Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies
Peter Szendy
Abstract
Music invents, constructs, and makes bodies. These are not only technical bodies—those prostheses and artefacts that instruments of music are—but also bodies living a strange life, bodies as strange as a hand with more than five fingers, feet that breathe like lungs, or long-distance touching without contact. In this book, organology, that self-respecting discipline that inventories sound-producing bodies, is questioned for its anthropocentric presuppositions. Beyond the rational descriptions where it inscribes instrumentalists, it is a matter of thinking the forms of hybridation and organ tra ... More
Music invents, constructs, and makes bodies. These are not only technical bodies—those prostheses and artefacts that instruments of music are—but also bodies living a strange life, bodies as strange as a hand with more than five fingers, feet that breathe like lungs, or long-distance touching without contact. In this book, organology, that self-respecting discipline that inventories sound-producing bodies, is questioned for its anthropocentric presuppositions. Beyond the rational descriptions where it inscribes instrumentalists, it is a matter of thinking the forms of hybridation and organ transplants for which the general rhetoric of musical bodies makes space. The central concept of this rhetoric is that of effiction: this is the name for the invention of unprecedented bodies, whether they be as singular as Thelonious Monk’s hand or as collective as the ones that arise from an equipment of long distance innervations. Along the path of this general and deconstructed organology, Diderot, Nietzsche, and Benjamin serve as guides, as do Bill Evans, Chopin, and Sergei Eisenstein.
Keywords:
body,
musicology,
organology,
performance,
philosophy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780823267057 |
| Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: May 2016 |
DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823267057.001.0001 |
