Music, Movement Culture, and the Politics of Bodily Health

Physical fitness has long been a central preoccupation within American culture. One of the most influential publications in this area was Physical Culture. It was founded by entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “fitness guru” Bernarr Macfadden in 1899 and ran until about 1961. Macfadden did not invent the term “physical culture” but rather appropriated it from a pre-existing trend that glorified health and wellness above all else. The magazine presented what its contributors felt constituted “sound health”: exercise, disease prevention, hygiene, bodily symmetry, and a balanced diet. Many of the articles in early issues of Physical Culture were opinion pieces that claimed authority by citing research in the fields of psychology, phrenology, and biology. Authors professed to know the secrets to increasing brain size and output, “supreme” bodily control, and healing. They presented readers with formulas that promised perfect physical fitness, optimized neurological function, and social superiority. The magazine's central premise was simple. Fitness was a tool available to everyone, and there were no excuses for not improving your health. Macfadden summarized it in his now-famous dictum that he boldly printed on the magazine's cover: “WEAKNESS IS A CRIME. DON'T BE A CRIMINAL!”1What if we were to read Physical Culture from a musicological perspective? Musicologists already know that music is inseparable from everyday life and the body.2 It should come as no surprise, then, that a magazine that gave Americans specific advice about treating their bodies also had much to say about music. Physical Culture portrayed music as a means of improving discipline, morality, and personal taste; of organizing physical activity through rhythm; and of alleviating the monotony of exercise. Reading Physical Culture through the lens of musicology creates new ways to understand how music has operated in American culture, bringing into view the deep relations among various movement genres, such as dance, calisthenics, weightlifting, and so forth.American attitudes toward fitness and their attendant body politics also extend into the performing arts. They have informed the way choreographers, dancers, actors, and musicians make art and move their bodies. Even sound-movement systems such as Delsartism, Dalcroze's Eurythmics, and Meyerhold's Biomechanics were influenced by trends in physical culture.3 Understanding “movement” as a broad category of analysis will allow us to see more clearly the shared role that music and dance play in the politicization and, at times, weaponization of health and wellness. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Physical Culture.One notable intersection of music and fitness is Carl F. L. Zeisberg's article, “How I Discovered Musical Exercise,” which appeared in an issue from December 1920.4 Here, the author describes how he learned to “harness” the power of music for his health. Afflicted by various ailments, Zeisberg began a regimen of daily exercise to alleviate his symptoms. He was quickly discouraged by the drudgery of needing to count while exercising. One day, however, he heard his neighbor playing a march on a piano and felt himself unconsciously moving to the beat of the music. This changed his exercise routine profoundly, transforming him into an ardent supporter of musical exercise. Zeisberg sought out a variety of musics and even sang to provide his own. For Zeisberg, any music was acceptable provided the exercises matched its form, rhythm, and mood, but he especially liked works by Irving Berlin, Beethoven, and Victor Herbert.Another article of note is Charles D. Isaacson's “Fokine—Sculptor of Human Beings,” which appeared in an issue from September 1920.5 Isaacson interviewed the Russian dancer and choreographer upon his visit to the United States in November 1919. In what is essentially a piece of health propaganda, Fokine describes dance as a means of disciplining the body and upholding specific aesthetic, artistic, and social values. He presents himself as a sculptor, one who seeks to shape, control, and uplift the body. Isaacson excerpts one of Fokine's more telling statements on the article's first page: When I see a man who slouches along, whose body is too weak to withstand any shock; head low, chest not expanded, stomach distended, I shudder. There is a valuable piece of property gone to ruin. You may tell me that in a head of the man is a brain of power. I will confess that it is too bad that such an owner of life should be content to reside in so miserable a dwelling place. That same man no doubt will get himself the finest house he can afford. He will put into it furniture, pictures, piano, in an effort to make it a beautiful residence for his friends and his family. But his own private individual apartment of a body he scorns. Either he is too lazy to make the body presentable, or he is too short-sighted.6The articles by Zeisberg and Isaacson are symptomatic of their time. Both reflect music and dance's absorption into fitness's popular consumer culture. Part of this transformation is undoubtedly due to the phonograph. As Mark Katz has observed, the increasing affordability, portability, and availability of the phonograph made “good music”—that which was thought to be refined and civilizing—more accessible to people at home.7 Music, especially classical, had already long been perceived as a powerful moral force.8 At the same time, Macfadden and other industry leaders were proselytizing the virtues of health and hygiene. He himself believed in the ability of music to motivate individuals to exercise and enliven their bodies. He famously had the guests of his Physical Culture Hotel sing every day to “invigorate” all their important organs and “fix thoughts of health firmly in mind.”9 Nearly a century earlier, Mary Lyon, the founder of the Mount Holyoke Seminary, would require students to sing while performing their daily calisthenics, on the