I'm an assistant professor of music and sound studies at Cornell University and Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, where I direct the research group "Histories of Music, Mind, and Body."
The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal, 2018
In 1801, the Scottish music theorist Anne Young (1756-1827) created an elaborate board game set d... more In 1801, the Scottish music theorist Anne Young (1756-1827) created an elaborate board game set designed to teach musical fundamentals. This video offers some thoughts on the creation and reception of her works, contextualizing their creation and reception within the history of education in late eighteenth century Britain.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2022
There is, Berlioz writes in his essay de la musique en général (1837), “a strange agitationin my... more There is, Berlioz writes in his essay de la musique en général (1837), “a strange agitationin my blood circulation: my arteries beat violently… a trembling overtakes my limbs and a numbness my hands and feet, while the nerves of sight and hearing are partially paralyzed.” The composer here is not, as one might think, describing the symptoms of an opium overdose, but rather the powerful effect of “good music” on his own body. Challenging our tendency to dismiss Berlioz’s musical writings as merely overheated Romantic effusions, I argue that the remarkable medical detail presented in his arguments reveals a hitherto neglected dimension of nineteenth-century engagement with the embodied effects of music. Contextualizing Berlioz’s claims within the neurophysiology of his age, and in particular the physiological psychology of Cabanis, the anatomy of Bichat, and the acoustic theories of Lamarck, I recover the medical and scientific epistemes that motivated the composer’s assertions about the power of music to effect embodied and emotional transformation: a constellation of ideas that I term his “neurophysiological imagination.” An analysis in these terms of some of Berlioz’s major compositional innovations reveals how both his writings and his music explore an explicitly neurophysiological dimension of early Romantic listening experiences. Specifically, I propose that Berlioz repeatedly attempted both to represent and to induce an experience of great interest to the artists and audiences of his day: an overpowering mental and physical response to music experienced as an embodied, neurophysiological form of the sublime.
This essay explores a hitherto unsuspected intellectual relationship among three important thinke... more This essay explores a hitherto unsuspected intellectual relationship among three important thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The great philosopher and economist Adam Smith is known to have had a conception of instrumental music exceptional for his time in its foreshadowing of ideas generally associated with Eduard Hanslick. As I show here, Smith's views were decisively influenced by the psychological theories of his countryman Thomas Reid in all likelihood by way of the extraordinary proto-cognitivist music theory of their contemporary John Holden, in particular the latter's conceptualization of the faculty of attention. The innovative contributions of these writers constitute a compact and suggestive case study in the circulation of ideas about perception and listening between philosophy and music, and suggest that the Scottish Enlightenment attitude to psychology enabled a new kind of theorizing about the musical experience: one that foregrounded the importance of the faculty of attention in the process of perceiving music and sound.
This vignette makes a number of analytical observations about Philippe Leroux's octet De la textu... more This vignette makes a number of analytical observations about Philippe Leroux's octet De la texture (2007), with a particular focus on the composer's transformation of gestural materials drawn from drum rudiments and waveform shapes into formal processes unfolding at various levels throughout the piece. It demonstrates how Leroux deploys his primal building blocks, whether composed of rudiments, waveform profiles, or non-pitched materials, within processes of kinetic ebb and flow that include alterations in dynamics, register, and tempo, as well as changes in pitch and/or rhythm.
The accordion was the stalwart staple of spiritualist encounters in
Victorian London. Introduced ... more The accordion was the stalwart staple of spiritualist encounters in Victorian London. Introduced into s´eances by the Scottish American Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86), the most celebrated medium of the era, the instrument was typically used to produce music without the visible aid of a performer (what I call the “spirit accordian”). This article seeks to explain why the accordion came to capture the imagination of the nineteenth-century spiritualist community. It does so by reconstructing the auditory culture in which the instrument was embedded, relying on scientific writings, the popular press, and the sonic experiences of both the spiritualists, who heard the spirit accordion as emitting the ethereal tones of other worlds, and the skeptics, who described the same sounds as grating squeaks. Linking the instrument and its role in the s´eance to eighteenth-century theories of neurophysiology, the article traces the spirit accordion’s various musical predecessors, arguing that Home’s canny selection of the instrument to represent the next world reflected the intersection of specific cultural signifiers.
In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, a new family of free-reed keyboard instrument... more In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, a new family of free-reed keyboard instruments – including accordions, harmoniums, and parlour organs – became hugely popular throughout Europe. Although these instruments relied on a novel acoustical technology borrowed from an ancient Chinese mouth organ known in the West since the seventeenth century, instrument makers and music critics alike consistently described the sounds they produced using ideas native to a Romantic tradition of affective discourse around windblown strings and spiritual transcendence. This essay traces the European reception of free reeds and interrogates the conditions under which keyboard instruments based on a Chinese technology came to be heard as embodying the properties of a very different instrument: the Aeolian harp. Although various agendas collaborated in obscuring the East Asian origins of the free-reed technology, it seems highly probable that changing political and racial contexts – most notably around 1830 – directly affected the ways in which the reeds were both heard and understood. Studying the appropriation of free reeds by the West as well as the technology’s postcolonial afterlives, I argue, can help us better understand the conditions under which sound objects are assimilated or rejected in changing cultural settings.
