“‘To be all Ears’ [Être À L'Écoute], to be Listening”: Listening to Music with Jean-Luc Nancy (Parts a, b, e)

Abstract

Sometimes we hear music (when we play it or hear it, whether live or recorded) and that experience is felt as a singular event. In those moments we find ourselves in an existential situation that, because it is singular (rare, unique, unintended), reveals the formative power of an aesthetic experience of listening to music, what we might call learning how to be poetic. Here, Eduardo Duarte Bono explores how engaging with Jean-Luc Nancy can enable us to deepen our appreciation for music's aesthetic education. Specifically, Nancy's category of “resonant subjectivity” describes the existential place where this education is occurring during those singular experiences with music, what Nancy describes as “‘to be all ears’ [être à l'écoute], to be listening.” As a way of amplifying Nancy's writing on listening to music, Duarte Bono takes up three distinct cases in this paper: the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Pablo Picasso's sculpture Guitar, and Ralph Ellison's musings on living with music as a writer.