Making earwax melt and teeth rattle: the project returning music to our bodies

Listeners in the 17th and 18th centuries experienced music in a startlingly vivid – and physical – way. A fascinating academic project is wondering if we should let ourselves be much more moved, and get moving. Plus: a prime minister’s musical legacy?

Professor Bettina Varwig wants to get us moving – and feeling, and listening, but primarily moving. The University of Cambridge academic says classical audiences today are “asked to leave our breathing, pulsing, feeling bodies at the door”. In concert halls we are told not to move or make a sound, subdue all the things that make us human. Whatever you do, don’t give in to the things your body is viscerally telling you when you experience a piece like Bach’s St John Passion, the way the music churns emotions and agitates your sinful heart. You have to listen passively, you can’t sigh or cry or clap in the wrong place, even if that’s what your whole being is telling you that you need to do to communicate the corporeal and spiritual pain the music is putting you through.

Varwig dreams of a different world. Her research focuses on how 17th and 18th-century listeners responded to music. “When you read about how music affected listeners in Bach’s time, their testimonies are striking in their bodily intensity,” she says. “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.”