Among the most exciting aspects of John Holden's Essay towards a Rational System of Music (1770) ... more Among the most exciting aspects of John Holden's Essay towards a Rational System of Music (1770) is its explicit ambition to explain musical practice by means of a limited set of psychological first principles. Relying primarily on introspection, it nonetheless describes phenomena that we today understand as grouping, chunking, and subjective rhythmicization. In the absence of anything resembling a modern theory of cognition, Holden's account of how we can perceive music chiefly relies on the actions of posited mental faculties, including attention, memory, imagination, and expectation. These concepts allow him to develop detailed speculations about a range of conscious and unconscious dispositions of perception. This study explicates the Essay's speculative theories and contextualizes them both within eighteenth-century music theory and in light of contemporary psychology.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Casa dei Matti in Aversa and Palermo were renown... more In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Casa dei Matti in Aversa and Palermo were renowned throughout Europe for using music to treat the insane. In an innovative approach to mental illness inspired by Pinel’s moral treatment, patients took regular part in theatrical productions, operas, and musical performances. This paper investigates the methods used at Aversa and Palermo in light of contemporary medical debates. I argue that the use of music and theater in these institutions should be understood not only within the context of the emerging field of psychiatry, but also as interacting with popular notions of the national characteristics of Italians. Relying on both historical accounts and fictional narratives, I end by considering how depictions of musical-theatrical treatment expressed the assumption that Italian minds and bodies had a special sensitivity to the arts.
"Abstract:
Director Patrice Chéreau describes the nineteenth century as “our mythology and our... more "Abstract:
Director Patrice Chéreau describes the nineteenth century as “our mythology and our past, containing our dreams” (Chéreau 1980: 430). His 1976 opera production of Richard
Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), considered perhaps the most influential Ring cycle of all time, evokes a nineteenth-century dreamscape: gods, giants, dwarves and mermaids in dinner jackets and petticoats scheme against the backdrop of steel dams and massive cogwheels. Traditionally, critics have seen this production as a continuation of the Marxist legacy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Viewed instead as an early representative of steampunk, the social critique, environmental concerns, and retro-futuristic ideas featured in this staging become contextualised within a coherent framework – one that explores contemporary social and technological anxieties through the metaphor of an epic fantasy world.
Keywords:
Patrice Chéreau, Der Ring des Nibelungen, magic, myth, nineteenth century, opera, Richard Wagner, staging, steampunk, technology"
ZEITSCHRIFT DER GESELLSCHAFT FÜR MUSIKTHEORIE 9/2 (2012) – ISSN 1862-6742
ABSTRACT: Ernst Toch’s “Geographical Fugue” was conceived of as a work for technological media, d... more ABSTRACT: Ernst Toch’s “Geographical Fugue” was conceived of as a work for technological media, designed as a recording to be ‘performed’ by gramophone set to a faster speed. Perhaps uniquely in music history, this electronic work has had an almost exclusively acoustic performance history of more than eight decades. Premiered in 1930 at a Berlin-based festival dedicated to the incorporation of technology in music, a few years later the piece was transformed into a humorous showpiece spoken live by a-cappella choirs. However, these renditions represent a substantial deviation from the composer’s intention.
This article contextualizes Toch’s compositional choices within the artistic, political, and scientific discourses of the Weimar Republic, with a focus on relationship between exoticism, experimental art and technology, postwar constructions of the body, and the influence of contemporary research on phonetics and sound reproduction. The latter are also examined through a linguistic analysis of the vowel and syllabic distribution within the “Geographical Fugue” itself. Finally, the afterlife of these features is explored in various contemporary remixes of Toch’s work on YouTube, and the ways in which contemporary possibilities of musical creation enable the work to return to a state that evokes its original context of technological experimentation.
Since antiquity, music has been a central metaphor for conceptualizing the workings of the mind. ... more Since antiquity, music has been a central metaphor for conceptualizing the workings of the mind. Philosophers and musicians alike have long accounted for the power of music with ideas borrowed from medicine, aesthetics and acoustics. The advent of mechanist understandings of nervous action in the eighteenth century heralded a new era of musico-medical interaction focused around the nerves, the subject of which is James Kennaway's new edited collection, Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. Kennaway emphasises that the neuroscientific turn of the past few decades in the humanities has a long history. Intending to foreground the degree to which 'the essentially medical neurological understandings of the body have long played a powerful role in thinking on music, its effects, and aesthetics' (p. 1) this rich volume provides a fresh window onto a history of which scientists, musicians and cultural commentators are all too seldom aware. The collection is ambitious and interdisciplinary in its scope, and includes contributions by historians of science, music scholars, an art historian and a neuroscientist. Taken as a whole, it provides an excellent introduction to some of the major ideas about music and the body. Kennaway's introduction cogently lays out the stakes for studying the history of the relationship between music and brain science given the current intellectual climate of 'neuro-enthusiasm'. Tracing the latest manifestations of the present-day fetishisation of the neuroscientific, he deftly critiques pop culture phenomena ranging from Baby Mozart to Jonah Lehrer, situating them within a long history of music and the body from the Pre-Socratic philosophers through the nineteenth century. The book continues with an essay by the cultural historian George Rousseau, a pioneer of the application of historical neural science to literary analysis. Exploring the history of relating musical emotions to 'pictures in the mind', interspersed with his own first