【音樂學研究討論 ②】
講者：Maurice Windleburn
講題：Vibratory Materialism, Musical Spiritualism, and Sonic Perspectivalism in the Fin de siècle
地點：普通506教室
時間：10 /30（五）14:30

演講摘要：

Vibratory Materialism, Musical Spiritualism, and Sonic Perspectivalism in the Fin de siècle

In 1907, the author, doctor, and explorer Victor Segalen published a short story titled Dans un Monde Sonore in the Symbolist journal Mercure de France. The narrator, an anthropologist named Monsieur Leurais, visits his estranged friend André, a physicist who has isolated himself in a villa on the outskirts of Bordeaux. Leurais is shocked to find that André has opted to live solely in a world of sound, turning his study into a vibrant resonance chamber from which he rarely steps foot. Playing with common Symbolist tropes of isolation, madness, and hyperesthesia, Segalen here imagines a purely sonic world where hearing, rather than vision, is our primary sense. 

In this paper, I outline three ways of contextualising André’s sound world in relation to his broader intellectual milieu. The first relates this sound world to nineteenth century developments in acoustical science and the study of vibration. I then consider the dualist nature of André’s sound world, how he regularly refers to neoplatonic ides shared by adherents of nineteenth century occultism and esotericism. Lastly, I consider Segalen’s own position concerning his character’s sound world via his adoption of anthropological and Nietzschean perspectivalism. Through these three divergent worldviews, I will consider how vibration, music, and sound were at the centre of early modernist tensions between materialism and spiritualism, while also detaching the notion of a sound world from those vibratory and sonic ontologies that have recently been posited by new materialist philosophers and sound studies scholars. 

Maurice Windleburn is a fellow with the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His research examines the impact of sound, music, and vibration on cosmological worldviews. He is preparing a monograph on the musical cosmologies held by philosophers, occultists, scientists, and critics in the fin de siècle, and their depiction in this period’s visual art. He is also editing a volume on negative metaphysics and sonic negation in both Western and Far Eastern musical thought. His past research focused primarily on contemporary avant-garde music understood via semiotic and intermedial frameworks, publishing his first book, John Zorn’s File Card Works: Hypertextual Intermediality in Composition and Analysis, with Routledge.