Full Description
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.
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
