Music as a Trigger for Performances of Meaning: Articulating Emotional Experience through Embodied Minds

Abstract

What did Franz Schubert feel when he realized he had syphilis? This question sets off Ingmar Bergman’s In the presence of a clown (1997). Facing death, a madman confined in a psychiatric hospital tries to make sense of his personal situation through Schubert’s via his music. Neither the disembodied sounds coming from his gramophone nor the doctor’s answer give him a note of hope. Only the arrival of another patient who endorses the relevance of one’s inner freedom and imagination prompts “a joint project against chaos and dissolution,” namely the creation and performance of the first talking film in history. Schubert’s music is thus put into context and acts as a trigger for meaningful performances –first cinematic then theatrical– which will give this man a new perspective of the composer’s feelings at the end of his life. Drawing on speech-act theory and Jerome Bruner’s notion of the “dual landscape” of narratives, this paper considers film as a communicative context in which the process of meaning making is displayed. Schubert’s music becomes a situated action within a symbolic system of interpretation whereby the protagonist of the film can frame, articulate, and share his own experience. The representation of the audience in the film foregrounds art’s social dimension and generates a “mirror effect” between the internal and external audiences. The heightened attention to performance blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality and makes consciousness available through embodied minds.