Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies

by Peter Szendy, Will Bishop (Translator)

Overview

The prostheses Peter Szendy explores-those peculiar artifacts known as musical instruments-are not only technical devices but also bodies that live a strange phantom life, as uncanny as a sixth finger or a third lung.The musicological impulse to inventory those bodies that produce sound is called into question here. In Szendy's hands, its respectable corpus of scholarship is read aslant, so as to tease out what it usually prefers to hide: hybrids and grafts produced by active fictions, monsters, and chimera awaiting the opportunity to be embodied. Beyond these singular bodies that music composes and disposes there lies the figure of a collective "social" body ready to emerge amid an innervated apparatus that operates at a distance, telepathically.Phantom Limbs touches on bodies of all shapes and sizes that haunt the edges of music's conceptualizations. Music continually reinvents such bodies and reconvenes them in new collective formations. It is their dynamics and crystallizations that Szendy auscultates on a motley corpus that includes Bach, Diderot, Berlioz, Eisenstein, Disney, and Monk.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823267064
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2015
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Peter Szendy is Professor of Philosophy at Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre and musicological adviser for concert programs at the Cité de la musique. His books in English include Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World; Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions; Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox; and Listen: A History of Our Ears (all Fordham).

Will Bishop holds a doctorate in French Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Paris, where he teaches and translates.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Interpreting Bodies
2. Effictions
3. Organologics (1): The Erasure of Bodies
4. Touch Ups, or the Return of Bodies
5. Idioms, Or the Dialect of Bodies
6. Monk, A Legend
7. Traces of Fingers
8. Digital Rhetoric
9. Ablations and Grafts ("Too Many Fingers")
10. Romantic Fingers ("System of Touch")
11. Feet
12. Joyful Tropiques (Evolution, Revolutions)
13. Two Dispatches (One Fictive and the Other Dreamed Up)
14. Organologics (2): Autophony
15. Genesis (1): Ocular Harpsichord, Organ of Flavors
16. Telepathy
17. Scruples (Clones and Stand-Ins)
18. Conducting (Seen From the Back)
19. Genesis (2) : Fantasia, or "Plasmaticity"
20. Touching from Afar
21. Organologics (3): Areality
22. Bodies Electric
23. Mass Formations
24. P.S.

Notes

Editorial Reviews

"The first truly comprehensive critique of organology-the study of musical instruments as related to the human body. A smart, lucid and original study, translated superbly by Will Bishop." — Richard A. Rand, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Alabama

From the Publisher

Throughout the book, Szendy invite us to take literally various metaphorical descriptions of musical bodies and their effects. These playful reversals have the potential to open up bold new horizons for thinking about musical performance and musicians' bodies... One may be tempted to read Phantom Limbs for its provocative collisions and dissipating resonances alone—to marvel at at Szendy's eclectic examples and to enjoy the rhythm of his prose.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Naomi Waltham-Smith

“A patient meditation on the musical body. Szendy provides a stunning reading of the digital history of the finger, or ‘digit.’ We witness the multiplication of digits, the multiplication of hands and fingers, the regulation of bodies in the hope of having as many fingers as we need to play on the keyboard. But there is more to musical bodies; there are the virtual bodies of instruments who would play without contact of touch, repeating the motion of music that touches us through the ether, and there is the body of a conductor, who governs the body politic that is the orchestra. This is a compelling study.”

Columbia University - Gil Anidjar

The first truly comprehensive critique of organology—the study of musical instruments as related to the human body. A smart, lucid and original study, translated superbly by Will Bishop.

Professor of English Emeritus, University of Alabama - Richard A. Rand

“A very original discussion of the production of the body through music. Szendy takes up a variety of musical practices in their fascinating and little-known history.

Brown University - Susan Bernstein