The Sculpted Ear

Books in the Perspectives on Sensory History series maintain

a historical basis for work on the senses, examining how the
experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching have
shaped the ways in which people have understood their worlds.

Mark Smith, General Editor

University of South Carolina

editorial board
Camille Bégin 
University of Toronto, Canada

Martin A. Berger
Art Institute of Chicago, USA

Karin Bijsterveld 
University of Maastricht, Netherlands

Constance Classen
Concordia University, Canada

Kelvin E. Y. Low 
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Bodo Mrozek 
University of Potsdam, Germany

Alex Purves
University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Richard Cullen Rath 

University of Hawaii, USA
The Sculpted Ear
Aurality and Statuary in the West

Ryan McCormack

The Pennsylvania State University Press

University Park, Pennsylvania
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCormack, Ryan, 1979– author.

Title: The sculpted ear : aurality and statuary in the
West / Ryan McCormack.
Other titles: Perspectives on sensory history.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Penn-
sylvania State University Press, [2020] | Series:
Perspectives on sensory history | Includes bibli-
ographical references and index.
Summary: “Examines the relationship between sound
and statuary in Western aesthetic thought in light
of discourses on aurality emerging within the field
of sound studies. Considers the sounding statue
as an event and as conceptualized through acts of
writing and performance”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020011884 | ISBN 9780271086927
(cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Sound sculpture. | Sound in art. |
Statues.
Classification: LCC NB198.5.S68 M33 2020 | DDC
731—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011884
Copyright © 2020 Ryan McCormack
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802–1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member

of the Association of University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University

Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated
stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material,
ansi z39.48–1992.
 For Lyndsey Lee,
the very best of Pygmalions
 Contents

Acknowledgments [ix]

Introduction: Elvis Leaves the Building  [1]

1. Animation Introduces Animation  [15]
2. Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth  [36]
3. Imperial Possessions  [63]
4. Hearing a Stone Man  [87]
5. Aural Skins  [111]
6. Now You Have to Go, Comrade  [135]
7. Museums of Resonance  [161]
Conclusion: I Now Present Sergei Rachmaninoff  [175]

Notes [181]
Bibliography [195]
Index [208]
Acknowledgments

I recall an episode of the BBC4 radio program In Our Time (on Shakespeare’s
Hamlet) where guest commentator Carol Rutter, during an off-air addendum
exclusive to the podcast version, mentions how strange it was that Shake-
speare spent so much time revising that particular work with no financial
incentive to do so. This play simply would not let him go, she concludes. The
following book is one that would not let me go, either, and I’m most grateful
for its perseverance since that first spark in my mind during the waning days
of the summer of 2011. Writing it has given me a sense of scholarly purpose
and personal pleasure through a period of professional tumult. And while it
may seem odd to give thanks to a book within the confines of its own pages,
that which we write is a constant companion, whether we as writers admit
it or not. This subject remained sufficiently fascinating for me to endure
the fears of inadequacy and the false starts, and the final result reflects the
intellectual intimacy that bolstered my resolve to see it through to the end.
Because of the long and rather private unfolding of this project, many
of those I wish to thank have already been acknowledged in other works
and mediums. Still, I want to highlight the contributions of a notable few.
Without their support, what follows would have been a very different text,
and most likely would not have come to pass at all. I must first thank the
Bulgarian American Fulbright Commission, whose Fulbright IIE Research
Grant in 2008 and 2009 funded my opening forays into what would even-
tually become the chapter on Sasho Sladura. Also of note are the libraries
staffs at the University of Tennessee, Tusculum University, and the Knox
County Public Library, who processed countless interlibrary loan requests
and gave me access to materials and resources I never would have been
able to get a hold of otherwise. Veit Erlmann and three anonymous readers
with the journal Sound Studies helped to shape an article codifying some of
the broader theoretical strokes that would eventually, albeit abstractly, find
their way into these pages. Mark Smith, the series editor with Perspectives
on Sensory History, saw some potential in the first abstract I submitted to
him and has been instrumental and unbelievably supportive in shepherding
this project to Pennsylvania State University Press. Kendra Boileau, Alex
Vose, and the editorial staff at Penn State did amazing work moving the book
x Acknowledgments

through the later stages and into print. James Mansell and Bruce Smith gave
wonderful feedback in their roles as readers, and their suggestions helped
immensely in refining my introduction and conclusion, as well as the over-
all structure of the book. Dana Henricks did incredible work copyediting
the manuscript. Justin Patch, Mark Lomanno, Daniel Sharp, Sonia Seeman,
Jacqueline Avila, Michael O’Brien, Sidra Lawrence, Mary Neuberger, Nick
Tochka, Ian Macmillen, Leslie Gay, Rachel Golden, and Plamena Kourtova
are friends, colleagues, and mentors who provided commentary and advice
on parts of the book at various stages of its long development. Some I have
relied upon in times of uncertainty, others have slipped through my grasp
as time and space often dictate. Yet their ideas and candor resonate through
these pages as much as a sightless vibration galvanizes the material body
of any statue.
Introduction
Elvis Leaves the Building

I want to begin by relating a tale about Elvis leaving the building. Not the
flesh and blood Elvis, who came and left hundreds of venues during his illus-
trious career. Nor any of the roughly eighty-five thousand impersonators
who attend conventions and parties, or appear at one of the many places
associated with the King, like Graceland, Sun Studios in Memphis, or the
Las Vegas strip. The Elvis I refer to is neither living nor dead. He is, in fact,
a statue that resides at Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, a culinary staple in the
Belltown neighborhood of Seattle. The Elvis statue has been the restaurant’s
unofficial mascot since 1998, when it was given to owner Mike McAlpin
for his burgeoning collection of Elvis memorabilia at the establishment.
McAlpin had a friend paint the gray, unfinished veneer to furnish Elvis
with a brown leather jacket and blue jeans, as he may have appeared during
his earliest recording sessions with Sam Phillips. The refurbished pièce de
résistance of King chic was then placed against a railing by the front door
that fenced in the outdoor seating deck, an ideal spot to feature the statue
for maximum exposure to restaurant patrons and passersby on the side-
walk. For years, Elvis welcomed patrons and silently posed for pictures with
fans and detractors alike, with little incident save the weathering expected
from living outside in rainy Seattle for most of the year. On the evening of
March 10, 2013, though, Elvis had more problems than the weather. After
2 The Sculpted Ear

