The Keyboard as Sensorium: Pedagogy, Pleasure, and Philosophies of the Body, ca. 1750-1800

Abstract

Denis Diderot’s famous formulation that “we are [harpsichords] endowed with feeling and memory” is but one example of a prevalent later-eighteenth-century trope that used the keyboard as a metaphor for the human body. In this dissertation, I excavate the musical conditions of possibility that allowed the keyboard to function as a privileged metaphor for embodiment and sensation in eighteenth-century materialist thought. I argue that the origins and referents of this musico-philosophical trope should be understood less in terms of public acts of musical composition and more in terms of the keyboard’s status as a domestic accomplishment and symbolic dowry, on the one hand, and its potential to act as an unruly medium for sexual desire, on the other. Bringing together philosophical texts, music-pedagogical treatises, ephemeral musical games, and works of literature, I emphasize the ways ostensibly descriptive philosophical claims were given persuasive power through normative music-pedagogical practices. However, I also argue that reading these texts together recasts the “human harpsichord” as an ambiguously gendered and promiscuously sensible figure that exceeds patriarchal systems of representation.

The organization of the dissertation borrows from Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s famous statue thought experiment, which asks the reader to imagine a statue progressively endowed with each individual sense faculty: first smell, then hearing, next sight, and finally touch. I use this organizational frame to explore how social power was exercised, reproduced, and contested in pedagogies of touch; to engage with anxieties about ephemerality and difference in the trope of sympathetic resonance; and to argue for an intimate link between musical taste and physical appetite as assimilative, pleasurable, and generative acts. I conclude with a chapter on emergence that explores how the keyboard—as both a site for the cultivation of the sensorium and a model for the sensorium itself—permitted a diverse set of audiences to engage in sensory experimentation that troubled traditional hierarchies of the senses and playfully simulated contemporary ideas of self-organization.

Examining the relationship between eighteenth-century keyboard practices and their philosophical representations offers several unique theoretical affordances. The mid-eighteenth-century keyboard functioned both as a paragon of mechanical complexity and an object through which players and listeners could play with experiences of bodily sensibility. Poised at a historiographic turning point in the formation of the modern subject, it permits us both to witness the growth of anxieties about the relationship between mechanism, sensation, and subjectivity, and to imagine alternatives to these anxieties. Moreover, this invites us to reconsider how we have understood musical sensibility—not only as an aesthetic category, but also as a medico-scientific property of bodies. And finally, engaging with the eighteenth-century keyboard in these terms resonates uncannily with recent theoretical work in new materialist philosophy—inviting us to consider how some of the same aporias and anxieties that haunted the “old” materialism persist in the “new.”