person account of musical development , Rousseau virtuosically surveys a range of philosophical and aesthetic issues clustering around the legacy of German Romantic ideas on Romantic 'neuroculture'. In a synoptic contribution characterised by both depth and breadth, musicologist Penelope Gouk lays out three intersections of music, physiology and natural philosophy in eighteenth century English thought: music's effects on the body and soul, the role of sound in conceptualising models of nervous transmission, and tarantism. She further contex-tualises the emergence of eighteenth-century music therapy within the context of both Cartesian and Newtonian theories of nervous action. Another standout essay in this collection is a collaboration between music historian Amy B. Graziano and neuroscientist Julene K. Johnson, who discuss the role of music within medical discourse around apha-sia and amusia between approximately 1745 and 1890. Focusing on a concise topic, the authors successfully illuminate the role of music as a diagnostic tool within shifting debates around brain localization, mental representation, and the nature of language. The eighteenth century is well represented by two additional chapters: historian of medicine Pilar Le on Sanz surveys the influence of acoustics and music theory on Spanish medical thought, focusing in particular on three fascinating figures: Tom as Vicente Tosca
The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal, 2018
In 1801, the Scottish music theorist Anne Young (1756-1827) created an elaborate board game set d... more In 1801, the Scottish music theorist Anne Young (1756-1827) created an elaborate board game set designed to teach musical fundamentals. This video offers some thoughts on the creation and reception of her works, contextualizing their creation and reception within the history of education in late eighteenth century Britain.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2022
There is, Berlioz writes in his essay de la musique en général (1837), “a strange agitationin my... more There is, Berlioz writes in his essay de la musique en général (1837), “a strange agitationin my blood circulation: my arteries beat violently… a trembling overtakes my limbs and a numbness my hands and feet, while the nerves of sight and hearing are partially paralyzed.” The composer here is not, as one might think, describing the symptoms of an opium overdose, but rather the powerful effect of “good music” on his own body. Challenging our tendency to dismiss Berlioz’s musical writings as merely overheated Romantic effusions, I argue that the remarkable medical detail presented in his arguments reveals a hitherto neglected dimension of nineteenth-century engagement with the embodied effects of music. Contextualizing Berlioz’s claims within the neurophysiology of his age, and in particular the physiological psychology of Cabanis, the anatomy of Bichat, and the acoustic theories of Lamarck, I recover the medical and scientific epistemes that motivated the composer’s assertions about the power of music to effect embodied and emotional transformation: a constellation of ideas that I term his “neurophysiological imagination.” An analysis in these terms of some of Berlioz’s major compositional innovations reveals how both his writings and his music explore an explicitly neurophysiological dimension of early Romantic listening experiences. Specifically, I propose that Berlioz repeatedly attempted both to represent and to induce an experience of great interest to the artists and audiences of his day: an overpowering mental and physical response to music experienced as an embodied, neurophysiological form of the sublime.
This essay explores a hitherto unsuspected intellectual relationship among three important thinke... more This essay explores a hitherto unsuspected intellectual relationship among three important thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The great philosopher and economist Adam Smith is known to have had a conception of instrumental music exceptional for his time in its foreshadowing of ideas generally associated with Eduard Hanslick. As I show here, Smith's views were decisively influenced by the psychological theories of his countryman Thomas Reid in all likelihood by way of the extraordinary proto-cognitivist music theory of their contemporary John Holden, in particular the latter's conceptualization of the faculty of attention. The innovative contributions of these writers constitute a compact and suggestive case study in the circulation of ideas about perception and listening between philosophy and music, and suggest that the Scottish Enlightenment attitude to psychology enabled a new kind of theorizing about the musical experience: one that foregrounded the importance of the faculty of attention in the process of perceiving music and sound.
This vignette makes a number of analytical observations about Philippe Leroux's octet De la textu... more This vignette makes a number of analytical observations about Philippe Leroux's octet De la texture (2007), with a particular focus on the composer's transformation of gestural materials drawn from drum rudiments and waveform shapes into formal processes unfolding at various levels throughout the piece. It demonstrates how Leroux deploys his primal building blocks, whether composed of rudiments, waveform profiles, or non-pitched materials, within processes of kinetic ebb and flow that include alterations in dynamics, register, and tempo, as well as changes in pitch and/or rhythm.
The accordion was the stalwart staple of spiritualist encounters in
Victorian London. Introduced ... more The accordion was the stalwart staple of spiritualist encounters in Victorian London. Introduced into s´eances by the Scottish American Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86), the most celebrated medium of the era, the instrument was typically used to produce music without the visible aid of a performer (what I call the “spirit accordian”). This article seeks to explain why the accordion came to capture the imagination of the nineteenth-century spiritualist community. It does so by reconstructing the auditory culture in which the instrument was embedded, relying on scientific writings, the popular press, and the sonic experiences of both the spiritualists, who heard the spirit accordion as emitting the ethereal tones of other worlds, and the skeptics, who described the same sounds as grating squeaks. Linking the instrument and its role in the s´eance to eighteenth-century theories of neurophysiology, the article traces the spirit accordion’s various musical predecessors, arguing that Home’s canny selection of the instrument to represent the next world reflected the intersection of specific cultural signifiers.
