Sounding Bodies

“How then does language manage, when it must interpret music? Alas, badly—very badly, it seems. If we examine the current practice of music criticism (or of conversations "on" music: often the same thing), we see that the work (or its performance) is invariably translated into the poorest linguistic category: the adjective. [...] Are we doomed to the adjective? Are we faced with this dilemma: the predicable or the ineffable?”

- Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice

I. Sound

Sound is a body. It is a collection of strings bound together by invisible threads. It has a grain, it is invested with the erotism of the body. When I play, my body is in the sound, that is to say, the sound is my voice, my body its grain. This will guide my musical action.

Sound becomes for us symbol. The symbols of sound enter into convoluted, self-referential relationships, and create systems of sounds immersed in musical time and space, that regulate the extent to which something is meaningful in music. To be a musician is to trade in symbols.

II. Systems of Sound

III. Musical Acts

Through music we have access to the outside. We nearly die as individual subjects and become part of one single musical body. In this body our grain is crystallised, and violently asserts itself over ordinary reality. This is our music.

Introduction

Throughout its course, humanity has constructed an enormous edifice of knowledge regarding a certain phenomenon, the nature of which...

I. Sound

In order to say anything meaningful about music at all, it is necessary to thoroughly examine the elements out of which music arises or,...