the restaurant had closed for the night, an unknown assailant nonchalantly
picked up the unrestrained statue from the railing, carried him off down a
side alley, and disappeared without a trace. A witness who saw the abduc-
tion did not contact police or alert McAlpin until the following morning,
thinking that Elvis was simply being taken for some much-needed repairs.
McAlpin took to the streets and the airwaves in search of Elvis, offering to
not press charges if he were returned to his spot, no questions asked. After
three weeks with no sign, the owners of another neighborhood establish-
ment happened to spot the statue laying under a white sheet at a nearby
rummage sale. Upon inspection, they found him relatively unscathed. The
proper authorities were notified, and Elvis was reunited with his perch as
if nothing had happened. The only evidence of the abduction was a hand-
written note the perpetrator(s) had placed with the body prior to obscuring
Elvis beneath an uncharacteristically plain cloak. The scrawl, not a ransom
but a wink, read, “Thank You Very Much.”
Though the theft may have been a mere prank, it was not one to go with-
out a reciprocal response. To celebrate his triumphant return, it was decided
to let Elvis have a little fun of his own at the expense of the public. On April
Fools’ Day, Seattle’s NBC affiliate (with the apropos designation KING5) filmed
a segment in front of the restaurant detailing a strange habit Elvis had begun
to exhibit upon his return. Amidst the noise of construction and traffic on
the surrounding streets, some unnamed patrons had claimed that they could
hear Elvis singing. The KING5 reporter filming the piece painted a mysterious
backdrop for the audience. No wires were found protruding from the body, no
externally mounted speakers, no obvious source for the incumbent sounds,
only a small microphone mounted by the news crew to help amplify any sound
over the excess environmental noise. Then, as if he knew that local skeptics
would decline to take him at his word, the journalist proceeded to ask people
passing by on the street to listen closely to the Elvis statue and describe what
(if anything) they heard. Many claimed to hear nothing amidst the urban
cacophony. Others seemed struck by the sheer oddity of the question itself (“I
mean . . . who hears stuff from a statue?” a woman asked with a clear expres-
sion of incredulity). Some, though, admitted to catching the faintest trace of
Elvis crooning his hits—“Blue Hawaii” or “Hound Dog,” depending on when
they were asked. Many hearing these sounds espoused a hint of bemusement
and wonder, perhaps sensing the nature of the joke. A few seemed genuinely
bewildered, unable to grasp the happenstance confronting their own ears.
One particular woman, though, betrayed a strange and fascinating aura of
 Introduction 3

unease. The camera captured her slackened face and exhausted eyes, which
may have had nothing to do with her pondering the prospect of a magical,
singing Elvis statue haunting the sidewalks of Seattle but certainly added to
the dramatic effect of the scene unfolding. After a beat of terse contempla-
tion, as if cued for a perfect cinematic moment by an out-of-frame director,
she turned to look at the camera and said, with a hint of dread undergirding
a soft chuckle, “It’s kind of creepy, actually.”1
I can think of no better allegory, even drawing from the depths of my
own fertile imagination, to capture the web of fascination, ambivalence, and
dread attached to the figure of the sounding statue in the Western imagina-
tion as the one presented by this publicity stunt foisted upon unassuming
strangers. It speaks with wondrous precision to the questions revolving
around performativity and being, themselves spinning off the implications
of wedding ambiguous sound and anthropocentric form, that I will explore in
depth throughout this book. One is hard pressed to find a stranger marriage
in Western aesthetics than sound (mobile, ephemeral, heard) and the statue
(staid, solid, observed). This is part of the reason why singing Elvis was
considered by some to be so jarring and weird, even with an obvious rational
recourse to sound reproduction technology available. However, the specta-
cle of animation that sound represents in the case of Elvis is one small part
of a broader and more diverse narrative regarding the relationship between
sound and statuary. Examples of sounding facsimiles in the style of singing
Elvis are not difficult to find and have deeper roots than one might expect.
The more pressing avenue of inquiry, for me, is understanding what drives
the complicated history of reception and comprehension of sounding statues,
and how Western aesthetic thought has proven lacking when relied upon to
explain these phenomena. Discourses on sculpture, much less music, have
had little to offer regarding the needling metaphysical quandaries inherent
in sounding statues that modernity has been unable to excise. A different
way of approaching these issues is needed to more fully appreciate the vari-
ous cultural manifestations of the sounding statue, one that gives credence
to aural reception and an intersubjective imaginary as much as sonic source.
Into this breach steps the concept of aurality: an emergent term within the
area of sound studies regarding cultural histories that embed the act of
hearing into specific social and artistic practices, technologies, and the shap-
ing of hierarchies of race, class, ethnicity, and power. Aurality, at base, has
been instrumental in critiquing the sensory dominance of vision (embodied
through the eye) and orality (embodied through the voice and language),
4 The Sculpted Ear