In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, a new family of free-reed keyboard instrument... more In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, a new family of free-reed keyboard instruments – including accordions, harmoniums, and parlour organs – became hugely popular throughout Europe. Although these instruments relied on a novel acoustical technology borrowed from an ancient Chinese mouth organ known in the West since the seventeenth century, instrument makers and music critics alike consistently described the sounds they produced using ideas native to a Romantic tradition of affective discourse around windblown strings and spiritual transcendence. This essay traces the European reception of free reeds and interrogates the conditions under which keyboard instruments based on a Chinese technology came to be heard as embodying the properties of a very different instrument: the Aeolian harp. Although various agendas collaborated in obscuring the East Asian origins of the free-reed technology, it seems highly probable that changing political and racial contexts – most notably around 1830 – directly affected the ways in which the reeds were both heard and understood. Studying the appropriation of free reeds by the West as well as the technology’s postcolonial afterlives, I argue, can help us better understand the conditions under which sound objects are assimilated or rejected in changing cultural settings.
Among the most exciting aspects of John Holden's Essay towards a Rational System of Music (1770) ... more Among the most exciting aspects of John Holden's Essay towards a Rational System of Music (1770) is its explicit ambition to explain musical practice by means of a limited set of psychological first principles. Relying primarily on introspection, it nonetheless describes phenomena that we today understand as grouping, chunking, and subjective rhythmicization. In the absence of anything resembling a modern theory of cognition, Holden's account of how we can perceive music chiefly relies on the actions of posited mental faculties, including attention, memory, imagination, and expectation. These concepts allow him to develop detailed speculations about a range of conscious and unconscious dispositions of perception. This study explicates the Essay's speculative theories and contextualizes them both within eighteenth-century music theory and in light of contemporary psychology.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Casa dei Matti in Aversa and Palermo were renown... more In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Casa dei Matti in Aversa and Palermo were renowned throughout Europe for using music to treat the insane. In an innovative approach to mental illness inspired by Pinel’s moral treatment, patients took regular part in theatrical productions, operas, and musical performances. This paper investigates the methods used at Aversa and Palermo in light of contemporary medical debates. I argue that the use of music and theater in these institutions should be understood not only within the context of the emerging field of psychiatry, but also as interacting with popular notions of the national characteristics of Italians. Relying on both historical accounts and fictional narratives, I end by considering how depictions of musical-theatrical treatment expressed the assumption that Italian minds and bodies had a special sensitivity to the arts.
"Abstract:
Director Patrice Chéreau describes the nineteenth century as “our mythology and our... more "Abstract:
Director Patrice Chéreau describes the nineteenth century as “our mythology and our past, containing our dreams” (Chéreau 1980: 430). His 1976 opera production of Richard
Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), considered perhaps the most influential Ring cycle of all time, evokes a nineteenth-century dreamscape: gods, giants, dwarves and mermaids in dinner jackets and petticoats scheme against the backdrop of steel dams and massive cogwheels. Traditionally, critics have seen this production as a continuation of the Marxist legacy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Viewed instead as an early representative of steampunk, the social critique, environmental concerns, and retro-futuristic ideas featured in this staging become contextualised within a coherent framework – one that explores contemporary social and technological anxieties through the metaphor of an epic fantasy world.
Keywords:
Patrice Chéreau, Der Ring des Nibelungen, magic, myth, nineteenth century, opera, Richard Wagner, staging, steampunk, technology"
ZEITSCHRIFT DER GESELLSCHAFT FÜR MUSIKTHEORIE 9/2 (2012) – ISSN 1862-6742
ABSTRACT: Ernst Toch’s “Geographical Fugue” was conceived of as a work for technological media, d... more ABSTRACT: Ernst Toch’s “Geographical Fugue” was conceived of as a work for technological media, designed as a recording to be ‘performed’ by gramophone set to a faster speed. Perhaps uniquely in music history, this electronic work has had an almost exclusively acoustic performance history of more than eight decades. Premiered in 1930 at a Berlin-based festival dedicated to the incorporation of technology in music, a few years later the piece was transformed into a humorous showpiece spoken live by a-cappella choirs. However, these renditions represent a substantial deviation from the composer’s intention.
This article contextualizes Toch’s compositional choices within the artistic, political, and scientific discourses of the Weimar Republic, with a focus on relationship between exoticism, experimental art and technology, postwar constructions of the body, and the influence of contemporary research on phonetics and sound reproduction. The latter are also examined through a linguistic analysis of the vowel and syllabic distribution within the “Geographical Fugue” itself. Finally, the afterlife of these features is explored in various contemporary remixes of Toch’s work on YouTube, and the ways in which contemporary possibilities of musical creation enable the work to return to a state that evokes its original context of technological experimentation.
