= 138

Figure 6. ‘Yodelling in the canyon of love’ (aerobics music)

of ‘e ort expansion’ in an aerobic session and magnifies the sense one has of power (for example, moving in the virtual, musical, space, one may have the sense of moving continually upward, or of taking ‘giant’s steps’). This musically translated sense is enabling, empowering; it has a direct e ect on the bodily properties of energy, motivation and endurance.

Here, then, is how music may be understood to have power over bodies: it a ords materials – structures, patterns, parameters and meanings – that bodies may appropriate or latch on to (mostly semi-consciously). Music is, in short, a material against which to shape up bodily processes, whether these are physiological states (such as exhaustion or arousal), behavioural movements (such as kicking or jumping), co-ordination in some setting (dance steps), self-perception of bodily state (pain or fatigue, pleasure), or motivational levels (being predisposed, in some embodied way, to a particular line of activity, such as, moving faster, jumping higher, slowing down and so on). Music accomplishes none of these things in its own right – it is not a ‘force’ like gravity or wave power. It is rather a potential ‘source’ of bodily powers, a resource for the generation of bodily agency. Music is, or rather can serve as, a constitutive property of bodily being.

Gearing up and staying up – musical devices

One of the most crucial stages in an aerobics workout is the pre-core or transition phase, where class members ‘change gear’ and begin to engage in the strenuous ‘power moves’ characteristic of the core of the session. It is in this pre-core stage that class members must, if they conform to the preordained aerobic order, leave behind the more workaday movements and gentler, fluid patterns of the warm-up. In the course of the ethnography, it became clear that some music was especially suited to this purpose. One of these was a number entitled, ‘Yodelling in the canyon of love’. This piece, a paragon of postmodern aesthetics with its jumble of cultures and musical discourses (the piece features a mélange of Latin rhythm, yodelling and cow bells), makes copious use of a cha-cha-cha figure (see figure 6). Although this repeated figure passes each time in an

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instant, its e ects were powerful. Like a hinge or switch, the figure shifted class members into a mode of moving and orienting to musical materials commensurate with the core. Its use illuminates clearly music’s ability to profile movement style and to instigate movement trajectory.

In tandem with Sarah’s choreography at this stage, the figure o ers a kind of musical ‘hop’ (the cha-cha-cha figure) that in turn encourages the body, which, according to the preordained choreography, is required to hop in synchrony with it. The rhythm thus provides a model for bodily action, one that also entrains the body and encourages it to begin a ‘hiimpact’ routine. In this respect, the cha-cha-cha figure places on o er to class participants a type of motivational material qualitatively di erent from that used in the earlier warm-up music. In the latter, the antipasto of the session, lyrics, melodic-associative figures and musical colour are characteristic. Here, by contrast, the source of motivation is relocated at the level of a contagious rhythm and this relocation may be understood as a shift away from the more sentimental (and more cognitive), physically less demanding modality of aerobic agency a orded by typical warm-up music, where lyrics (often about romance or about the idea of movement, such as, ‘Everybody get on up and dance’) are most likely to be positioned in the foreground – the musical foreground and the foreground of attention. In the music of the aerobic core, focus is deliberately shifted to the physicality of the musical beat. This shift in focus from imagery to beat and rhythm is a deliberate design feature of aerobic music for the core. It is in turn appropriated by instructors in their attempts, at the end of the warm-up, to transform – or in Callon’s (1986) terms, ‘translate’ – class members into fully committed exercisers, into bodies who will execute, for a gruelling ten or fifteen minutes, ‘power’ moves.

The ‘Yodelling’ track thus a ords a conversion from ‘warming up’ to ‘warmed up’. It helps to induce in class members the embodied desire to ‘hop’ – that is, to put, for the first time in the session, a bounce or skip in their step. In so doing they become less self-conscious, more meditatively engaged in the exercise, and as this happens, the musical materials become increasingly rhythmical, less melodic, so that for part of the number they are little more than a clear and relentless beat. If the music has done its work at this stage, class members are most fully enlisted or conscripted as aerobic agents; here the ‘doing’ of aerobics is allencompassing: as the Zen expression has it, ‘not a thought arises’. At this moment, within ‘good’ aerobics, music facilitates, in Mauss’s (1979 [1934]) sense, techniques of the body (Lash and Urry 1994:45–6).

