Author: Navid Gohari
Phenomenology of Musicality
Embodiedness, energy, and presence in music performance
1. Introduction: The Crisis of Meaning and the Forgotten Musicality
In today’s performance culture, musical execution is often dominated by technical precision, structural analysis, and fidelity to the score. Conservatories and institutions of higher music education primarily emphasize mastery of form, rhythm, dynamics, stylistics, and interpretation. However, even within the most refined interpretations, something essential is lost: the flow of energy in music. The expressive force that breathes life into a piece and affects the listener beyond the textual relations of the score vanishes the moment performance is reduced to technical skill or formal accuracy. This missing element is what I call musicality.
Musicality, in its deepest sense, is not merely a matter of taste or stylistic finesse. It is an inner, lived, and phenomenological quality. This quality cannot be notated in the score, nor is it attainable through structural analysis alone. Musicality emerges as an embodied, energetic, and affective connection between the performer and the effect of musical elements on their perceptive experience.
This article aims to rediscover and redefine musicality as a fundamental and experiential dimension in the process of music-making. It seeks to show how, through a phenomenological and interdisciplinary approach, musicality can be theorized, experienced, and transmitted. Drawing on over two decades of practical and research-based experience in music, theater, embodiment studies, and the philosophy of performance, I will outline a conceptual framework that restores musicality to the heart of musical performance.
I begin with a critical survey of key theories of musicality across music, theater, and philosophy, comparing their approaches and implications. Then, I examine and critique the dominant pedagogical and performance models that reduce musicality to a secondary or indefinable quality. Finally, I propose a new model of musicality: as a living, embodied relation to time, energy, and meaning. I conclude with a practice-based proposal for cultivating this capacity in performers, particularly those trained in classical or contemporary traditions.
This endeavor is not merely academic. It stems from a vital necessity: to restore the expressive and relational force of music in a performance culture increasingly shaped by standardization. Musicality is not an optional ornament — it is the soul of performance.
2. A Comparative Review of Musicality Theories
2.1 Musicality in Music Theory and Music Education
In traditional music education, especially within conservatory systems, musicality is often presented as a combination of rhythm, sonority, interpretation, phrasing, dynamics, and the emotional understanding of a piece based on the composer’s ideas. However, this approach frequently reduces musicality to a set of stylistic conventions or “expressive skills” that can be measured and judged in technical competitions or through the repetition of predetermined patterns.
Although in the world of music, efforts to retrieve the fundamental quality of musicality have been explored and questioned by artists and theorists, it is difficult to find a practical solution beyond pure technicality. For instance, Carl Nielsen defines musicality concerning the sense of form and temporal intuition in the moment of performance, and John Rink, in his Musical Performance Studies, considers musicality as the result of structural interaction, the performer’s body, and lived experience. Nevertheless, to this day, the definition by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments remains widely accepted among musicians. He attempted to describe musicality through a sensitive understanding of dynamics, phrasing contours, and emphases in performance.
2.2 Musicality in Theatre and Performance Art
In theatre and performance studies, especially in the 20th century, musicality has been regarded not as musical content in the strict sense, but as a bodily and energetic quality in the actor’s action, breath, and presence. Jerzy Grotowski did not separate musicality from the actor’s body and emotional tensions. He believed that the actor’s vocal qualities must be inherently connected to their physical actions and expressions. For Grotowski, musicality was not confined to music but referred to the actor’s inner score for enhancing presence, structured by energy, silence, and action.
In his period of Theatre as a Vehicle, Grotowski said that working on primal songs is like pursuing a song and asking: Who sang it first? How did it begin? No song is created all at once from beginning to end. Often, the initial core lies elsewhere, not among the notes and structures. Where are the first impulses?
Grotowski believed that only by engaging with these primal impulses can one truly live the song. In such a state, he asserted, it is not we who perform the song, but the song that flows through us.
Peter Brook, also influenced by Grotowski’s ideas, considered musicality not merely as musical elements but as the fusion of all elements of a performance. For Brook, to musicalize a performance meant to reveal its essence. His concept of the “living moment” referred to a form of musicality defined not by representation but by the presence and actions of the performer.
Brook’s works often incorporated music not just as a background but as a vital element that deepened emotional impact and narrative. He believed in the power of the present moment in performance and compared it to an atom that, when split, releases infinite potential. He aimed to draw the audience into this living experience.
However, perhaps the most significant influence on the concept of musicality in 20th-century theatre, in the evolution of Grotowski’s ideas, comes from Włodzimierz Staniewski. According to Staniewski, musicality is the spirit of music that can be instantly recognized as something that affects us or something we have heard in real life. “Musicality is us.” Music—as a set of codified notes, like any other abstract product—has lost its connection with its primal stimuli and sources.
