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Description of  Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies

The prostheses Peter Szendy exploresthose peculiar artifacts known as musical instrumentsare 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 Szendys 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 musics 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. Read more