Journal 2: Musical and Tangible


As my project hopes to explore relationships between the aural and visual world, this chapter appears to be especially pertinent material. I found the separation of music into "the music one listens to," and "the music one plays" to be especially interesting. One might, at first glance, be inclined to equate the two musics as two largely equivalent representations of the same underlying form. Yet Barthes' analysis of them as "... two totally different arts" rings largely true to me, as an amateur musician myself. I have indeed experienced the very phenomenon Barthes describes: that of a piece not resounding with me when merely listened to, but becoming beautiful when played. 

Could it be that Beethoven's "lack", the inability to hear his own music, unlocked an unrealized musical potential inside him? Existing outside the realm of the heard music, and likely the played music as well, Beethoven's new perspective simply as 'composer' undoubtedly changed his relationship to music.

These themes, along with others discussed in this chapter, are ones I am eager to experiment with and explore when it comes to my project. The universality (or lack of it) of music, the private, public, played, and heard, and their relationships to each other will all play a role in my project's creation. 


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