MUSIC 6233

Music and Touch

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024.

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.

When Offered Spring.

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