From his book Embodied Expression in Popular Music : A Theory of Musical Gesture and Agency, Oxford University Press, 2024.

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This chapter focuses on Joni Mitchell's distinctive approach in singing and playing her instruments and, specifically, on her unique strategies in combining musical materials. I again invoke the idea of gestural pairing to explore how Mitchell leverages vocal and instrumental strategies to create a singular expressive subjectivity. Conceiving of counterpoint broadly as the combination of musical parts, this study of musical texture and embodiment in Mitchell's music reveals strategies in songwriting while providing a basis to better understand her unique approach to melody and harmony in relation to lyrics. Later in the chapter, I show how Mitchell's designs of layered contrapuntal texture provide an artistic foundation in her collaborations with jazz musicians and her songs with orchestral accompaniment. I further explore how gestural pairing relates directly to the expressive oppositions that animate narratives in her songs, dramatizing a tension between the artistic impulse to maintain independence, observing humanity from a distance, and the desire to surrender that independence to find human connection in love.

As a study of embodied musical expression, the aim is to explore how Mitchell communicates with the body in her songs. We cannot help but respond empathically as she expresses our common humanity through the body, moving in ways that have parallels in fundamental patterns of movement we all experience. But it is also through the body, in the ways she sings and plays instruments, that she expresses a unique subjectivity. It is this emergent expression I hope to illuminate in close readings of songs, showing how Mitchell, in her performative actions, embodies movement in songs that progresses from a more generic source domain of cultural rootedness toward a more individualized subjectivity: from familiar musical materials that are "close at hand" to new expression. In a 2013 interview Mitchell stated, "I'm fluid, you know Everything I am I am not."1 I argue that the complex layering of musical materials with a multiplicity of implications is a natural impulse in her creativity. One dimension of this multiplicity is Mitchell's innovative use of "slash chords," in which a chord is superimposed over a bass note other than the indicated chord's root. I interrogate passages with slash chords in terms of gestural opposition, examining how independent layers in Mitchell's textures are situated as tactile physical gesture but also situated culturally, shaping formal and rhetorical strategies that align with Mitchell's storytelling in her songs.

Our kinesthetic engagement with music enlists embodied knowledge: the ways we understand our own bodies in relation to the world. Musicians and listeners spatialize musical materials in relation to the human body, individualized and imperfect. Mitchell's personalized approach to songwriting and performance leverages her particular muscular abilities, which were attenuated as a result of contracting polio as a child. I argue that Mitchell radicalizes embodied musical expression by uplifting the individualized and imperfect performing body. What has been described as Mitchell's "crip virtuosity" in guitar playing (Jones 2019) leverages innovative guitar tunings in accommodating her muscular limitations. Mitchell has stated that she "had to simplify the shapes of the left hand," explaining that her left hand "is somewhat clumsy because of polio" (Monk 2012, 69). I propose that by extension, we can infer that in her piano technique as well, she may have sought to "simplify the shapes," with right- hand chords sometimes shifting over a left-hand part grounded in a single hand position. Mitchell's artistic approach to layered musical textures may have first developed as a strategy of adaptation. I explore how layered textures and superimposed musical gestures in Mitchell's music project a dynamic negotiation of mobility and im- mobility, creating a powerful expressive undercurrent that is evident whether she is playing piano, dulcimer, or guitar as she sings. Later in the chapter I examine how the social mediation of (dis)ability enlivens her collaborations with jazz musicians, her songs with orchestra, and her recent performances as a venerated musical elder.

Mitchell was diagnosed with polio in 1953 at age ten. The polio vaccine would not reach Canada until 1955. Mitchell and her friend Neil Young are among the survivors of the 1953 epidemic. Mitchell would spend Christmas at the polio ward in Saskatoon. She states, "I couldn't get out of bed. I was paralyzed. When they diagnosed it, they shipped me up to a polio colony, outside St. Paul's hospital in Saskatoon. The place was like a leper colony, designed to limit the spread of the harrowing disease" (Yaffe 2017, 19 - 20). I propose that the metaphor of paralysis is a source of productive tension in her music, connecting to broader expressions of otherness, isolation, and distancing objectivity. Importantly, Mitchell does not express this as an impediment to be overcome or concealed, but rather, as a marker of difference that is artistically positioned in transgressively resisting expected norms. Mitchell musicalizes social and physical discomfort that we might all identify with to some degree, artistically embracing that discomfort as a musical gesture of self-acceptance.

I explore how Mitchell highlights the expressive power of the singing body in narratives shaped through changes of persona and subject-position, in which a voice of enacted memory or dream is marked as out of time and out of body. This provides a means to articulate her recurring rhetorical scheme, of dramatically contrasting the allure of the internalized and independent world of the imaginative mind against a desire for human connection in the physical world. This dramatic opposition be- tween "heart and mind" provides a site for creatively probing power relations as a female artist, as Mitchell engages with gendered tropes of identity, travel and mobility, and artistic creation, notably in her songs with orchestra, in which the singer-pianist's interaction with the orchestra is mobilized to enact the evolving psychic state of the song's protagonist.

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