while turning the ear from an organ of passive engagement to one of active
inquiring. It is thus a productive conceptual counterweight to the gravity of
an object-centered discourse that pervades the history of sculpture. Outlin-
ing the failures of this discourse toward sounding statues, as well as how
aurality helps to reframe the needling problems inherent at the juncture of
sound and metaphysics, will be the first step in creating a more nuanced
history of hearing and querying the relationship between sound and statu-
ary. Yet engaging with aurality also begins to address the privileging given
the conceptual viability of the sculpted over the presence of the sonic in
occurrences like the singing Elvis. This privilege of the sculpted can even
be found at the level of language, where the very use of a term like sounding
statue subtly reinforces an object orientation, as if the sounds themselves
were property of the statue and no other. The case studies that I utilize seek
to complicate and nuance this idea. Instead of thinking about the sound-
ing statue as an objective unification between disparate parts that Western
aesthetics has had difficulty placing together, I understand it as an event
that occurs in the encounter between sound and statuary, something that
extends beyond that encounter into the imaginative unfoldings of perfor-
mance and cultural discourse.
The word event may seem, at first thought, a rather odd choice from
which to proceed. For one, it is a term most at home not in aesthetics or
cultural studies but in a speculative ontology that developed from the legacy
of René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza questioning the constitution of matter,
substance, and the spatio-temporal nature of bodies. And within this body
of thought, event has often been ontologically defined in contradistinction
to the concept of an object. Events occur, permeate space, and take up time;
objects exist, occupy space, and persist through time.2 By these attributes,
sound is an event; statue is an object. Yet there are ways of thinking about
the concept of event that are not so beholden to this rigid dichotomy with
objectivity. A more expansive idea of the event is developed through a lineage
of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze,
one that rests on a notion of creativity and transformation, instead of being,
as the driving forces in an existential metaphysics. Elucidating the broader
discourse connecting creativity and event will take more time and space than
is available here.3 Nevertheless, Deleuze offers an intriguing definition of
the event vis-à-vis the creative spark in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the
Baroque, one drawn through the thought of Whitehead that is useful for my
limited purposes. For Deleuze, an event manifests as a winnowing down of
 Introduction 5

the possibilities in a chaos of multiplicity, and he identifies four essential

components in Whitehead’s philosophy that contribute to this formative
process. The first is extension, in which one element encapsulates separate
ones into a common series (the concept of sounding statue extending over
the presence of sound and the object statuary in space and time). The second,
intension, constitutes the individual and ascertainable attributes within the
extended event (sound has timbre and volume; statuary has measurements,
material, and represents something). The third, prehension, refers to the
ability of attributes within the event to connect and overlap with other
attributes based on shared points of contact within their own historical,
social, or epistemic milieus (in its simplest form, a recording of “Jokerman”
creates a connection to a statue of Bob Dylan, just as a Dylan statue may
spark thought of the song “Jokerman,” let’s say). And the fourth, ingression,
is the creation of something new and meaningful out of the disparate parts
overlapping together within the field of the event (the acknowledgment of a
statue making sound as a sounding statue, or any number of performances,
ideas, discourses, and ideologies that spin off of the particular event and
become purveyors of affect in the world themselves). Together, in ways far
more complex than my little example can fully capture, these attributes of
the event meld together into a ceaseless “opening onto the new” that defines
both Whitehead and Deleuze’s concept of creativity.4
My only caveat is that because their shared notion of the creative also
distances from the classic notion of a coherent bourgeois subject, I think
there needs to be a way to write some sense of the subject back into the
event. Alain Badiou offers an elegant addendum to event metaphysics in this
regard. Badiou has argued that while the event manifests primarily within
the field of broader ontological mechanisms, the subject alone holds the
ability to define its parameters, what he calls a “capacity for indiscernment.”5
Granted, his notion of ontology is grounded in the more materially abstract
realm of mathematics, and his regard toward the indiscernible suggests a
trait of negation at the center of subjective engagement. Yet his recourse to
the indiscernible does much to articulate something beyond the purview of
the creativity espoused by Whitehead and Deleuze: how weird and ephem-
eral many have considered the very idea of the sounding statue. As we
shall see, these are difficult events to pin down, often besotted by concep-
tual doubt and epistemological barriers. And though they may manifest as
actual occurrences or throbs of experience, they only gain meaning through
the human capacity to define them as meaningful.
6 The Sculpted Ear

I argue that the concept of event gives us a platform through which we

can begin the difficult work of uncoupling the relationship between sound
and statuary, and its meanings, from the reductive language of sculpture. All
the same, we must resist the urge to move too far in the other direction, as
working exclusively within the milieu of the sonic does us no favors either.
Unlike other projects dealing with sound, there cannot be an assumption that
an immersive sonic autonomy can be extracted from a surrounding artifice.
On the contrary, these are encounters laden by the impossibility of divorcing
the entity of sound from an embodied, representational referent. This quality
lends a certain level of odd abstraction not only to the encounters themselves,
but to attempts to describe and rationalize them, as well as using them as
the basis for performative reimaginings. As the anecdote regarding the sing-
ing Elvis tells us, these events present an ontological convergence for which
aesthetic thought, even language itself, leaves us unprepared. The impetus,
then, should be in creating a way to think about and articulate these events
between (and extensions of) sound and statuary in all of their metaphysi-
cal, theological, folkloric, political, and aesthetic clothing. Aurality and the
ear are as central to this work as the statues themselves, even as one cannot
be abstracted from the other. That is why when I utilize the term sounding
statue throughout this book, I intend for it to refer to subjective or intersub-
jective constructions of these events as much as to an object as such.
Any history or philosophy of the sounding statue is inevitably a theory
of those who shape themselves as vessels to hear them. Singing Elvis, and
other similar events, may bewitch us, confuse us, and upset our very notions
of the real. But such bewitchment only occurs because we are willing to
countenance its possibility, whether consciously or not. To truly articulate
this possibility in all of its guises and portals, we must weave together the
language that dictates the experience of statuary with a language drawn
from the mentality and experience of sound. The sphere in which these
languages of concept come together in the purview of the subject is what I
call the sculpted ear.
I think it best to introduce my reasoning in conceptualizing the sculpted
ear through what amounts to a cautionary tale. In 2016, I wrote an article
about the Colossus of Memnon, a statue located near the ancient Egyptian
city of Thebes that was renowned throughout Mediterranean antiquity as
an object that emitted sound in the light of the morning sun.6 The only
surviving evidence that the sound existed at all comes from the litany of
testimonial epigrams carved into the surface of the Colossus, writing that
 Introduction 7

