Category Archives: Attunement

On lateness in listening: From late style to late mood

The scholarly symposium “Late Style and the Idea of the Summative Work in Bach and Beethoven,” taking place this month at the Department of Music & Dance in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, inspired me to return to a particular aspect … Continue reading

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The time of friends

Friends operate on their own time.  The time they spend together cannot be estimated by calendars and schedules since they walk together at the unique pace of their friendship. When friends communicate, the time they share expands.  It grows flexible … Continue reading

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Friends making Music together (3)

There are moments when the thought of a friend makes us pause and ponder where they are and what they are doing right now.  It is not because we miss or need them.  We do not worry about their situation, … Continue reading

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On not Reading Music (3)

Is there a study of the role of music in friendship,                                                                          a study of the way in which music helps people establish and maintain strong friendships, the way the love of music becomes a powerful code of communication for close … Continue reading

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The presence of the friend

Close friends who practice together the exercises of friendship-as-ethic                             mold each other into their Aristotelian “other self” under a bright sun like Vienna’s. In addition to … Continue reading

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On not talking to a close friend (4)

Hegel to Hölderlin: «Your image, My Beloved, passes before me along with the joy of days gone by;                      yet soon it yields to sweeter hopes of our reunion. The scene of our long-sought and ardent embrace depicts itself even now … Continue reading

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The 1819 Dresden Conspiracy (Travels in revolutionary Mitteleuropa, from the Rhine to the Danube/2)

I went for the first time to Germany last month with a specific purpose: To walk in the footsteps of revolutionary friends in Dresden, such as the comrades in this painting. “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), … Continue reading

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The listening self

Musicians do not play an instrument.  They are using instruments to play their body.  They resonate instruments in the echo chamber of their reverberating body. In attending or watching live performances, I have learned to listen not to the interpretation, … Continue reading

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Three years of blogging about listening to music and poetry

Trifonov walks swiftly on the stage, bows to us, his audience, sits down, touches the piano … and Pantelis starts to play: I can hear immediately his distinct touch on the keys. This is how our friendship works.  Today, 3 … Continue reading

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Τhe friend as internal condition of thought

The friend is not an external circumstance but an internal presupposition of all thought as such. This friend, the “other self,” is a philosophical and political condition of thought: He is not the second piano but the second pair of … Continue reading

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