Touching through Music, Touching through Words

Abstract

This article investigates the versatile embodiment of touch in the sensory-aesthetic construction of piano performance. The sensorial interactions enmeshed in piano playing distribute a peculiar interaction between touch and sound, which can be comprehended as two kinds of pianistic touch – the physical touch and the affective touch. In the synthesis, or symbiosis, of these two kinds of touch, piano performance epitomizes a sensory-aesthetic continuum to transmit its force beyond perceptible spatial-temporal boundaries. This article argues that the tactile-sonic relationship in piano playing manifests the performative power of music to formulate new modes of feeling and understanding. This argument is explored in three stages. The first stage utilises two treatises, Steven Connor's ‘Edison's teeth’ (2001) and Simon Waters’ ‘Touching at a distance’ (2013), to explicate how touch enables the production of musical sound and how music can be received as tactually oriented sensations. The second stage introduces the piano as an exemplary instrument of touch in the contexts of scientific studies and relevant cultural history. The third stage uses two novelistic texts as heuristics to explore how pianistic touch is enacted performatively to engage with the aural, visual, somatic and visceral sensations. Both Thomas Mann's ‘Tristan’ (2009 [1903]) and Forster's A Room with a View (2012 [1908]) testify to how fictional presentations of piano playing can provide fertile loam to reappraising pianistic touch beyond the ordinary musical context. Overall, as performed in a range of pianistic settings, the multivariant senses of touch provide productive perspectives for re-constructing what prior categories of senses and sensations could not consider. This article will thus be conducive to a quest for new forms of creativity underlying the performance and performativity of pianistic touch.