became a driving force in how the totality of this multiepochal discourse

took shape. Such was the cultural power of these epigrams that even after the
sound ceased sometime in the third century CE, under as mysterious circum-
stances as its emergence some three centuries prior, the Colossus continued
to attract the speculative fascination of scientist and poet alike. A space was
thus opened for countless explanations ranging from spiritual possession,
crafty hoaxes, intricate machinery, heated gas escaping from cracks—what-
ever might fit the interests and biases of the speculator. My own take on this
discursive thrust was to notice how it has often been constructed tautolog-
ically, casting premodern interest in the sound in terms of the vagaries of
metaphysics (this is a voice coming from somewhere) while casting modern
interest in terms of the disclosure of the physical sciences (this is a sound
made by something). This reliance on a narrative portraying an ancient gnosis
that is banished by modern scientific inquiry fails to capture how the two
have been intimately intertwined and articulated throughout the entire range
of writing on the Colossus. I argued that this intertwinement could best be
captured through the word phonography, which references both the origins
of modern sound reproduction technology and some obscured ontotheolog-
ical connections between writing and voice within the diffuse metaphysics
of antiquity. My thought was that phonography could serve as a means to
epistemologically suture together the ephemerality of sound and the stony
permanence of statue, traits often deemed aesthetically and metaphysically
incompatible, through the Greek and Roman idea that epigrams were in fact
a type of sonic inscription. This alliance produced an intriguing consequence:
a manifestation of what Jonathan Sterne saw as the post-Enlightenment
project to ground cultural understandings of the sonic through the lens of
physical preservation within the unexpected confines of the Roman world.7
Thus, when thought about in phonographic terms, the Colossus transformed
from mere curiosity into something whose existence brought into question
the ways in which we have constructed the genealogy of modern aurality
and sound reproduction.
What I have come to understand in the course of writing this book is
that the concept of phonography is limiting in its own right, while also sell-
ing short the implications of the paradigm shift it is meant to encapsulate.
Part of the problem lies with the sheer difficulty of disentangling phonog-
raphy from the cultural pessimism that greeted its spread and influence
during the early twentieth century. It was precisely this liminality attached
to the phonograph that made it an alluring signifier to capture the disregard
8 The Sculpted Ear

given the sounding statue within the same circles of cultural criticism. When
Adorno, for one, cast the phonograph as an object perpetuating a culture of
listless aural consumption, he fit all too well in a broader history of conti-
nental aesthetic thought questioning the efficacy of the sounding Colossus
as a work of sculpture.8 Yet the danger inherent in constructing this kind of
phonographic milieu is that such thinking falls right into the ideological trap
that Sterne warns about through his concept of the audiovisual litany.9 At
base, this litany serves as a way to chart the various ahistorical dichotomies
that have alternatively valorized and denigrated the respective senses of hear-
ing and seeing with regard to one another. But Sterne is also conscious that
while the transcendental claims the litany attaches to sound are grounded
in easily historicized social and cultural constructions, scientific discourses
about sound cannot escape the historical weight of their theological associ-
ations. Sterne’s solution to this quandary is to historicize the very notion of
experiencing sound, and while such a conceptual move to rethink sound itself
would carry its own problems for my project, the lesson of hedging upon
a decidedly sonic metaphor to describe an event between sound and statue
must be duly considered. Regardless of whether it is framed in terms of its
technological or ontotheological attributes, phonography is still a concept
that by its very nature privileges the ethos of the heard over the seen (not
to mention the touched, an important distinction in the phenomenology of
sculpture that will be addressed later). A phonographic Colossus, then, truly
does become an empty container for a sounded mystery, and nothing more.
The sculpted ear is my attempt to get at the same questions I tried to
articulate through phonography while cognizant of the problems that the
audiovisual litany presents for any such project. Thus the chapters in this
book, in pursuance of articulating a sculpted ear, draw from an expansive
notion of contextualized hearing in tandem with an equally expansive notion
of the social mobility of statuary. Sounds and statues are less an endpoint
than a platform to expound upon subjective, intersubjective, and cultural
readings of these complex and richly detailed assemblages. Actual sounds,
imagined sounds, desired sounds, inscribed sounds, transcendent sounds,
theoretical sounds, and silent sounds come into play, weaving paths from
the infancy of Western metaphysics to present-day Chicago. These sonic
imprints become associated with actual statues, ruined statues, statuesque
objects, allegorical statues, people performing as statues, and statuesque
people questioning their statuesque qualities. At the nexus of these assem-
blages are those whose ears are sculpted, attuned to the possibility of an
 Introduction 9

encounter with an event between sound and statuary and, in turn, using
this attunement to create extensive avenues to perform and perpetuate its
efficacy. This is a visage borne from the forge of what Jacques Rancière calls
the “sensible fabric of experience,” something not beholden to ideology or
tradition so much as to the “welcoming of images, objects and performances
that seemed most opposed to the idea of fine art,” and to a ceaseless repeti-
tion aimed at broadcasting the magic of the encounter through alternative
means.10 As those familiar with Deleuze know, repetition and difference share
the same table. Although each chapter features a particular event between
sound and statuary at its core, the path taken from that event diverges
through uniquely crafted philosophical corridors. Some of these concepts
and ideas will dovetail into the sphere of other chapters and weave together
a brief but potent conceptual sinew. Others will remain more contextual-
ized, capturing the unique qualities of a particular historical moment. By
keeping the theoretical trajectory of the book somewhat fragmented, I am
trying to avoid replacing one tautology of epistemic closure with another,
one that memorializes the sounding statue with the material and craft of
intellectual labor. Rather, I want to produce a text that echoes the almost
limitless diversity of these encounters, perhaps spurring readers to recount
their own encounters with events between sound and statuary, and rumi-
nating upon the extensions of those events and recognizing a sculpting of
their own ears that had perhaps escaped notice.
I begin The Sculpted Ear within the fulcrum of the anxiety surrounding
animation. Because this idea has beset the sounding statue almost from the
start, it will first be necessary to address a history where this anxiety was
sourced in the possibility of some elusive and all-powerful animating cata-
lytic substance, and the potential consequences inherent in the belief that
such a catalyst exists. Chapter 1 will begin this work by grounding anima-
tion within discourses on modern aesthetics, sound art, and terminologies
of listening/hearing. Central to this grounding will be the argument that
an anthropology of the senses represents the best means by which we can
elucidate the sounding statue as event. Chapter 2 will continue it through
the tableaux of a well-worn aesthetic critique that has carried dire implica-
tions for the sounding statue: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 essay on the
statue of Laocoön. Lessing famously used the stoic mouth on the ancient
statue of the Trojan priest to argue that sculpture could not properly capture
the emotional fervor of a scream. The essay, in a sense, did much to facili-
tate the aesthetic silencing of the statue that persists to this day. However,
10 The Sculpted Ear

