Musical Vitalities

Two very different movies came to mind when I started reading this book. The first was Peter Bogdanovich’s screwball comedy What’s Up Doc? (1972), whose musicologist hero Howard Bannister summarizes the focus of his research as being ‘early man’s musical relationship to igneous rock formations’. The second was the Dan Brown thriller Angels and Demons (2009), in which the CERN scientist Vittoria Vetra pithily describes her field as ‘bio-entanglement physics: interconnectivity of life systems’. We are in similar territory—bio-entanglement musicology, perhaps—in Holly Watkins’s ambitious new monograph, although as with most real-life research it resolutely resists being condensed into a snappy soundbite or Hollywood-style pitch. Watkins makes several gestures towards pinning down the book’s focus in its Introduction, yet all of these seem to sell short its richly entangled themes and approaches. On one level, she describes it as offering ‘roughly equal parts philosophy of music, history of aesthetics, and analytically...

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Comedy · Focus (optics) · HERO · Hollywood · Literature · Musical · Musicology · Physics · Style (visual arts) · Visual arts · Empathy and Medical Education · Music Therapy and Health · Neurology and Historical Studies