Listen: A History of Our Ears / Edition 3

by Peter Szendy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Charlotte Mandell

Overview

In this intimate meditation on listening, Peter Szendy examines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The role of the composer is clear, as is the role of the musician, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to the music s/he listens to? What is the responsibility of the listener? Does a listener have any rights, as the author and composer have copyright? Szendy explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music. How can we share our actual hearing with others?

Along the way, he examines the evolution of copyright laws as applied to musical works and takes us into the courtroom to examine different debates on what we are and aren’t allowed to listen to, and to witness the fine line between musical borrowing and outright plagiarism. Finally, he examines the recent phenomenon of DJs and digital compilations, and wonders how technology has affected our habits of listening and has changed listening from a passive exercise to an active one, whereby one can jump from track to track or play only selected pieces.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823227990
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2008
Edition description:	3
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown Universityand musicological advisor for the concert programs at the Paris Philharmonie. His books include Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience; All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage; Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World; Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials; Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox; and Listen: A History of Our Ears..

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universityé Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His “The Intruder” was adapted into a film by Claire Denis.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Ascoltando   Jean-Luc Nancy     ix
Prelude and Address: "I'm Listening"     1
Author's Rights, Listener's Rights (Journal of Our Ancestors)     13
Plagiarism and the obligation of truth     16
1757: Music and notes (at the foot of the page)     18
1835: A great change in our customs     22
1853: A listener in court     25
1841: Our portrait in a cartoon     31
Writing Our Listenings: Arrangement, Translation, Criticism     35
Ever since there have been works     39
Functions of arrangement     44
Liszt and the translators     47
The original in suspense     50
Arrangement at work (Liszt, second version)     56
Schumann the critic     60
Decline of arrangement (Why is music so hard to understand?)     65
Our Instruments for Listening Before the Law (Second Journal Entry)     69
The first trial of mechanical music (Verdi on the boards)     72
Music in Braille     76
The phonograph in court     80
Rights for reproduction and radio broadcast     83
Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and pirates     85
The Furtwangler ruling and subsidiary laws     91
Trademarking a sound (Harley-Davidson in the sonic landscape)     92
On the right to quotation in music (John Oswald, the listener)     95
Listening (to Listening): The Making of the Modern Ear     99
Types of listening (Adorno's Diagnosis)     100
"Listening, I follow you" (Don Giovanni)     105
Polemology of listening (Berlioz and the art of the claque)     110
Attention     117
Deafness     119
Schoenberg: "to hear everything"     126
Epilogue: Plastic Listening     129
A dialogue with Beethoven     130
The "second practice" of track markers     133
The prostheses of authenticity     137
Hearing listening: summation of listening(s)     140
Notes     145

Editorial Reviews

Every child knows about the right to speak, and when to shut up and listen. But do we know what listening is? In this book Peter Szendy asks who has the right to listen when it comes to music. It turns out that listening is a species of theft disguised under polite terms like transcription and arrangement, but it is mischief all the same. There may be no such thing as a work of music. Szendy gives us a rogue's history of the ear, filled with splendid and hilarious anecdotes about the things we do to music, and the uncanny machines we have used on it, tin ears among them. Read this book and find out what you have an ear for.

University of Notre Dame - Gerald Bruns

Szendy's meditation on listening and on music is a dreamlike mixture of philosophy, personal memoir, and intellectual history. Listening is not hearing (perception or sensation), but neither is it understanding ("entendre"), as opera especially makes clear, in those ecstatic moments when the libretto is least important, and the human voice suspends all sense, but holds the listener most. What subject is brought into being in such moments, beyond the interiority of the person, as a relation to the world and to others with whom one shares (or disputes about) this experience? And how has the history and transmission of such listening, especially in music, been caught in the great questions of law and copyright, citation, quotation, reproduction and sampling, original text and its "translation" in performance (a secondary repetition without which music cannot exist)? How are the questions of instrumentation and mechanical reproduction, so dear to Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and other theorists of modernity, played out in the economy of the listening ear? And how are these issues aggravated today by advertizing and media that sample and distribute, but also copyright and turn into property even those random noises — the sound of a car engine or the tone of a cell phone — which become the identifying markers or signatures of multinational corporations, where the border between music and noise is negotiated. From Lizst and Beethoven to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, from Charlie Parker and Bill Evans to more recent experiments in digital sampling, Szendy takes us across a wide territory with an ease and lightness that are beautifully rendered in Charlotte Mandell's translation.——Charles Shepherdson, Universityat Albany, State University of New York

Every child knows about the right to speak, and when to shut up and listen. But do we know what listening is? In this book Peter Szendy asks who has the right to listen when it comes to music. It turns out that listening is a species of theft disguised under polite terms like transcription and arrangement, but it is mischief all the same. There may be no such thing as a work of music. Szendy gives us a rogue's history of the ear, filled with splendid and hilarious anecdotes about the things we do to music, and the uncanny machines we have used on it, tin ears among them. Read this book and find out what you have an ear for.——Gerald Bruns, University of Notre Dame

From the Publisher

Swerving away from the grand abstractions of late-deconstructive theory, the book has no labyrinthine close-readings, no world-historical announcements, and ties itself in no tortured linguistic knots.

Current Musicology

Szendy's meditation on listening and on music is a dreamlike mixture of philosophy, personal memoir, and intellectual history. Listening is not hearing (perception or sensation), but neither is it understanding ("entendre"), as opera especially makes clear, in those ecstatic moments when the libretto is least important, and the human voice suspends all sense, but holds the listener most. What subject is brought into being in such moments, beyond the interiority of the person, as a relation to the world and to others with whom one shares (or disputes about) this experience? And how has the history and transmission of such listening, especially in music, been caught in the great questions of law and copyright, citation, quotation, reproduction and sampling, original text and its "translation" in performance (a secondary repetition without which music cannot exist)? How are the questions of instrumentation and mechanical reproduction, so dear to Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and other theorists of modernity, played out in the economy of the listening ear? And how are these issues aggravated today by advertizing and media that sample and distribute, but also copyright and turn into property even those random noises — the sound of a car engine or the tone of a cell phone — which become the identifying markers or signatures of multinational corporations, where the border between music and noise is negotiated. From Lizst and Beethoven to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, from Charlie Parker and Bill Evans to more recent experiments in digital sampling, Szendy takes us across a wide territory with an ease and lightness that are beautifully rendered in Charlotte Mandell's translation.

University at Albany, State University of New York - Charles Shepherdson