within Lessing’s critique lies a potent conceptual legacy of sounding—the

substance known as pneuma, a universal medium based in air that informed
a litany of philosophical, religious, and scientific cosmologies from antiquity
until the nineteenth century. There is a long history implicating pneuma as
an ontotheological presence suturing together sound and voice in statues,
and its declining influence beginning in the Enlightenment coincided with
both the broader rejection of the metaphysical vocality of statued sound. By
the nineteenth century, pneuma was considered no more existentially prev-
alent than premodern magic. However, there is also a fervent material and
scientific history behind pneuma that complicates this narrative. Its perva-
sive power was centered in the inability of premodern science to render
pneuma in an observable state while simultaneously unable to disprove its
existence. As such, pneuma holds to important implications for this project.
First, because it continually bifurcated the metaphysical and material strata,
pneuma alters the potential social consequences of the sounding statue.
Instead of a mere magical curiosity, it becomes an object that could portend
a destabilization of established authority and power through the mechanism
of the voice. Second, because pneuma was thought to be a central motiva-
tor to the entire sensory schema of human experience, it unveils a history
where aurality was considered multisensory, intersubjective, and embodied.
A pneumatic hearing, then, presaged many of our modern perspectives on
what it means to hear, and the sounding statue was one of the most fervent
sites through which such a hearing could unfold.
Chapter 3 takes the multifaceted aurality surrounding the relation-
ship between pneuma and hearing and juxtaposes it to a particular type of
sculptural object: the automaton. More specifically, I seek to challenge the
historical status of the automaton as a means to ground the sounding statue
as a technological object within the bounds of the Enlightenment’s ratio-
nal aesthetic order. The case I use to demonstrate is an infamous statue/
automaton/organ known as Tipu’s Tiger, which depicts a European man being
mauled by a tiger with requisite screams and growls activated by an assem-
bly of bellows triggered by an external crank. The Tiger was a military spoil
captured by the British from Tipu Fath Ali Khan of Mysore in 1799 and has
been prominently displayed in various London museums since that time. Its
potent notoriety in nineteenth-century Britain, I argue, complicates a prevail-
ing narrative casting the automaton as a more rational, modern cousin of the
sounding statue due to its mechanical apparatuses. On one hand, the Brit-
ish public engaged with it as an oddity tied to a sense of Imperial exoticism.
 Introduction 11

At the same time, many of those people connected the sounding portions of
the mechanism to the world of magic and the occult. In hearing the mauling
growl, muffled scream, and peculiar organ, the Empire’s cosmopolitans were
themselves consumed by the aurality inherent in the tiger’s seductive power.
Chapter 4 expands the relationship between sound and statuary into
another level of representational abstraction, that of humans perform-
ing as statues in the theatrical and musical arts. Central to this concept is
the relationship between sound and materiality, borne out of the fact that
the performer is not made of the material implied by the statue he or she
is representing. I argue that this relationship between human voice and
performing inanimate material was profoundly affected by the reappearance
of the Commendatore in the form of a statue during Act II in Mozart’s Don
Giovanni. Specifically, I hold that the way Mozart wrote the vocal part for
the Commendatore reflected an awareness of the material illusion presented
by the character: in other words, trying to imagine what an actually existing
singing statue of stone would sound like. This awareness carried two broader
implications. First, the Commendatore character refigured the prevailing
tradition of writing the animated statue in opera (evident in various tell-
ings of the Pygmalion myth throughout the eighteenth century), creating a
potent legacy for those wishing to inhabit the sounding statue as a performa-
tive trope. Second, and most important, it represented a new perspective in
elucidating the interplay between aurality and the ontology of sound within
the rubric of the statue. Instead of trying to conceptualize the meaning of a
sonic presence by making a statue more human, the Commendatore repre-
sented an attempt to understand it by making a human more statue-esque.
Chapter 5 takes the juncture of sound, material, and performance intro-
duced through the Commendatore and expands it into questions of race,
gender, and identity in the avenue of self-representation and, by proxy, a
sort of hearing-oneself in material composition. I unpack this issue through
a contemporary wax sculpture of singer Josephine Baker in a museum at
her former estate at Milandes in France. Recent scholarship has attempted
to show the ways in which Baker’s performing body was constructed as a
sculptural object reflecting both the metallic sheen of the modern surface,
and the exotic beauty of the black feminine body. The material of bronze
would seem ideal to capture this embodied duality, yet she chose to repre-
sent herself in the ephemeral and duller material of wax. I argue that this
wax body represents an intersection between three interrelated discourses
regarding statued aurality. The first is the long and problematic history of
12 The Sculpted Ear

juxtaposing the material bronze with black skin in Western sculpture. The
second are literary examples where sonic vibrations emanating from metal
statues are imagined to control the minds and bodies of listeners. The third
is the use of wax as one of the first materials in the mass reproduction of
sound and in the late nineteenth century. Taken together, they create a means
to understand Baker’s wax visage as an object of sonic memory—obliquely
referencing her voice without preserving it as such. Wax, in essence, creates
a material apparatus that silently reinforces the presence of her denigrated
and silenced singing voice.
Chapter 6 takes the specter of silence introduced through Baker’s wax
and expands its importance in two significant ways. First, it acknowledges the
lack of sound in statues as a trait that is heard and given meaning by those
who engage with them. Second, it explores how hearing silence in statues
evokes a visceral political dimension, as well as a cultural or aesthetic one.
In making these points, I consider the bronze statue of Aleksandar Nikolov,
a Bulgarian violinist and comedian from the city of Plovdiv active during
the early Communist period (ca. 1944–1989). Popularly known as “Sasho
Sladura,” Nikolov was arrested and killed in an internment camp in 1961,
an event still considered tragic by an older generation of Bulgarians. I argue
that Nikolov’s bronze statue in Plovdiv, which mimetically captures him as
he looked during his peak, paradoxically represents his sounded life through
the lack of emanating sound. This sculpted silence mirrors the destruction
both of Nikolov’s physical body, and the attempts by the state to erase all
traces of his existence after his death (including arrest records and record-
ings). In essence, the only means by which the sonic life of Nikolov can be
preserved is through the ironically silent form of the statue, and the actual
physical silence creates a space of sonic memory invoking the repression
and political silencing common during that era of Bulgarian history.
The political resonance of silence in the aurality surrounding statues
and the violence it entails has also found resonance in the physical sciences
during the twentieth century. Recent work in sound studies has attempted
to frame vibration as a field of affect that operates on the body prior to the
interposition of signification, often in connection to tropes of state control
and aural violence. Chapter 7 critiques this particular stance with regard to
the relationship between sound and statuary through the writings of Donald
Hatch Andrews, a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University who
published several works in the 1960s and early 1970s conceptualizing of
the quantum vibrations of subatomic particles in terms of musical sound.
 Introduction 13

