Description
Book SynopsisIn an exploration of the many ways that musical bodies have been trained and imagined but also concrete analyses of the ways certain of them have played, Phantom Limbs touches on the technical apparatuses set into place by organology with an ear for the dissident mass formations haunting music’s corpus.
Trade Review"The first truly comprehensive critique of organology-the study of musical instruments as related to the human body. A smart, lucid and original study, translated superbly by Will Bishop." -- -Richard A. Rand Professor of English Emeritus, University of Alabama "A patient meditation on the musical body. Szendy provides a stunning reading of the digital history of the finger, or 'digit.' We witness the multiplication of digits, the multiplication of hands and fingers, the regulation of bodies in the hope of having as many fingers as we need to play on the keyboard. But there is more to musical bodies; there are the virtual bodies of instruments who would play without contact of touch, repeating the motion of music that touches us through the ether, and there is the body of a conductor, who governs the body politic that is the orchestra. This is a compelling study." -- -Gil Anidjar Columbia University "A very original discussion of the production of the body through music. Szendy takes up a variety of musical practices in their fascinating and little-known history." -- -Susan Bernstein Brown University
Table of ContentsIntroduction 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
