This dissertation tracks the historical abstraction and dissociation of performing bodies from musical composition in classical music. I show that while dominant pedagogical traditions have historically distinguished between bodily practice and musical ideation, corporeal performance has always guided the construction of musical thought and creativity. While I attend to the progressive disciplining of bodies through formulaic exercises and regulative canons of musical works, I also draw out the hugely variable historical configurations of performers’ practices and knowledge. Throughout the dissertation I compare historical accounts of performing bodies as measuring sensoria, perceiving subjects, finely-tuned instruments, and generative structures for musical creation. These bodies have historically arbitrated musical aesthetics as both the perception and cognition of tones, and as judgments of taste, beauty, and truth.

The dissertation consists of close-readings of pedagogical treatises, compositions, and recordings of violinists from the mid-18th to the mid-20th centuries. A first glance at this literature unsurprisingly reveals disciplinary programs which reinforce the enduring image of performance as the reproduction (rather than creation) of musical works. Yet a closer reading of these texts, scores, and recordings renders an image of the violinist’s resounding body as a locus of music’s material, social, and intellectual histories.

Within this corpus of violin practice, musical knowledge is developed, suppressed, and resurfaced in elliptical cycles of disciplining and experimentation. In contrast to the predominantly patrilineal trees of violin teachers and their teachers’ teachers used to justify and consolidate pedigree and cultural authority, this genealogy of performance pedagogy attends to the generational cycles of willful amnesia and selective recall characterizing the passage of embodied knowledge. I address the neglected influence of these negotiations of violinistic listening and corporeal practice on familiar histories of musical abstraction.

This essay presents a philosophical account of musical performance within the tradition of European art music. Although the 19th and 20th century formulation of performance as reproduction has been critiqued in recent scholarly texts, I will argue the case that reproduction—when not exclusively conceived of as the reproduction of the musical work—still provides a useful and accurate characterization of the performance process.

The questions that logically follow are “who” and “what” is reproduced? Answering the question of “who,” I will refer to Naomi Cumming’s account of subjectivity as it is maintained in the synthesis of musical signs. Answering the question of “what,” I will diagram the work’s object ontology proposed by Theodor W. Adorno. Having followed these nuanced approaches to the development and maintenance of music’s subjects and objects, I will propose that it would be useful for scholars and musicians to think of templates for musical reproduction. The template concept on the one hand draws attention to the technical and technological nature of performance, the structures of which emerge historically. On the other hand, templates index the subject’s unique cultural position and voice.

To this end, the essay will look at three case studies of templates for performance: Fritz Kreisler’s distinctive lilt (deriving from Viennese Ländler and Waltz rhythms), elements of Jascha Heifetz’s bodily formalism (tracking these specifically from some of his teacher, Leopold Auer’s, pedagogical instructions), and Hilary Hahn’s conformity to a metric and sonic consistency as it appears represented in notation.