He proposed that every statue carried a unique molecular sonic signature

existing beyond the range of human hearing that could be catalogued by
machinery and used to create a new music theory based on the temperament
of vibrating particles. Though his dream never became manifest, Andrews’s
work did lay the groundwork for using technology to transform statues into
objects of aural performance in the public sphere. And we are beginning to
hear Andrews’s dream of spaces populated by sounding statues, in sympa-
thetic resonance with the people who surround them, though in a very
different medium than he envisioned. Such is the case with Statue Stories
Chicago, a program employing actors to record short monologues in the
persona of statues throughout the city that people can listen to using their
mobile devices. One of the statues, that of Chicago native Bob Newhart at
Navy Pier in the guise of his character from the eponymous 1970s televi-
sion show, has dialogue recorded by Newhart himself. Newhart embodying
Newhart with his own voice, I propose, brings the long and troublesome
tautology regarding the relationship between sounding statues and the meta-
physics of vocal presence full circle. It creates a unique condition in which a
living person voices his own representation, an act that turns the relation-
ship between sound and death on its head. This opens up a very different
possibility for an anthropology of sounding statues similar to work being
done on contemporary sound art, sound installations, and sonic architecture
in urban spaces that centers upon the public relationship between object and
hearer, rather than the presence of the object itself. It represents nothing
less than a move toward making an event-based experience of the sound-
ing statue in the contemporary public sphere an ordinary phenomenon.
At this juncture, I should elucidate my reasons for emphasizing the
concept of hearing, rather than listening, as the cornerstone for aurality
that will appear throughout this book. Although the two words are often
colloquially synonymous, there have been attempts to delineate important
differences between them as means of articulating the perception of sound.
These manifest into a kind of auditory litany, divided within the realm of the
sonic in a fashion not unlike the audiovisual litany developed by Sterne. In
the most basic sense, this auditory litany unfolds as such: listening is consid-
ered active and psychological, while hearing is understood as passive and
physiological. Listening is of the mind; hearing is of the body. Following
this logic, one would expect listening to encompass the epistemological,
thinking ear, and hearing the ontological, resonant one. However, a clear
dichotomy cannot be built between them with such ease. The connections
14 The Sculpted Ear

between listening and epistemology can be easily ascertained. Listening

depends on an active aural engagement with a sound or an object emanating
sound, treating that sound as an object. Listening is inherently directional,
focusing on what the subject chooses to hear, and filtering based on precon-
ceived personal, social, and cultural criteria of what is worth listening to.
Listening is also implicated in the perpetuation of power and surveillance
regarding the cementing of social and cultural hierarchies, as well as in
acts and mentalities that attempt to undermine them.11 As such, it draws a
certain companionship with rationalizing, thinking sight still at the heart of
constructing the sensory subject in the West, making ear into another kind
of eye. Or, as Salomé Voegelin suggests, the act of listening generates the
meanings imagined in that which is heard.12 But hearing carries a rich, rele-
vant epistemological life as well outside of its cornering within the bounds
of the litany. Hearing lacks the more obvious object orientation, transcends
the engagement with physical sound, and basks in its ephemerality. Recog-
nizing the specific lack of object association, Heidegger associated hearing as
an engagement with sound (via language) “already underway, without ever
coming to be limited to the self or to presence.”13 Hearing goes even further,
specifically engaging with the noncochlear unsounds that also permeate the
social, historical, and methodological dimensions of sounding and sound
reproduction. The kind of hearing that results from transforming the act of
punctuation (as in periods and question marks) into an act of auscultation
(applying the ear directly to the body to hear its internal sounds), what Peter
Szendy calls the “otology of thinking.”14 This step, into the thinking sounds
that do not sound, makes hearing the more resonant word when considering
the relationship between sound and statuary, separating it from the object
presence inherent in listening to. In other words, the epistemology of listen-
ing is dependent upon the ontology of sonic presence; the epistemology of
hearing is self-emergent, growing out of the act of thinking about hearing
itself (no actual sounds need apply).
Mapped back upon the subject of this book, such a designation parses
the language I use to describe that subject with a dose of anecdotal flair.
Consider it a mantra to keep in mind when reading this book, if you will. A
sounding statue is an object that you listen to; an event between sound and
statuary is something that you hear.
Chapter 1

Animation Introduces Animation

I recall a throwaway joke in the beginning of a Simpsons episode called “Guess

Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner?” that, in retrospect, may have been my
first indication that statues could possibly be something other than silent
monoliths. The setup has Lisa and her classmates going on a field trip being
chaperoned by Homer, part of the usual first-act machinations that serve
to establish the forthcoming plot. Surprised that her notoriously unreliable
father is being, well, reliable, she queries further with regard to this abnor-
mal behavior. “Dad, it’s great that you volunteered to drive,” she asks, “but
how did you get out of work?” Homer looks to the sky while grazing his
chest with half-clenched fingers, wearing a self-assured grin that longtime
viewers will recognize as the beginning of trouble coming to Springfield.
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” he tells her with a loveable but slightly condescend-
ing tone. “Daaaaaady’s got it covered.” The scene shifts to his workstation at
the nuclear power plant, where Homer has concocted an anthropomorphic
avatar out of odds and ends that he has left slouching in a chair. His hurried
bricolage should fool no one. A metal pail adorned with oblong, vacant coffee
cup eyes and an expressionless streak of red paint for a mouth tops a mop
handle; tree branch limbs are capped off by sagging rubber gloves; and two
pillows are stuffed under an ill-fitting white shirt, their simulated midriff
girth the only aspect properly representing the fidelity of its subject. But to
amplify the ruse even further, Homer attached a tape recorder to the chest
of the facsimile, playing an inept homemade cover of Donna Summer’s “She
16 The Sculpted Ear

