Phantom Limbs

On Musical Bodies

Peter Szendy, Will Bishop

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780823267071
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

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.

CHAPTER 1 Interpreting Bodies

I have a body: This is a statement that—even though its use and overuse have made it banal—vacillates and trembles in me every time I experience musical body-to-body contact [corps à corps].

Each time this phrase comes back to me, in a halo still rumbling around the resonating instrument, I sit there wondering what the verb to have might mean here. What does having a body, and a body that is mine, really mean when I lift my hands from the keyboard, and, in this suspended time, little by little, the vibrations, tacts, and contacts dissipate, and the innervations slowly come undone, the ones that just a moment ago seemed to articulate some kind of immense demultiplication table to me?

It sometimes seems to me that after the incredible dilation and ramification that my body has just experienced in its contact with keys, vibrating strings that resound or zing, pieces of wood and felts that strike in a muffled way or with brilliance, it retracts or reconfigures only reluctantly [à contre-coeur]. It is thus despite my body [à contre-corps]; yes, it is in a slow contraction that an infinite number of phantom limbs that had come to dance a delicious Sabbath wither away. A transitory necrosis of an always unique form of my organism’s organization.

And I tell myself that what was invented and disposed, provisionally and as if it were pending during the time devoted to playing, is a momentary figure, a fragile and fleeting envelope for what Nietzsche, through the voice of Zarathustra, called “the commander”—a “self” from before the “ego”:

Always the self listens and seeks; it compares, compels, conquers, destroys. It rules and is also the ruler of the ego.

Behind your thoughts and feelings . . . stands a powerful commander, an unknown wise man—he is called self. He lives in your body, he is your body.¹

Something—something unknown, an x—thus seems to inhabit my body; it seems to inhabit my body that I inhabit as well. And thanks to the grace of musical playing, it seems to move from behind to up front. It seems to become embodied—an almost tangible though infinitely plastic body—it seems to dance its dance for a while before retreating and leaving me dumbfounded, dispossessed.

What musician has not dreamed of virtuosity as a magisterial stage where the domination, possession, or mastery of this dancing chimera, this “self” that has furtively emerged from its threatening reserve, could play itself out, victoriously?

Because perhaps even more than a struggle with the instrument’s inert matter, musical virtuosity might have something to do with the hand-to-hand combat [corps à corps] between an “ego” and a “self,” in a kind of conjuration: It would be a ritual celebration—a magnificent one by its very despair—of a Promethean denial opposed to the commander of the ego, in the spectacle made of the mastery of playing. Liszt has stated it better than anyone, this dream of a tamer who is dialoguing with the unknown x to domesticate it; and this is the point where the piano became for him a docile means of transport to colonize the terra incognita and its uncanniness:

My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab, and perhaps more because even now my piano is myself, my speech, and my life. It is the intimate personal depository of everything that stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys, and all my sorrows lay. Its strings quivered under all my passions, its docile keys obeyed my every whim.²

Here virtuosity is nothing other than a theater of domestication: After struggle and conquest, it installs the ego once again in its mastery. The virtuoso’s body does not emerge from this recomposed but is merely glorified. It is he (the “I”) that leaves a victorious seal on the matter that he informs or inspires, in order to erase all trace of a self crouching there, behind. (This is at least what Liszt says allows us to understand—which does not necessarily include the experience of hearing him play.)

Other forms of less dramatically conquering bodily struggle [corps à corps] seem to give voice to the instrument without immediately enlisting it into the project of its mastery.

In chamber music it readily presents the face of a dialogue. It’s in a tone of familiar conversation that many teaching manuals destined for the use of amateurs address the instrument in person in the figure of a convivial prosopopoeia. In the second part of his marvelous 1676 Musick’s Monument,³ Thomas Mace, hoping to give us “the Lute made Easie,” inserts “a Dialogue between the Author and his Lute.” He asks his instrument, “What makes Thee sit so sad, my Noble Friend?” And the instrument answers by complaining about the negligence and poor handling to which he has fallen victim from those who do not make the effort to learn to play it with respect.

But in this fiction of alterity, this domestic dialogue, the self that Zarathustra mentioned is conspicuous by its absence. The Lute presents itself as a partner, as a quiet roommate with whom one can do business and negotiate and that one will learn to play on good terms at the end of the conversation. Nothing about it suggests an unknown, worrisome x. It is, therefore, certainly not this reassuring accord concluded in the intimacy of a home that will be able to account for my strange experience (that I nonetheless know is shared and sharable): the radical reinvention or recomposition of the body, its renewed destitution and individuation, endowed with an unprecedented envelope and members.

