Unlike the Petrarchan lovers of Monteverdi's early madrigals who suffer inside, this pain marks external surfaces. But I will argue that, the attention to tactile detail bespeaks an emptying out of song's alterity and a distancing from the body, marked by musical gestures whose virtuosity, consistency, brevity, and circular motion frame the voice within an independent musical logic that operates apart from the body. Before the full coalescing in Europe around 1800 of a modern ideology of music, song could lodge itself in the European imagination as a rich amalgam of primal utterance, tropological elegancy, affirmation of shared humanity, and confirmation of drastic human difference. All these ingredients originated in early modern conceptions of the passionate powers of voice and lived on in Enlightenment rethinking of these powers. I will outline this cultural formation and trace some of the changes wrought in it around 1800, linking the decline of the earlier ideology to the emergence of modern music and a modern anthropology as well.
Jewish prayer is centered on the performance of liturgical and sacred text.
In certain services, the public reading of the Torah amplifies this performance by the use of pageantry, procession, sexual imagery, music and choreography. Focusing on the historical emergence of radio music in the 1920s and 1930s, MacBrien will discuss the media-technological formation of the listening subject. Contemporaneous musicological writings, media criticism, fiction, poetry, and journalism suggest that radio, in its infancy, could produce subtle shocks of embodied awareness in the listener that depended precisely on disembodying the performer. The moment of vertiginous shock, however, could also register a physical awareness of other modes of experience that writers seem to have found very difficult to describe. The paper argues for a rehabilitation of Walter Benjamin's notions of experience for understanding this experience and its relevance for contemporary aesthetics.