What my body told me: towards a bodily interpretation of Clare Loveday’s Johannesburg Etude No. 1

Abstract

The relationship between performance and analysis has been a consistent point of discussion in music discourse for at least the past four decades. This article uses Johannesburg Etude No. 1 (2012) by South African composer Clare Loveday as a case study to explore ways in which searches for musical meaning may proceed from insights generated in and through a performer’s body – how bodily knowledge may become an entry point into music analysis. I draw on musicologists Nicholas Cook and Suzanne Cusick to establish frameworks through which performance may be approached not as an ‘end point’ of structural music analysis, but rather as the primary point of entry into analytical endeavours. I offer a ‘bodily analysis’ of Johannesburg Etude No. 1, which I first performed in 2014 as part of the Cape Town public arts festival Infecting the City. This analysis is connected to notions of an ‘urban imaginary’, an affect which I suggest is characteristic of an African metropolis such as Johannesburg.