Since antiquity, music has been a central metaphor for conceptualizing the workings of the mind. ... more Since antiquity, music has been a central metaphor for conceptualizing the workings of the mind. Philosophers and musicians alike have long accounted for the power of music with ideas borrowed from medicine, aesthetics and acoustics. The advent of mechanist understandings of nervous action in the eighteenth century heralded a new era of musico-medical interaction focused around the nerves, the subject of which is James Kennaway's new edited collection, Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. Kennaway emphasises that the neuroscientific turn of the past few decades in the humanities has a long history. Intending to foreground the degree to which 'the essentially medical neurological understandings of the body have long played a powerful role in thinking on music, its effects, and aesthetics' (p. 1) this rich volume provides a fresh window onto a history of which scientists, musicians and cultural commentators are all too seldom aware. The collection is ambitious and interdisciplinary in its scope, and includes contributions by historians of science, music scholars, an art historian and a neuroscientist. Taken as a whole, it provides an excellent introduction to some of the major ideas about music and the body. Kennaway's introduction cogently lays out the stakes for studying the history of the relationship between music and brain science given the current intellectual climate of 'neuro-enthusiasm'. Tracing the latest manifestations of the present-day fetishisation of the neuroscientific, he deftly critiques pop culture phenomena ranging from Baby Mozart to Jonah Lehrer, situating them within a long history of music and the body from the Pre-Socratic philosophers through the nineteenth century. The book continues with an essay by the cultural historian George Rousseau, a pioneer of the application of historical neural science to literary analysis. Exploring the history of relating musical emotions to 'pictures in the mind', interspersed with his own first person account of musical development , Rousseau virtuosically surveys a range of philosophical and aesthetic issues clustering around the legacy of German Romantic ideas on Romantic 'neuroculture'. In a synoptic contribution characterised by both depth and breadth, musicologist Penelope Gouk lays out three intersections of music, physiology and natural philosophy in eighteenth century English thought: music's effects on the body and soul, the role of sound in conceptualising models of nervous transmission, and tarantism. She further contex-tualises the emergence of eighteenth-century music therapy within the context of both Cartesian and Newtonian theories of nervous action. Another standout essay in this collection is a collaboration between music historian Amy B. Graziano and neuroscientist Julene K. Johnson, who discuss the role of music within medical discourse around apha-sia and amusia between approximately 1745 and 1890. Focusing on a concise topic, the authors successfully illuminate the role of music as a diagnostic tool within shifting debates around brain localization, mental representation, and the nature of language. The eighteenth century is well represented by two additional chapters: historian of medicine Pilar Le on Sanz surveys the influence of acoustics and music theory on Spanish medical thought, focusing in particular on three fascinating figures: Tom as Vicente Tosca
Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it... more Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it possible not only to analyse such visual wonders as the Parthenon in terms of music theory, but also to identify their corresponding musical harmonies and melodies. Carmel Raz on the Scottish artist's original, idiosyncratic, and occasionally bewildering aesthetics.
An international conference at the Sorbonne and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art Paris,... more An international conference at the Sorbonne and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art Paris, June 1-2, 2018
To be entranced, transported, or to drift into the uncharted realms of dreams… From radical derangement to passing boredom, from hypnosis to sleep or anesthesia, from drugs and medicine to ecstatic fervors of faith, “altered states” constitute a recurrent trope of our ways of relating to our perceptive and affective lives. Encompassing continuities and ruptures, the notion of altered states structures our experience of the world, and forms an integral part of our constructed narratives of consciousness.
But “altered” with respect to what: a norm or baseline which, like bodily homeostasis, presupposes a hypothetical resting state? With regard to a graduation of changes extending across various spectrums? What understanding of the mind and body is provided by the poles of alteration and normality? How are we to distinguish between the end and beginning of various states, or to order them within a hermeneutical catalogue? As we exist in time, and are conditioned by the experience of change, our consciousness, bodies, and even existences, are perhaps necessarily, continually, altered. Moreover, if the notion of alteration implies disruption, does it make sense to talk about states at all, to the extent that this term implies a degree of stability and dependability, rather than pure dynamic flux?
While a series of “altered” objects—whether bodies, personalities, or states—took center stage in modern epistemologies such as psychiatry, both the aesthetic subject and the work of art were increasingly conceived of as prime sites of transformative experience. In a global context, music, literature, and the performing arts, as disciplines of temporal absorption, are frequently seen as the cause of altered states—in spectators and readers, in performers and authors—or as literal incarnations of altered states themselves, in a mode of aesthetic embodiment. From the point of view of the feeling and perceiving subject, the alteration of one’s own states—or even of the self—is actively practised as a means to access “higher” forms of existence, or as a disturbing distortion.
This international conference, which will take place in Paris on June 1-2, 2018 at the Sorbonne and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), will investigate the concept of altered states in theoretical debates, socio-historical discourses, and in the creation of works of art and their reception. Bringing together scholars with a wide range of disciplinary orientations, the conference will consist of both panel sessions and discussions of pre-circulated papers. A second installment entitled “Synesthesia” will take place at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt in early 2019.
Organizers: Céline Frigau Manning (Université Paris 8—Institut Universitaire de France), Nicholas Manning (Sorbonne Université), Carmel Raz (Columbia University— Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics)
The workings of the corporeal and spiritual body were repeatedly reimagined in France between 178... more The workings of the corporeal and spiritual body were repeatedly reimagined in France between 1789 and 1848, as successive revolutions fundamentally transformed understandings of bodily autonomy and moral responsibility. Discourses in philosophy, aesthetics, and the sciences were strongly affected by these events, as the radical reconfiguration of the institutional landscape from 1789 onwards led to the emergence of Paris as an international center for modern science and medicine in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Paris also became a crucial locus of activity in the musical sphere, a city of innovative composers, virtuoso performers, and instrument designers as well as a rising culture of musical ‘dilettantes’
Understandings of the body, as shared between the musical and the scientific spheres, will lie at the heart of our exploration. The late eighteenth century saw various conceptions of the body set into flux, influenced by the writings of philosophers such as Rousseau and Diderot. In the domain of the medical sciences, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart and René Laënnec regarded the body as a site from which to develop new understandings of timbre and listening, while Xavier Bichat reinvigorated the Vitalist frameworks of sympathy and harmony in order to examine the relationship between various executive organs of the body. This period also saw the rise of new “moral” approaches toward insanity associated with Philippe Pinel, as well as the phrenological classifications of the Paris-based Franz Joseph Gall. The repercussions of these developments were directly felt in the musical realm, and played out on the operatic stage, in the soundscapes of Revolutionary festivals, and in theoretical, medical, and governmental inquiries into the relationships between music and human behavior.
