Music and Touch

Catalog description

This seminar explores musical, aesthetic, physiological, and mythical concepts of touch in relation to music. Focusing on the relationship between the body of the musician and musical sound, we will develop an interdisciplinary history of musical touch from the late 18th century to the present. How are sensibility and sympathy, performance and material culture, instruments and bodies, figured in terms of touch and touching? Exploring haptics, disability studies, new musical instruments, music cognition, physiology, theory of listening, topics include the clavichord as tactile revelation of genius; the glass harmonica, blindness, and physiology of the nervous system; technologies of touch in the 19th century; the fetishization of the disciplined hand; the absent or fantastic touch and its relation to music-making at early 20th-century electronic instruments, especially the Theremin; deafness, musical vibration and wearables; contemporary touch-sensitive keyboarding.Readings include C. P. E. Bach on keyboard practice, Diderot on sympathetic vibration, German romantic fiction, contemporary theory of sensibility, physiology, and new materialism; composers include Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, MacPherson and many unknowns. Visual materials include representations of the sensing body, hand casts and photographs, and 'hand-fetish' films such as the 1924 expressionist classic The Hands of Orlac.Our aim will be to develop a broader understanding of music culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to recognize connections between keyboard culture, histories of the body, and the fine arts. Students will refine critical reading and research skills, and practice the art of developing imaginative research questions.