belief that it warmed the body and increased circulation.10 In these instances, music was more than mere color and inspiration. It lay at the core of exercise and its putative physiological rewards.While Zeisberg outlines a rather superficial aspect of the relationship between music and exercise, Isaacson demonstrates how music is easily swept up into the body politics advanced by physical culturists and the greater wellness movement. Beyond the widespread industrial, technological, and medical changes of the time, the Progressive Era witnessed what some historians have referred to as the “clean living movement,” an overhaul of American values concerning health and wellness.11 This movement, in turn, coincided with the popularization and adaptation of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory of natural selection by figures such as Herbert Spencer and Sir Francis Galton. Macfadden published content that spoke to the social anxieties surrounding body consciousness, which was increasing due to the new developments in science, medicine, and technology and the changing conceptions of gender, class, and race that emerged in their wake. Physical Culture routinely cited Herbert Spencer and made reference to eugenics, linking bodily and social health by isolating desirable physical and behavioral characteristics for men and women. Isaacson's interview with Fokine—with its emphasis on the “perfect” body and its “DIY” attitude to physical fitness—fit snugly into Physical Culture because it resonated with Macfadden's own beliefs.The “Progressive” era's fixation on progress and perfect health is integral to our understanding of Fokine's connection between physical wellbeing and music. In the block quotation above, Fokine likens the human body to an apartment and compares the quality of its décor to its condition and, in terms of the metaphor, its bodily health. For Fokine, to exist in a body that does not move, one that “slouches” or cannot support itself, is a profound waste. That “pictures” and a piano are part of what makes Fokine's metaphorical “apartment” adequate speaks to the role of the arts in constructing the ideal, sculpturesque body. He is tapping into the age-old idea that music reflects and conveys good taste, morals, and beauty. Fokine extends the metaphor by comparing the body to a musical instrument and the ability to move freely and effectively to its sounding. A body that responds well to a dancer's “playing,” like inputs on an instrument's surface, is one that is sound in health. For Fokine, bodies translate ideas and thus must be kept in good condition to communicate. Bodies in poor condition, those too weak to carry themselves, let alone express ideas, are challenged and thus questionable. Despite excluding “the handicap of bent and broken bones and the ravages of disease,” he still operates on Macfadden's assumption that weakness renders a person defective. Fokine's perspective politicizes health and echoes the ableist, racist, classist, and gendered logics of physical culture, its relationship to eugenics, and its subscription to Darwinian thought.12 This politic—where bodily well-being is weaponized as a marker of responsible humanity while its opposite signifies apparent “laziness” and narrow-mindedness—is at the foundation of physical culture meritocracy. Those who do not succeed only have themselves to blame.Most musicologists would agree with Zeisberg and Isaacson that music is inextricable from movement. Music structures, colors, and inspires movement. It generates and communicates emotions and ideas that individuals then translate into movement. However, it is becoming clearer now that the very idea of music creates an aura of presumed authority, civility, intelligence, and morality.13 Scholars working in voice, dance, and disability studies have already explained how music and musical talent work within preexisting social structures to uphold ableist, sexist, classed, gendered, and racist ideology.14 Examining the role of sound in Physical Culture extends this line of thought, revealing how music purportedly heals, signals “good taste” and morals, and embodies holistic wellness. Contributors used the widespread appeal and supposed ethical value of music to sell fitness to the white middle class and circulate deeply flawed health information.Reading Physical Culture musicologically also reveals what scholars gain from thinking across genres and investigating “movement” broadly. A broader way of understanding “movement” provides a better grasp of the interconnections between physical culture and the greater artistic—music, theater, and dance—community. Zeisberg's and Isaacson's articles demonstrate that physical culture ideology—the relentless pursuit of “perfect” health at all costs—reached the performing arts. To this end, I offer the term “movement culture” as a theoretical tool for articulating the connections between music-movement systems. Rejecting the idea that movement genres exist in separate spheres, movement culture comprises the overlapping ideological and physical habits and practices of music, dance, and fitness genres. As an interdisciplinary concept, movement culture brings “physical culture” into musicological scrutiny and provides a useful framework for the scholars who have already noted its relevance in dance history.15 Taking “movement” as a broad frame of reference allows us to understand the ideologies of bodily health that affect embodied approaches to music, dance, and fitness pedagogy more holistically. My concept of movement culture does not deny the importance of a close reading but rather aims to shine a light on the new similarities that are revealed by using a wider lens. Scholars could use a language to describe the ideological, gestural, and sonic links between and among movement genres. Movement practitioners have been thinking across genres since at least the late-nineteenth century. Music studies would surely benefit from doing the same

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