This interdisciplinary workshop will examine the interaction between music, science, and medicine in Paris, as they were influenced by the reframing of the self in the aftermath of successive revolutionary upheavals. It will bring together scholars from the fields of musicology, performance studies, literature, and the history of science and medicine in order to explore historical and emerging contemporary perspectives on the body. On Saturday we will be holding a workshop for conference participants to discuss draft papers. We encourage interested scholars from Columbia and the New York area to join the conversation. Pre-registration is required (further details to come).
Schedule
Friday, March 31: Conference
2:00-4:00pm: Nineteenth-Century Music and Science
John Tresch, "La Technaesthetique, or the Kick of the Cosmos"
Mark Pottinger, “Science, Madness, and the Sound of Disease in Donizetti's 'Lucia di Lammermoor' (Paris, 1837)”
David Trippett, “Sound and the Ultrasonic Imagination ca. 1876”
Chair: Lydia Goehr
4:00-4:30: Break
4:30-6:30pm: Bodies Politic
Julia Doe, “On the Well-Being of Queen and Nation: Politics and Pastoral Fantasy at the Petit Trianon”
Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, “Music and the French Body Politic in Festivals of the French Revolution”
Francesca Brittan, “Neology, Fantasy, and the Revolutionary Body Politic”
Chair: Elise Bonner
On Saturday we will be holding a workshop for conference participants to discuss draft papers. We encourage interested scholars from Columbia and the New York area to join the conversation. Pre-registration is required (further details to come).
Saturday, April 1st: Workshop
10-11: Isabelle Moindrot, “Musique et musiciens de la Grande armée. Traces et rémanences culturelles de quelques usages non artistiques de la musique”
Respondent: Annelies Andries
11-12: James Davies, “Creatures of the Air”
Respondent: Michael Weinstein-Reiman
12-12:30: Break
12:30-1:30: Emmanuel Reibel, “La musique comme corps : la métaphore de la dissection dans la critique (1820-1850)”
Respondent: Arden Hegele
1:30-2:30: Break
2:30-3:30: Céline Frigau Manning, “Opera and Hypnosis. Victor Maurel’s Experiments in Suggestion With Verdi’s Otello”
Respondent: Jessica Simon
3:30-4: Break
4-5: Carmel Raz, “Operatic Fantasies in Early 19th C. Psychiatry”
Sound & Sense in British Romanticism, edited by James Grande & Carmel Raz, 2023
A radical re-imagining of the relationship between sound and sense took place in Britain in the d... more A radical re-imagining of the relationship between sound and sense took place in Britain in the decades around 1800. This new approach reconfigured sound as central to understandings of space and temporality, from the diurnal rhythms of everyday life in the modern city to the ‘deep time’ of the natural world. At the same time, sound emerged as a frequently disruptive phenomenon, a philosophical and political problem, and a force with the power to overwhelm listeners. This is the first book devoted to the topic and brings together scholars from literary studies, musicology, history, and philosophy through the interdisciplinary frameworks of sound studies and the history of the senses. The chapters pursue a wide range of subjects, from ‘national airs’ to the London stage, and from experiments in sound to new musical and scientific instruments. Collectively, they demonstrate how a focus on sound can enrich our understanding of Romantic-era culture. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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Papers by Carmel Raz
Challenging our tendency to dismiss Berlioz’s musical writings as merely overheated Romantic effusions, I argue that the remarkable medical detail presented in his arguments reveals a hitherto neglected dimension of nineteenth-century engagement with the embodied effects of music. Contextualizing Berlioz’s claims within the neurophysiology of his age, and in particular the physiological psychology of Cabanis, the anatomy of Bichat, and the acoustic theories of Lamarck, I recover the medical and scientific epistemes that motivated the composer’s assertions about the power of music to effect embodied and emotional transformation: a constellation of ideas that I term his “neurophysiological imagination.”
An analysis in these terms of some of Berlioz’s major compositional innovations reveals how both his writings and his music explore an explicitly neurophysiological dimension of early Romantic listening experiences. Specifically, I propose that Berlioz repeatedly attempted both to represent and to induce an experience of great interest to the artists and audiences of his day: an overpowering mental and physical response to music experienced as an embodied, neurophysiological form of the sublime.