Breaking with Lisztian metonymy (“my piano is myself,” it’s my part for the whole), breaking as well with the prosopopoeia of the speaking lute, there is one figure—that I do not know how to name—through which Thomas Bernhard, in his fiction inspired by the character of Glenn Gould, will have approached the fragile reality, the suspended reality of these chimeras of the body whose tangible plasticity and infinite becoming are confirmed for me every time I have an experience of the piano.

In The Loser, Gould declares:

My ideal would be, I would be the Steinway, I wouldn’t need Glenn Gould. . . . I could, by being the Steinway, make Glenn Gould totally superfluous. But not a single piano player has ever managed to make himself superfluous by being Steinway, as Glenn said. To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glenn in one, . . . Glenn Steinway, Steinway Glenn.⁴

This fantastic and fantastical reciprocal baptism inscribes Glenn Steinway at the heart of an entire onomastic lineage of composite names that cross over all the borders between different musical genres: Banjo Joe, Johnny Guitar Watson, The Man with the Horn. But the chimera named Glenn Steinway is different from the others to the precise extent that the incarnation and living incorporation of this bifid name is pushed back onto an ideal, unattainable horizon. Whereas Johnny Guitar or Banjo Joe still seem to be sustained by a possible conviviality with the instrument (which is not without recalling Mace’s dialogue),⁵ Glenn Steinway infinitely defers his becoming embodied by enduring the following paradox: There will be Glenn Steinway only once Glenn, having become “superfluous,” will have definitively dissolved into a Steinway playing all by itself.

This dream of an organic body deposed and transfigured by its replacement in an instrumental automatism, this “ideal,” as Gould says in the novel, nonetheless also seems to me to fail to grasp the singularity of the experience for which I’d like to account by showing its historical importance: that of an invention, of a manufacture of the body, which would certainly not be the work of an ego consciously or conscientiously cultivating its capacities of execution, but which would also not be included in the horizon of a sacrifice at the altar of inorganic objectivity. This is then a manufacture or a fiction (in the sense of something made, fictum-factum), in which the self would seek to open the path for unprecedented organs, making use of a musical hand-to-hand struggle that must above all not be reduced to one of its terms: neither triumphant and virtuosic Glenn nor Steinway alone, but the chance for the tension and reciprocal innervation of both, one that the chimerical figure of Glenn-Steinway seems able to name only with reluctance, despite his body [à son corps défendant].

In its relation to an ideal horizon, Gould’s dream does indeed have something sacrificial about it: The ego (Glenn) will deliver himself up body and soul to the autophonia of the instrument vibrating by itself. Yet by sacrificing himself in this way, by making himself superfluous, it is perhaps still Glenn who, in the novel, dreams of finding a way to get along just fine, that is, without owing anything else to the self.

Is what is intolerable in all this—which all the virtuosic conquests, all the reassuring dialogues, and all the sacrifices attempt to conjure up as a way of getting rid of it—not that incredibly insistent adverb in Zarathustra’s statement: “Always the self listens and seeks”?

If so, how might we understand the insistence or authority of this self that seems to find in the musical body-to-body contact [corps à corps] the occasion, the chance for which it is on the lookout? How might we describe the clearing work that the self, this path-breaker, performs in the body’s envelope?

Nietzsche played piano; we have testimony to this from several people. “I do not believe,” writes his friend Carl Gersdorff, “Beethoven’s improvisations could have been more poignant than those of Nietzsche, especially when a storm filled the sky.”⁶ And Peter Gast, who pays him a visit toward the end of his life, after his hospitalization, recounts: “Nothing but phrases of a Tristan-like inspiration, pianissimo; then fanfares of trombones and trumpets, a Beethoven-like furor, exultant songs, meditations, reveries—indescribable!”⁷

One should not rush to see Nietzsche’s musical body-to-body experiences [corps à corps] as the symptoms of an unconscious that might become manifest through the vehicle of music and even more clearly in the period said to be of his “madness.” The self that, through these several descriptions, one can make out playing behind the ego, and probably even in front of him, this self is not the unconscious of psychoanalysis, even if it is tempting to make Nietzsche into its precursor. This is why, if it is obviously impossible to maintain that it is “I” who is speaking here at the piano, one probably also and still has to give up on the desire to decipher the inscription of a body subject to drives, of an “it speaks.” “Perhaps,” writes Nietzsche, “some day we shall accustom ourselves . . . to get along without the little ‘it’ (which is all that is left of the honest little old ego).”⁸

