MUSIC 6233

Music Aesthetics and Criticism: Sensation, Sympathy and Theories of Touch c. 1800

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2021-2022.

This seminar explores the aesthetics of musical touch, especially at the keyboard, from the late 18th century to the present. We will examine how sensibility and sympathy, performance and material culture, instruments and bodies, are figured in terms of touch and touching. Readings include C. P. E. Bach on keyboard practice and Diderot on sympathetic vibration, German romantic fiction, contemporary theory of sensibility, physiology, and new materialism, and visual materials including hand casts, photography, and film. Topics include clavichords and sympathetic vibration; glass harmonicas and physiology of the nervous system; 19th-century technologies of touch and the fetishization of the disciplined hand; and the absent or fantastic touch and its relation to music-making at early 20th-century electronic instruments.

When Offered Fall or Spring.

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