Victorian London. Introduced into s´eances by the Scottish American
Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86), the most celebrated medium of the
era, the instrument was typically used to produce music without the
visible aid of a performer (what I call the “spirit accordian”). This article
seeks to explain why the accordion came to capture the imagination of
the nineteenth-century spiritualist community. It does so by reconstructing
the auditory culture in which the instrument was embedded,
relying on scientific writings, the popular press, and the sonic experiences
of both the spiritualists, who heard the spirit accordion as emitting
the ethereal tones of other worlds, and the skeptics, who described the
same sounds as grating squeaks. Linking the instrument and its role in
the s´eance to eighteenth-century theories of neurophysiology, the article
traces the spirit accordion’s various musical predecessors, arguing that
Home’s canny selection of the instrument to represent the next world
reflected the intersection of specific cultural signifiers.
Director Patrice Chéreau describes the nineteenth century as “our mythology and our past, containing our dreams” (Chéreau 1980: 430). His 1976 opera production of Richard
Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), considered perhaps the most influential Ring cycle of all time, evokes a nineteenth-century dreamscape: gods, giants, dwarves and mermaids in dinner jackets and petticoats scheme against the backdrop of steel dams and massive cogwheels. Traditionally, critics have seen this production as a continuation of the Marxist legacy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Viewed instead as an early representative of steampunk, the social critique, environmental concerns, and retro-futuristic ideas featured in this staging become contextualised within a coherent framework – one that explores contemporary social and technological anxieties through the metaphor of an epic fantasy world.
Keywords:
Patrice Chéreau, Der Ring des Nibelungen, magic, myth, nineteenth century, opera, Richard Wagner, staging, steampunk, technology"
This article contextualizes Toch’s compositional choices within the artistic, political, and scientific discourses of the Weimar Republic, with a focus on relationship between exoticism, experimental art and technology, postwar constructions of the body, and the influence of contemporary research on phonetics and sound reproduction. The latter are also examined through a linguistic analysis of the vowel and syllabic distribution within the “Geographical Fugue” itself. Finally, the afterlife of these features is explored in various contemporary remixes of Toch’s work on YouTube, and the ways in which contemporary possibilities of musical creation enable the work to return to a state that evokes its original context of technological experimentation.
Reviews by Carmel Raz
Challenging our tendency to dismiss Berlioz’s musical writings as merely overheated Romantic effusions, I argue that the remarkable medical detail presented in his arguments reveals a hitherto neglected dimension of nineteenth-century engagement with the embodied effects of music. Contextualizing Berlioz’s claims within the neurophysiology of his age, and in particular the physiological psychology of Cabanis, the anatomy of Bichat, and the acoustic theories of Lamarck, I recover the medical and scientific epistemes that motivated the composer’s assertions about the power of music to effect embodied and emotional transformation: a constellation of ideas that I term his “neurophysiological imagination.”
An analysis in these terms of some of Berlioz’s major compositional innovations reveals how both his writings and his music explore an explicitly neurophysiological dimension of early Romantic listening experiences. Specifically, I propose that Berlioz repeatedly attempted both to represent and to induce an experience of great interest to the artists and audiences of his day: an overpowering mental and physical response to music experienced as an embodied, neurophysiological form of the sublime.
Victorian London. Introduced into s´eances by the Scottish American
Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86), the most celebrated medium of the
era, the instrument was typically used to produce music without the
visible aid of a performer (what I call the “spirit accordian”). This article
seeks to explain why the accordion came to capture the imagination of
the nineteenth-century spiritualist community. It does so by reconstructing
the auditory culture in which the instrument was embedded,
relying on scientific writings, the popular press, and the sonic experiences
of both the spiritualists, who heard the spirit accordion as emitting
the ethereal tones of other worlds, and the skeptics, who described the
same sounds as grating squeaks. Linking the instrument and its role in
the s´eance to eighteenth-century theories of neurophysiology, the article
traces the spirit accordion’s various musical predecessors, arguing that
Home’s canny selection of the instrument to represent the next world
reflected the intersection of specific cultural signifiers.
Director Patrice Chéreau describes the nineteenth century as “our mythology and our past, containing our dreams” (Chéreau 1980: 430). His 1976 opera production of Richard
Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), considered perhaps the most influential Ring cycle of all time, evokes a nineteenth-century dreamscape: gods, giants, dwarves and mermaids in dinner jackets and petticoats scheme against the backdrop of steel dams and massive cogwheels. Traditionally, critics have seen this production as a continuation of the Marxist legacy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Viewed instead as an early representative of steampunk, the social critique, environmental concerns, and retro-futuristic ideas featured in this staging become contextualised within a coherent framework – one that explores contemporary social and technological anxieties through the metaphor of an epic fantasy world.
Keywords:
Patrice Chéreau, Der Ring des Nibelungen, magic, myth, nineteenth century, opera, Richard Wagner, staging, steampunk, technology"
This article contextualizes Toch’s compositional choices within the artistic, political, and scientific discourses of the Weimar Republic, with a focus on relationship between exoticism, experimental art and technology, postwar constructions of the body, and the influence of contemporary research on phonetics and sound reproduction. The latter are also examined through a linguistic analysis of the vowel and syllabic distribution within the “Geographical Fugue” itself. Finally, the afterlife of these features is explored in various contemporary remixes of Toch’s work on YouTube, and the ways in which contemporary possibilities of musical creation enable the work to return to a state that evokes its original context of technological experimentation.