What seems to emerge in musical playing, what seems to find its chance or its grasp in an exemplary way, might well be interpretation, on the condition that we understand this word not in its usual musical sense, but in the sense Nietzsche could give it in a fragment from 1885–86: “When an organ is constructed,” he says, “it is a question of interpretation”; or elsewhere: “The organic process constantly presupposes a continual interpretation.”⁹

Musical interpretation, playing, taken in a Nietzschean sense rather than in its usual musical sense, would perhaps be this organic thrust not only removed from the ego’s command but also unlinked from the drive of an id that would remain related to it in an underground way. Thus the musical body-to-body experience would produce inventions of improbable bodies that are still without figure or destination. Bodies that are neither monstrous nor fabulous, neither glorious nor weak nor empty: simple but powerful thrusts from even before the drives, from “behind”; threads or traces of still unorganized organs—neither living nor dead—that are membering, dismembering, hurrying, crowding, growing, ramifying.

CHAPTER 2 Effictions

The postures of Nietzsche’s body at the piano apparently had nothing to envy the veritable trance of possession Diderot staged in Rameau’s Nephew:

But you would have gone off into roars of laughter at the way he mimicked the various instruments. With cheeks puffed out and a hoarse, dark tone he did the horns and bassoons, a bright, nasal tone for the oboes, quickening his voice with incredible agility for the stringed instruments to which he tried to get the closest approximation; he whistled the recorders and cooed the flutes, shouting, singing, and throwing himself about like a mad thing: a one-man show . . . , a whole orchestra . . . tearing up and down, stopping, like one possessed, with flashing eyes and foaming mouth.¹

Possessed, yes, the Nephew most certainly is that; and this is why he, too, does not have his body.

What is incredible is that this possession is not the result of one or several minds, as one might think if one limits oneself to the most theatrical passages of his trance (when he “plays” roles or “mimics” characters, men and women, singers and dancers). No, the Nephew has a body that he does not have to the precise extent that he begins by letting himself be possessed by other bodies, sound-producing and vibrating bodies that interpret him as much as he interprets them.

It is true, though, that during some of these transports, he also lends his voice to living beings and lively passions: “What didn’t he do? He wept, laughed, sighed, his gaze was tender, soft, or furious: a woman swooning with grief, a poor wretch abandoned in the depth of his despair.” But the privilege of welcoming other souls into one’s body is an absolutely provisional one; it is abolished once the murmurings of the sounds of nature take things up: when the Nephew becomes “waters murmuring in a cool, solitary place or tumbling in torrents down the mountain side,” and then “a thunderstorm, a hurricane,” and also the “howling of the tempest” and “the crash of thunder.”

Possessed by nature, the Nephew then gets lost in the night; even in his very muteness he is delivered up body and soul to the unknown, to the x:

[He was] night with its shadows, darkness and silence, for even silence itself can be depicted in sound. By now he was quite beside himself. Knocked up with fatigue, like a man coming out of a deep sleep or long trance, he stood there motionless, dazed, astonished.

Astonishing Nephew who...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Training
• Chapter 1 Interpreting Bodies
• Chapter 2 Effictions
• Chapter 3 Organologics (1): The Erasure of Bodies
• Chapter 4 Touch-ups, or The Return of Bodies
• Chapter 5 Idiotisms, or The Dialect of Bodies
• Chapter 6 Monk, a Legend
• Chapter 7 Traces of Fingers
• Chapter 8 Digital Rhetoric
• Chapter 9 Ablations and Grafts (Too Many Fingers)
• Chapter 10 Romantic Fingers (System of Touch)
• Chapter 11 Feet
• Chapter 12 Joyful Tropiques (Evolution, Revolutions)
• Chapter 13 Two Dispatches (One Fictive and the Other Dreamed Up)
• Chapter 14 Organologics (2): Autophony
• Chapter 15 Genesis (1): Ocular Harpsichord, Organ of Flavors
• Chapter 16 Telepathy
• Chapter 17 Scruples (Clones and Stand-ins)
• Chapter 18 Conducting (Seen from the Back)
• Chapter 19 Genesis (2): Fantasia, or “Plasmaticity”
• Chapter 20 Touching from Afar
• Chapter 21 Organologics (3): Areality
• Chapter 22 Bodies Electric
• Chapter 23 Mass Formations
• P.S.
• Notes