By Lawrence Kramer, author of Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of BeingOn the two-hundredth anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which premiered on May 7th, 1824, The New York Times ran an opinion piece on the work by the distinguished pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. The next day Beet...
By Lawrence Kramer, author of Music and the Forms of Life
The concept of life has a long and complicated history, but its modern version can be said to date to the late seventeenth century. The science of the time launched a concerted effort to discover what made living bodies, particu...
By Lawrence Kramer, author of The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening
Sound in recent years has escaped its traditionally subordinate relationship to sight and become the object of widespread interest. Sound Studies is a flourishing field. But much of the work done under this r...
By Lawrence Kramer, author of Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History
In his classic study of perception, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the experience of listening to a classical sonata, which he takes to be representa...