In sum, over the first half of the aerobics class the music’s quality changes: specific musical devices are introduced, gradually and imperceptibly, to induce participants to ‘get into the rhythm’ so that they

come to do what the earlier warm-up music told them to do with its lyrics (‘let the music move you up and down’). Class members are aware of this at some level. As one woman put it (in an interview), ‘[music] can make me work harder . . . if it’s just a simple strong beat then it’s easier to work with . . . and if it very slowly gets faster [see again figure 4 to note tempo changes over time] I don’t sort of realize it’.

Cooling o and shifting down – from ‘body’ to ‘heart’ to the ‘calculus’ of the crunch

‘Shifiting down’ is an important phase in the grammar of good aerobics, as important as ‘shifting up’ into the core. Here, too, music a ords this bodily process. At this stage, well-known ballads often make an appearance, albeit remixed by the aerobic music firms, so as to possess a rhythmic pulse that moves at twice the pace of the original melody (the result is a slow melody in the foreground, set against a background that moves in double time). The tempi of these ballads are not only slower than the numbers within the aerobics core; they can also be seen to a ord a shifting of motivational focus yet again, from the meditatively ‘bodied’ mode of the core (little thinking or feeling and much moving) back to a more self-conscious, and more sentimental, mode post-core. Their elements are repositioned: familiar melodies and lyrics are brought back to the fore, and rhythm is relegated to the background. Through this, and through the use of musical and lyrical sentiment (recognizable and overtly sentimental ballads whose lyrics describe philosophical matters – ‘Do you know where you’re going to?’ – or ‘relationship’ issues, such as ‘I know him so well’ from the musical Chess), bodies are, as it were, encouraged to cool o physically and to recalibrate emotionally. The aim, here, overtly stated within the prescribed order of an aerobics session, is to prime class members for the final stage of the workout where they must engage in a highly calculative mode as deliberate, rational executioners of precision-engineered exercises such as ‘the crunch’ (for abdominal firming) and other floor exercises such as sit ups, reverse curls, triceps dips, ski squeezes, press ups and leg raises. All of these moves are executed in conjunction with copious instructions from the class leader.

Slowing down and cooling down are, according to Sarah (and also as discussed in aerobic exercise manuals), prerequisites to doing floor exercises. Because precision is required (if injury is to be avoided), musical arousal, so crucial during the core, and especially late core, becomes, during floor exercises, a liability. Accordingly, at this stage, the music’s volume is lowered, not, as one might think, for the simple reason that instructions can be heard (Sarah’s voice projects exceptionally well, and

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has been heard throughout the session) but, rather, to dampen class members’ motivation to move quickly and vigorously, and so to enable the mental calculation about what the body is doing (for example, ‘Am I moving in precisely the right way?’). Here is how Sarah explains it:

Q. When you turn the volume down, when you are at the end and you do the stomach work, why do you do that?

Sarah: Because you don’t need it, you don’t want them as motivated do you? Q. Right.

Sarah: When they’re doing sit ups also you need a lot of teaching points with the sit ups as well [i.e., you need them to be oriented to your verbal utterances] and you just need it for a beat not to motivate them or any way really so [i.e., just to keep in a regular rhythm, not to generate and sustain high energy].

Even Sarah’s voice is modulated in this section to emphasize the ‘mental’ modality of cool-down. Throughout the core of the session she typically uses a loud voice, one that makes use of a good deal of long, drawn-out tones, snappy rhythms and latching-type figures to spur on class members. Here, by contrast, she speaks, rather than bellows, in an ordinary voice tone – one that sounds low-key, authoritative, even clinical. This return to cognitive consciousness is also a returning of the class member to the embodied modality (the tension levels, energy and exertion levels and motivational levels) of everyday life in modern societies (Witkin 1995:206). Many of them, for example, will be driving home from class.

Thus, over the course of forty-five minutes, music is used in an aerobic session to configure and reconfigure bodies and emotional-cognitive modalities as the aerobic agent is initially enlisted by the warm-up tracks (that feature emotional, romantic and fluid musical materials), launched on a trajectory of ‘pure’ movement during the core (where the beat occupies nearly all of the musical space) and ‘cooled down’ (recognitivized, resentimentalized, slowed down) into the more cognitive and less energetic mode associated with the precise forms of exercise at the end of the session.

Music as a prosthetic technology of the body

Music is an accomplice of body configuration. It is a technology of body building, a device that a ords capacity, motivation, co-ordination, energy and endurance. In the case of aerobic exercise, it is possible to identify some of the specific musical materials that work, in real time, upon the body, materials that have been designed and can be appropriated for specific bodily ends. As specified in the discussion of a real-time aerobic session, these devices assume the guise of tempi, figures and gestures