To be entranced, transported, or to drift into the uncharted realms of dreams… From radical derangement to passing boredom, from hypnosis to sleep or anesthesia, from drugs and medicine to ecstatic fervors of faith, “altered states” constitute a recurrent trope of our ways of relating to our perceptive and affective lives. Encompassing continuities and ruptures, the notion of altered states structures our experience of the world, and forms an integral part of our constructed narratives of consciousness.
But “altered” with respect to what: a norm or baseline which, like bodily homeostasis, presupposes a hypothetical resting state? With regard to a graduation of changes extending across various spectrums? What understanding of the mind and body is provided by the poles of alteration and normality? How are we to distinguish between the end and beginning of various states, or to order them within a hermeneutical catalogue? As we exist in time, and are conditioned by the experience of change, our consciousness, bodies, and even existences, are perhaps necessarily, continually, altered. Moreover, if the notion of alteration implies disruption, does it make sense to talk about states at all, to the extent that this term implies a degree of stability and dependability, rather than pure dynamic flux?
While a series of “altered” objects—whether bodies, personalities, or states—took center stage in modern epistemologies such as psychiatry, both the aesthetic subject and the work of art were increasingly conceived of as prime sites of transformative experience. In a global context, music, literature, and the performing arts, as disciplines of temporal absorption, are frequently seen as the cause of altered states—in spectators and readers, in performers and authors—or as literal incarnations of altered states themselves, in a mode of aesthetic embodiment. From the point of view of the feeling and perceiving subject, the alteration of one’s own states—or even of the self—is actively practised as a means to access “higher” forms of existence, or as a disturbing distortion.
This international conference, which will take place in Paris on June 1-2, 2018 at the Sorbonne and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), will investigate the concept of altered states in theoretical debates, socio-historical discourses, and in the creation of works of art and their reception. Bringing together scholars with a wide range of disciplinary orientations, the conference will consist of both panel sessions and discussions of pre-circulated papers. A second installment entitled “Synesthesia” will take place at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt in early 2019.
Organizers: Céline Frigau Manning (Université Paris 8—Institut Universitaire de France), Nicholas Manning (Sorbonne Université), Carmel Raz (Columbia University— Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics)
Understandings of the body, as shared between the musical and the scientific spheres, will lie at the heart of our exploration. The late eighteenth century saw various conceptions of the body set into flux, influenced by the writings of philosophers such as Rousseau and Diderot. In the domain of the medical sciences, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart and René Laënnec regarded the body as a site from which to develop new understandings of timbre and listening, while Xavier Bichat reinvigorated the Vitalist frameworks of sympathy and harmony in order to examine the relationship between various executive organs of the body. This period also saw the rise of new “moral” approaches toward insanity associated with Philippe Pinel, as well as the phrenological classifications of the Paris-based Franz Joseph Gall. The repercussions of these developments were directly felt in the musical realm, and played out on the operatic stage, in the soundscapes of Revolutionary festivals, and in theoretical, medical, and governmental inquiries into the relationships between music and human behavior.
This interdisciplinary workshop will examine the interaction between music, science, and medicine in Paris, as they were influenced by the reframing of the self in the aftermath of successive revolutionary upheavals. It will bring together scholars from the fields of musicology, performance studies, literature, and the history of science and medicine in order to explore historical and emerging contemporary perspectives on the body. On Saturday we will be holding a workshop for conference participants to discuss draft papers. We encourage interested scholars from Columbia and the New York area to join the conversation. Pre-registration is required (further details to come).
Schedule
Friday, March 31: Conference
2:00-4:00pm: Nineteenth-Century Music and Science
John Tresch, "La Technaesthetique, or the Kick of the Cosmos"
Mark Pottinger, “Science, Madness, and the Sound of Disease in Donizetti's 'Lucia di Lammermoor' (Paris, 1837)”
David Trippett, “Sound and the Ultrasonic Imagination ca. 1876”
Chair: Lydia Goehr
4:00-4:30: Break
4:30-6:30pm: Bodies Politic
Julia Doe, “On the Well-Being of Queen and Nation: Politics and Pastoral Fantasy at the Petit Trianon”
Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, “Music and the French Body Politic in Festivals of the French Revolution”
Francesca Brittan, “Neology, Fantasy, and the Revolutionary Body Politic”
Chair: Elise Bonner
On Saturday we will be holding a workshop for conference participants to discuss draft papers. We encourage interested scholars from Columbia and the New York area to join the conversation. Pre-registration is required (further details to come).
Saturday, April 1st: Workshop
10-11: Isabelle Moindrot, “Musique et musiciens de la Grande armée. Traces et rémanences culturelles de quelques usages non artistiques de la musique”
Respondent: Annelies Andries
11-12: James Davies, “Creatures of the Air”
Respondent: Michael Weinstein-Reiman
12-12:30: Break
12:30-1:30: Emmanuel Reibel, “La musique comme corps : la métaphore de la dissection dans la critique (1820-1850)”
Respondent: Arden Hegele
1:30-2:30: Break
2:30-3:30: Céline Frigau Manning, “Opera and Hypnosis. Victor Maurel’s Experiments in Suggestion With Verdi’s Otello”
Respondent: Jessica Simon
3:30-4: Break
4-5: Carmel Raz, “Operatic Fantasies in Early 19th C. Psychiatry”
Respondent: Jeremy Blatter
http://heymancenter.org/events/music-and-the-body-between-revolutions-paris-1789-1848/