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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.
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 9780823267057
Number of pages: 208
Dimensions: 216 x 140 mm
Language: English
"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 "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." -- -Gil Anidjar Columbia University "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." -- -Susan Bernstein Brown University
Music and Sentiment
The Essential Ellen Willis
Gluck und die Oper
A Vision of the Orient
Music at the Limits
The Sonata
The Organ, Its History and Construction
How to Write About Music
Harmony in Haydn and Mozart
Scorched Earth
Orientalism and the Operatic World
The Musical as Drama
Book on Music
Brahms and His World
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