Works Hard for the Money.” I offer the lyrics to the reader in full to relish
all of its misbegotten glory:

I work hard for the money

So hard for the money
Oh-wah something something money
Come on, give me lots of honey

At that point, C. Montgomery Burns and Waylon Smithers pass the doorway
and gaze upon the sounding monstrosity that Homer created. (Good thing
he took the clever step of giving the verse iterations enough space that they
would not interrupt their conversation.) “Now there’s an employee, Smith-
ers,” Burns exclaims with his usual sedated glee. “A smile on his lips, and
a song in his heart. Promote him!” We immediately cut to a scene at some
point in the future, showing the crude figure seated in an executive office,
the tape recorder playing a labored distortion of the song as the batteries
die. Then, to end the joke in a way most apropos for the aesthetic of The
Simpsons, the machine explodes without warning in the midst of its death
throes, catching the faux Homer and the rest of the office on fire. But not
before you can hear the beleaguered voice on the recorder mustering its last
reserves to plead for someone to turn the tape over, as if a last-second inter-
vention would prevent the pail-headed homunculus from self-destructing.
A certain symmetry emerges from an animated television program
encapsulating the perceived perils about animation in statuary. I mean this
as more than a simple rhetorical flourish. As an art that most associate
with the prevalence of the eye, sculpture finds that most visceral of viola-
tions in animation. Anxiety over the specter of movement in a statue, and
the pernicious worlds of possibility that such movement opens, represent
an important preamble to the anxious worlds that sound opens up in the
same context. And an instance where sound alone provides the animating
impulse unearths the root of this anxiety still obscured when only regard-
ing movement. But a more general sense of animation is where we must
start. In the previous chapter, I argued that we could best understand the
sounding statue through the terms of event metaphysics instead of merely
as an object. Getting to that point, though, requires some delicate conceptual
tracing back into this history regarding animation that does consider it an
object first and foremost. It is a history that articulates where the language
supporting a vaporous orthodoxy encapsulated by the word “creepy” would
 Animation Introduces Animation 17

come from. A history that shows how the creation of modern aesthetics
functioned as a response to this language, and why trying to pull sound into
this aesthetics as a solution to the problem of the sounding statue created
more problems than it solved. And, most importantly, a history impossible
to conceive without an ear that works in tandem with the eye. Sound may
not always be present in this broader history of animation, but the example
of Homer’s sounding avatar should make us begin to consider its relative
importance in the discourse surrounding that animation, and the doors
sound can open that mere movement cannot.
•••••••

Tales of the sculpted coming to life and walking among the living are as old
as the art of anthropocentric sculpture itself, with too many examples in
literature, poetry, theatre, and film to count. Embedded within most accounts
are numerous archetypal responses, almost as many as the tales themselves:
desire, fear, ambivalence, and fascination. The most famous stories fit into
or tell a lesson about a particular emotive domain. From Ovid comes the
myth of Pygmalion: the Cypriot sculptor whose love for his lifelike ivory
statue of a woman culminated in a granting of life by the goddess Aphrodite.
From rabbinical traditions comes the golem of Rabbi Loew: a being crafted
from mud and brought to life with Hebrew incantations to defend Prague’s
Jewish population from Christian pogroms, only to run amok through the
very city it was tasked to protect. More recently, the animated statue has
become a trope less imbued with the gravity of desire or religious signifi-
cance than an object of weird kitsch. Elvis and Homer are merely the tip of
the iceberg. One infamous example (and a personal favorite) comes from the
opening of John Boorman’s 1973 cult classic Zardoz, where a floating stone
head lectures a group of transfixed men that “the gun is good . . . , the penis
is evil” before vomiting a cache of firearms and ammunition from its mouth
onto a beach. Some may also remember an infamous 1985 music video by
the band Starship where the Abraham Lincoln Memorial leaps from his
marble throne and proclaims with Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick that we
built this city on rock and roll.
The widely divergent tone of various animation fantasies in the Western
imagination were charted by Kenneth Gross in his 1992 book The Dream of
a Moving Statue, a landmark text on the historical and philosophical impli-
cations of statues coming to life. Gross contends, among other observations,
that the imposition of animation is completely within the purview of the
living, leaving the statue with no real agency in the act. Therefore, it is
18 The Sculpted Ear

difficult to construct a unifying principle regarding animation because the

motives and cultural predilections surrounding these fantasies are so diverse.
But this very ubiquity has allowed the animation fantasy to maintain a
consistent resilience throughout a heterogeneity of cultural practices and
ideals in the West since antiquity. “There are few ideas that can be more
immediately haunting than the thought of a statue coming to life, few that
tap a more fundamental wish,” Gross writes to give perspective to the anima-
tion trope. He continues:

It is one of our oldest images of the work of magic, one of our

most primitive metafictions, something capable of unsettling our
accepted versions of the real. But it is also one of the most trite and
conventional of our fantasies; indeed, nothing can seem more liter-
alistic, or a better example of what we call kitsch, than the idea of
waking up an immobile statue, nothing that enacts a more stupefy-
ing violence on certain works of sculpture. The effect of this is that
our investments in the fantasy tend continually to be put to the test;
the fantasy always invites and continually resists our attempts to
make sense of it, to place its motives and seductions.1

