COML 4029

Feeling in Sound: Touch and the New Musical Body

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

This seminar explores musical, aesthetic, physiological, and mythical  concepts associated with 'touch' in music. Focusing on the relationship between the hand of the musician and musical sound, we will develop an interdisciplinary history of musical touch, especially at the keyboard, from the late 18th century to the present. The four interrelated units focus on: 1) the clavichord and 18th-century concepts of sympathetic vibration; 2) the glass harmonica and physiology of the nervous system; 3) technologies of touch in the 19th century and the disciplining of the hand; and 4) the absent or fantastic touch and its relation to music-making at early 20th-century electronic instruments. We'll study musical, literary and visual texts, including works by C. P. E. Bach, Diderot, Chopin, Schumann, Coleridge, Canetti.  

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