Music Is Feeling, Then, Not Sound

fact that our listening goes beyond the sounds, to catch the quality of the performer's sensibility, an authenticity that transcends the mechanical demands of the instrument, so that the expression often occurs the form ...but he/she plays with feeling. Let us, however, allow ourselves to mishear the phrase and take and feeling their less respectable senses, turning our admirable performer into an irresponsible and self-indulgent connoisseur of the tactile. is play (Spiel) not frivolity (Spielerei) says Hanslick, anxious lest we might mishear. The prevention of such mishearings has always been at issue Western discourse about music, which has been at pains to control the ambiguities of this art hovering between the body and the spirit, between seduction and redemption. Music itself, which turns the equivocal into a system, as one of Thomas Mann's characters puts it Dr. Faustus, both invites and controls mishearing (47), and there are few poems so musical this sense as Wallace Stevens's Peter Quince at the Clavier.' This is a poem whose overt poetics is anti-Platonic, and which the flesh whose beauty it would celebrate is present a minefield of puns, ambiguities and doubles entendres. As a poem, it invites us to hear equivocally; at the same time, as music, it seeks to control our mishearing. It is this musical strain of the poem-which makes possible the ringing pronouncement that beauty is immortal not in the mind but in the flesh-that will be my subject. I will read the poem, somewhat perversely, as a poem about music, whose authority it would appropriate to perform certain sleights-of-hand. More specifically, I will read it as a poem about musical listening, about music as a figure for desire this poem which transforms physical desire into a spiritual sacrament

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Feeling · Flesh · Literature · Musical · Musicality · Performing arts · Poetics · Poetry · Sensibility · Subject (documents) · French Literature and Poetry · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

• The Questionability of Music

  William Fitzgerald•Representations•1994

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• “If There is God, everything is Lawful” (Dostoevsky’s Central Meta-theme in Contemporary European Psychoanalytic Philosophy)

  Sergei A Kibalnik, S Kibalnik•Voprosy Filosofii•2019

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• Feminism and Art History

  Norma Broude, Mary D Garrard•Feminism and Art History•2018

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