Public Research Seminar: Bettina Varwig

Public Research Seminar - Bettina Varwig: Music in the Flesh: Plenisentient Listening

In this paper, I discuss some of my recent work on early modern music, bodies and emotions. In particular, I introduce the idea of plenisentience as a basis for understanding early modern musicking experiences. The concept of plenisentience suggests a model of being-in-the-world in which human sense-making takes place in and through the convergence of all sensory modalities.

This concept resonates with many historical sources that discuss the effects of music-making on human bodies, souls and spirits in terms of such a synaesthetic encounter with the world. These sources challenge the focus on the auditory domain in present-day explanations of music's affective power and instead invite a mode of performing and listening that engages the human body-soul in all its sensory capacities. We will be testing out some of these plenisentient modes of musicking live in the seminar.

Bettina Varwig is Professor of Music History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College. After completing her PhD (Harvard, 2006), she held a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College Oxford (2005–2018) and was Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at King’s College London (2009–2017).

She is editor of Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021) and author of two monographs: Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (University of Chicago Press, 2023), which received the 2024 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society.

Running time approx. one hour and 30 minutes