music in the Flesh began as an academic book by Bettina Varwig, published in 2023, but has since grown into a far more ambitious project exploring the synergies between historical research and live performance.

A Professor of Music History and Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Varwig has developed an innovative collaboration with two distinguished musicians: violinist Margaret Faultless, Becket Chair of Historical Performance at the Royal Academy of Music and a leader of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; and tenor Nicholas Mulroy, Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music and Associate Director of the Dunedin Consort.

Together they have been using Varwig’s findings about early modern musical experiences to guide and inspire experimental workshop performances in venues in both London and Cambridge. The team works with professional and student musicians, classical music audiences, and complete newcomers. For good reason, these performances have focused on the music of J.S. Bach.

The new film follows pioneering workshops of Bach’s St. John Passion at the Royal Academy of Music last June, in which musicians play without a conductor, and are encouraged to engage with the music and each other far more physically and freely than they are used to. In discussion and interviews, the musicians passionately describe how the experimental approach transforms their performance and emotional engagement with the music.

“When you read about how music affected listeners in Bach’s time, their testimonies are really quite striking in their bodily intensity,” Professor Varwig said. “Music contracted their innards and made their hearts leap. It could taste like vinegar in your throat. It could melt your earwax. It could draw your soul out of your body. In classical concerts today, we don't tend to experience many of these effects because we are asked to play and listen in a particular way.”

Varwig argues that this music is often presented and received as a disembodied artefact. Performers are physically separated from the audience, clad in body-effacing black clothes; and listeners are seated in neat rows and asked not to move, make a noise or otherwise share their responses to the music.

“We are asked to leave our breathing, pulsing, feeling bodies at the door,” Varwig said. “We want to use some of this history as an inspiration for doing things differently now.”

Lessons from the past

Varwig’s historical research has unearthed a wealth of evidence of people feeling the physical and spiritual effects of music from the 17th and early 18th centuries.

“Philosophers, music theorists, theologians, devotional writers, poets, anatomists, medics and listeners described music as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, and miraculous,” Varwig said.

“Music could soften your heart, pierce your brain, make your teeth grate and rattle, constrict your chest like it was bound with ropes, or flood you with honeyed sweetness. It could enter your body through the pores of your skin and spread contagiously between people. It could induce melancholic disorders or drive out the plague.”

Varwig emphasises that these were not merely metaphors; they described real experiences of bodily and spiritual transformation. “These early modern subjects inhabited bodies that were ensouled, porous, fluid, volatile and open to influxes from the environment,” Varwig explains. “As music spread contagiously within and between their bodies, it produced affective responses of ecstasy, despair and catharsis.”

During experimental performances, Varwig and her collaborators strive to make music which is ‘fleshy, gutsy, alive, humane and from the heart’.

“We prize affective immediacy, collaborative creativity, collective attunement and the spontaneity and vulnerability of live performance,” Varwig said. “We embrace the technical and physical challenges posed by historical instruments as catalysts for enhanced expression. We move when we feel moved.”

“We encourage our participants to feel themselves into unfamiliar, porous, flowing ways of being-in-the-body. We play with aspects of traditional concert ritual; we use movement, physical proximity and touch, alternative kinds of seating and multi-sensory immersion as ways to foreground bodily presence. We invite participants to use their whole being as a resonator; to listen with their skin, heart, liver and feet; to open their minds and bodies to being permeated with musical affect.”

Impact on performers

Many participants have been deeply affected by the experience.

Margaret Faultless said: “We found ourselves engaged in music we know so well in such different ways. We experienced the physicality of our own bodies and emotions. We were incredibly attuned to our fellow performers and listeners in the room. We were free to inhabit the intensity of Bach’s music, free to move, to breathe together and to respond to the power of the story through our shared humanity. This never felt contrived or staged, but rather something intensely immediate, connected and transformative.”

Rebecca Legget, a mezzo-soprano, took part in the filmed workshop at the Royal Academy of Music. She said: “I felt myself gripping the chair, not through any kind of vocal tension, but just because I was so moved. I just felt this kind of gripping tension, and I often feel that and don't know where to put it. And usually, I put it in trying to control the sound, so like I'll put it in my jaw or my tongue. But this, I felt like I was able to really let myself feel the tension and release.”

Rachel Stroud added: “We go to see something live for a reason. We're saturated with digital information and actually there's nothing that beats a body on stage being vulnerable, sweating, crying, all of those things, which is why we need to do this, why this work is so important.”

Nicholas Mulroy said: “It was at times quite an emotional day. I think some people found some bits of music making overwhelming. And I think that's accurate in some ways. I think the piece is designed really to be a sensory shot. You know, it's meant to overwhelm, it's meant to change us.”

In the coming months, Varwig is expanding her project to reach amateur classical musicians further afield. Collaborations are planned with a new Baroque ensemble hosted at Handel Hendrix House, and with Gospel Oak Chorale, a London-based community choir. She says: “I have these utopian visions where this level of physical and emotional engagement among performers and audiences becomes the norm in the classical music world.”

Rachel Stroud agrees: “Bettina’s work on early-modern listening is going to transform the world of performance as we know it. We’ve started a revolution.”

Watch the film here: