Tuning this Curious Harp

For my research MA at the University of Birmingham I have been writing music that focusses on the experience of illness. The project title is taken from the larger quotation from Francis Bacon's second volume of The Advancement of Learning - "This variable composition of man's body hath made it as an instrument easy to distemper; and, therefore, the poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man's body and to reduce it to harmony." I have tried to bridge techniques of music composition and aesthetic considerations with the scientific exploration of the experience of illness (e.g. qualitative research, disease specific impacts). To do this I have exploited the idea that illness is the embodied experience of disease and that music is a deeply ‘embodied’ art. I have used several approaches including embodied and blended metaphor, illness narratives and textual incorporation of the reported experience of illness. To access the thesis, scores and audio-files go to: DAVIES, Simon (2023) Tuning this curious harp: composing music that embodies the experience of illness. University of Birmingham
http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/14206