Some get their impetus from novelty; they take pleasure in the picturesque, the varied, and the unexpected. […] Others plumb the depths of being. They seek to find there both the primitive and the eternal.
There is something eternal in this rendez-vous between the French composer and the dancing Indian chiefs. “The other” appears superficially strange, something that one can merely watch like a tourist. There is no access to the corporeal roots of these movements and their inner consistency. The metaphor of a painting on the wall of a cave (a grotesque) works perfectly here. The Indians’ lived life is a grotesque for someone who is unfamiliar with this culture. The perception of la musique grotesque encompasses phenomenological questions concerning lived-through historical experiences. As Monika Langer (1989, 101) puts it: “It is the phenomenal body which comprehends, appropriates, and sediments the human world into its own dynamic structure.” Something of the experience is shared, and the feeling of otherness is combined with the feeling of familiarity. This apprehending of the intersubjective world exists between the perceiving bodies as a kind of dialogue.
Conclusion The intentions of the historically informed musician pass through constant turbulence. In question, among other concerns, is how our gained knowledge, skill and comprehension are intertwined with the act of rehearsing and performing. Also, what are the qualities of the music’s inner materiality that we perceive as living musicians? What has it “consumed”? The study of rhetorical actio as a kit of tools (including gesture, voice, mien, movement) stimulates the mental, embodied activity rather than controls it. By exploring its deep roots of bodily history, we are able to articulate the rich materiality of Les Sauvages. This is one way to embody historically informed performing and to grasp it as something happening in the musician’s body-mind. By embracing the extremities of Les Sauvages we are able to live through the music’s multi-layered bodily image schemas, the antithesis of “us and them”. We perceive “the other” like a painting on the ceiling of a cave (a grotto). By exaggerating the oddities of this alien world we aim at diminishing its supposed threat. The dynamics of the I-Other-conjuncture is one of the most important themes of the phenomenological approach. Musician and musicologist Laurence Dreyfus (2007, 270) points out the musician’s lack of power in the music field: “Early music with its dependence on History, has handed over the keys of the shop to outsiders and is forbidden from mounting any defence of its practices on purely creative grounds.” This has meant in many cases that artistic solutions become more and more 47