This definition of musicality by Staniewski can be compared to the views of his mentor (Jerzy Grotowski), with the distinction that Staniewski and the Gardzienice theatre group placed greater focus on music and its technical elements, and on the exploration of musicality’s function within the context of rhythm, music, and collective work.
Staniewski considers musicality a relational state that emerges among performers through movement, sound, and rhythm. In the Gardzienice tradition, an actor does not merely perform—they establish a relationship—and musicality manifests through relationality in space, time, body, and voice. They seek moments in which the actor’s body, voice, rhythm, gaze, and attention reach a peak of focus and vital energy. For them, musicality is synonymous with “life on the threshold”: a moment just before collapse, at the height of tension and arousal.
2.3 Musicality in Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Art
The phenomenological tradition—especially through Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—offers a rich framework for understanding musicality beyond cognition and representation. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the body-subject and perception as being-in-the-world directs our attention to the embodied nature of musical experience. Here, musicality is a form of sensorial–temporal presence: not what is heard, but how it is heard—and more importantly, how it is lived and realized.
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy explores the idea that musicality is deeply intertwined with embodied experience and our perception of the world. He regards music as a model for understanding how meaning arises from our sensory interaction with the world, dissolving the boundaries between sound and idea, body and mind.
Roland Barthes, in his essay The Grain of the Voice, extends this view by asserting that what affects the listener is not the meaning of what is sung, but the expressive energy and the physical trace of the singer embodied in their voice. He argues that musical quality arises not from semantic content, but from the materiality of sound. Thus, musicality in this sense is a sensory, vulnerable, and affective quality that must be perceived in the moment of utterance.
3. Embodied Encounter with Sound
Every sound, before it becomes a note on the page, is a vibration in space, in the body, on the skin, in the bones. Musical engagement comes alive when the performer perceives sound not as musical information, but as a living force.
Musicality, here, is a quality that arises through the simultaneity of sensation–movement, imagination, tactile contact, and the active presence of the body within the sonic field. In this experience, the body is not merely an instrument for music, but its ground and companion.
4. The Aliveness of Sound
A musical piece (as a text or score) is, in its essence, a tool for establishing a relationship with the musical dimension, not a substitute for it. “Becoming musical” means moving beyond mere interpretation of signs, toward a living perception of them as forms of energy.
A performance of a Bach piece becomes musical only when the performer experiences the score not as a constraint but as a guide — a path to move from form to force, from structure to presence.
5. Return to the Source: Relation to Primary Stimuli
At its deepest layers, musicality is a return to the sources of vocal or sonic arousal — a place where sound is not yet organized but already carries energy and lived experience.
This return is a kind of renewed listening — not only to what is being played, but to what remains unsaid yet is present in the energy of the performance.
Here, silence and breath, vibration and movement, imagination and connection are reactivated as the primary elements of music-making.
To perform music, in this sense, is to rediscover the force that made music possible in the first place.
6. Toward a Methodology for Cultivating Embodied Musicality
From musicality as a concept to musicality as a practice
Any attempt to teach musicality must begin by redefining it as a mode of embodied awareness, not merely as music knowledge. Musicality, in this sense, is not something that is applied to music; it is the very precondition for music to be alive.
This quality operates before it is conceptually formulated: through rhythm sensed in the body, time lived through breath, resonances felt in the tissues, sonic dialogues unfolding in the imagination, and the tension and release expressed in the muscles.
Musicality, as a fundamental and living quality of musical performance, transcends technical skills and structural analysis.
It is rooted in lived experience, presence in the moment, and a deep connection with musical energy. Redefining musicality as a “living relationship” and a “lived phenomenon” opens pathways for new approaches in music education and performance.
The proposed approach for cultivating musicality — developed through a synthesis of practical experiences and theoretical foundations from music, theatre, philosophy, and embodiment — provides a solid basis for deeper and more holistic training.
This perspective, while emphasizing sensory and bodily presence grounded in musical intuition, enables music performance to become a powerful and flowing process within the fabric of time and space.
Future research directions may include empirical studies on the impact of this approach on the quality of professional performances, psychological and neuroscientific analyses of the musicality experience, and the development of digital educational tools based on this method.
Additionally, exploring the connections between this method and contemporary approaches in music and theatre education, as well as its potential applications across different artistic genres, offers valuable research opportunities.
Ultimately, training and research programs based on this method can contribute to a deeper and more human understanding of music and its performance, enhancing the expressive and artistic quality of professional musicians and vocalists.
