Musique

Peter Szendy - publié le 19/12/2013

"To comfortably acquire, so to speak, as many fingers as needed," said one of Bach’s sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, in his Essay on the True Art of Playing the Keyboard (1753). And these words are remarkable, as long as we are prepared to take them literally, and not hastily consider them as one of the metaphors that adorn discourse about music and on the bodies that it evokes.

Pierre Bayard, Wendy Lesser, François Noudelmann, Mónica de la Torre - publié le 20/01/2012

The affinity tables established by chemists served as models for sentimental encounters. But the concordance and discordance resulting from affinities are closer to musical phenomena, where associations infinitely redistribute harmonic correlations. Pierre Bayard, author of ((How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read)), will discuss this topic with Wendy Lesser, author of ((Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets)), and François Noudelmann, who explores in ((Le toucher (...)

Elena Mannes - publié le 19/12/2013

Our relationship with sound is an intimate one – arguably the most intimate with any of our five senses. We live in a visual society. Many people would say that sight is our primary sense. We hear before we see. In the womb, the fetus begins to develop an auditory system between seventeen and nineteen weeks. Already we are in a world of sound, of breath and heartbeat, of rhythm and vibration. Already, we are feeling the sound with our bodies.

Kirsty Gunn - publié le 08/09/2014

That sound you hear, as though coming off the lonely Scottish hills, through the fine Highland air, passing across straths and glens, along rivers and to the sea... Is the sound of the piobaireachd, the classical music of the great Highland bagpipe, a music made for Gatherings, Salutes and Laments, a grand and grave and complicated music - Ceol Mor it is in Gaelic - The Big Music. The Big Music, too, is the title of my latest work of fiction - not a novel, but an elegy, as Virginia Woolf (...)

Nikolai Grozni - publié le 10/09/2014

“Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased,” writes Beckett in his Texts for Nothing. Or does he sing it? If words were the only sounds, then a sentence would be the only melody. We might never understand which came first—the words or the melody. Perhaps the first humans knew how to sing long before they knew how to talk. In this Dionysian vision of antiquity, all mortals were originally musicians. Music was the only thing that mattered. People understood each other by (...)

Jay Gottlieb - publié le 20/01/2012

Literally playing with the notion of "affinities" with its vast resonances, Jay Gottlieb has constructed a program not only of works by composers with whom he feels a particular bond, but also incorporating the diverse relationships of the chosen composers with their sonic material. He created for instance a vast sound sculpture that incorporates moments from all of Malher's ten symphonies. He will also play pieces by Donatoni, who shows how affinities can be volatile, Berio, who brilliantly (...)

Wendy Lesser - publié le 14/02/2012

"As an element in Shostakovich's music, the shame is perhaps not as audible as the dread, but it is everpresent nonetheless. One cannot point to a precise place in the music where you can hear it, but it underlies and supports most of the other painful emotions, and if it were removed from the mix, you would certainly notice the difference."

Wayne Koestenbaum - publié le 18/04/2011

Wayne Koestenbaum (États-Unis), poète, romancier et essayiste, est l'auteur d'une œuvre protéiforme et subversive qui explore les multiples facettes de l'identité américaine à travers de nombreux thèmes (les arts, la célébrité, les gender studies...) et où se mêlent les cultures littéraire, artistique, musicale et populaire. Dans ((Hotel Theory)), il met en regard une enquête philosophique sur les hôtels et le récit d'une rencontre improbable entre deux icônes de la culture (...)