The Invention of Breath: Historicizing a cosmic metaphor through music and theatre

Breath as a concept emerged into cultural salience in Europe at some point between the mid-eighteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. This came about largely as a counterpoint to industrial modernity, whilst also retaining a sense of corporeal mysticism amid evolving understandings of the body. The liberatory and democratizing insights of modern medicine and pneumatic chemistry, alongside broader emancipatory movements, reoriented the causal relationship between human wellbeing and social class. This destabilized reactionary spiritual orthodoxies, necessitating the invention of breath as a transcendent cosmic and esoteric life force, outside of time and politics. This drew on real and fantasized encounters with Eastern and ancient philosophies and practices and remains the dominant cultural presentation of breathing today. Over the past three centuries, changing attitudes to the significance of breath and breathing have characterized the relationship of European music and performance to ideas of authorship, artifice and narrative. The article traces these transformations through the work of Rousseau, Gluck, Wagner, Artaud and Barrault and others before discussing the persistence of cosmic breath in contemporary performance practices. It concludes with an examination of the breath-related works of the musician Kathryn Williams and the artist Marina Abramović.