There is a type of animated statue for all comers, to be sure. But Gross warns
that to focus the power of animation on the fantastic and imaginary neglects
a darker ethos where the act of animation commits an act of “stupefying
violence” on a statue. He connects this violence to that which Charles Baude-
laire noticed with regard to the toys of children. The inability of the toy or
the statue to manifest the proper response of liveliness, to show they in fact
were embedded with a soul, exposed the fantasy as exactly that, leading to a
disavowal of said toy or statue as a magical object and potential companion.2
Sound presented itself as a potent but troublesome manifestation of
this desire for animation. Unlike movement, its source could not be parsed
and readily determined by the skepticism of the rational eye, particularly
in the age prior to the development of mechanical reproduction. Yet even in
the world wrought by the phonograph, any locative supposition would be
necessarily beset by doubt, since per Western aesthetics no rational person
should consider sound to be an attribute associated with a statue. To this way
of thinking the statue was the anti-phonograph: an object where the sonic
at best can be an unwanted acousmatic supplement. This is why the rela-
tionship between sound and statuary, when considered at all by the modern
 Animation Introduces Animation 19

mind-set, was often understood in caustic metaphysical terms. Supersti-

tion, idolatry, and magic became the modus operandi that faced rigorous
challenges from the ideals of reason and scientific naturalism. From these
lines of inquiry stemmed numerous rationalizations for distancing from
sound. Existential denial was common, casting any sonic manifestation as
the result of hallucination or overactive imaginations. There was also a bevy
of technological explanations, embracing industrial sources and mechanical
processes that rendered those objects as mere novelties, or worse yet hoaxes
intended to goad and manipulate those who believe in divine manifesta-
tions. This thread, in particular, was the source of many intriguing tales of
fiction and apocrypha. E. T. A. Hoffman’s Nathanael falls in love with the
automaton Olimpia and is driven insane once he finds out she is not a real
person. Thomas Aquinas reacts to a talking automaton created by his mentor
Albertus Magnus by smashing it to pieces (much to the chagrin of the schol-
arly elder, who worked diligently in its construction). While some sources
claimed Aquinas was merely annoyed by the statue interrupting his work,
others capitalized on his reputation for piety to claim the destruction was to
eliminate a vulgar reproduction of the human voice.3 Even among the lite-
rati, an aural occurrence could incite violence against the body of the statue
if understood as evidence of a demonic possession or some other phantas-
magorical presence, despite its technological veneer being exposed.
Such metaphysical or technological rationalizing was no doubt connected
to the inescapable proximity of the anthropocentric statue with the death
narrative. Part of the power behind the animation fantasy was in how it inter-
twined with the fear that an unanimated statue suspended the human body
in a state prior to carnal demise. “We recognize in the statue an image of
the fate of bodies,” Gross writes, “to provide ourselves with idealized stone
mirrors” and provide a wedge in death’s door.4 The cultural utility of this
reflective aspect has long been noticed and actualized. When statues of the
famous and powerful were made to manifest the bodies of the dead, they
not only represented that person as they appeared in life. These statues also
became, as Katherine Verdery has aptly noted, the projection of that indi-
vidual beyond the confines of the physical body into the undead temporal
and spiritual nebulousness defining the collectivity of the body politic. “Stat-
ues,” she tells us, “symbolize a specific famous person while in a sense also
being the body of that person. . . . [A] statue alters the temporality associated
with the person, bringing him into the realm of the timeless or sacred, like
an icon.”5 Erecting them signifies a desire to remember, honor, or preserve
20 The Sculpted Ear

people and happenings, while bringing to mind a field of transcendence for

our own ordinary bodies. By contrast, tearing them down displays a desire
for erasure, or a symbolic act of violence against someone already dead or
otherwise not present, making us think about the mortality of that ordi-
nary body and the “stupefying violence” that may await it. If someone as
epoch-transforming as Lenin could be toppled in plain sight and in living
color, the thinking goes, what does that mean for our chances?
Because of its perceived qualities of ephemerality and ubiquity, sound
often amplified this already present death fixation with statuary into a rather
grotesque gloss of performativity. The spectacle of the death scream becomes
the expected sonic companion to an embodied object so closely tied to funer-
ary ritual and remembrance, and its howl when attached to the statue could
push the Platonic disquiet toward mimetic art to the very limit. Some of
the more macabre examples displayed a morbid creativity that would make
most moderns feel queasy, to say the least. Bruce Boehrer describes a prac-
tice among early modern English Protestants of burning cats within papal
effigies to simulate the effect of the human scream, in lieu of going to the
trouble of burning actual Catholics.6 Further afield, documents of question-
able historical accuracy but undeniable historical impact perpetuate stories
of burning the living to give earthly voice to the transcendent. Several medi-
eval rabbinical commentaries mention bronze statues of the Canaanite god
Moloch built with compartments to house animals and children, who were
then burned together in a dire polyphony. That such stories evoke a tangible
mix of disgust and fascination is evident in the references and adaptations
of this story into the aesthetic realm, right down to modern popular culture
laden with touches of pagan stereotyping in the service of horror. Who can
forget that each incarnation of The Wicker Man ends with a man being burned
alive (spoilers, sorry) in a wooden facsimile of a human body in accordance
with a profane ceremony? The effect is chilling in the 1973 version star-
ing Edward Woodward, and a farcical delight in the 2006 remake starring
Nicolas Cage. Still, each presentation of the effigy shares a common affect:
the living source of the sound becomes indistinguishable from the material
body of the statue containing him, manifesting only as a tortured signifier
of that which could not scream on its own.
Even absent the moral repugnance of human immolation, sound was
clearly instrumental in making the affect of death surrounding the statue
untenable. So one cannot help but understand the intellectual impetus to
reframe questions about the ontological status of the statue away from the
 Animation Introduces Animation 21

death narrative and to recast a proper history of sculpture exclusively in

terms of a rational aesthetics. Though this move started in earnest during
the Renaissance, it was embraced with particular fervor during the eigh-
teenth century, as the terms of Enlightenment sought to vanquish the profane
magic fueling rituals like those associated with Moloch. Essayists on sculp-
ture, such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Étienne Maurice Falconet,
perpetuated an ideal of pristine beauty and undifferentiated form at the heart
of classical sculpture, which was to be the model for crafting statues in the
modern age. Falconet, in particular, noticed the limited palette of compo-
sitional effects available to the sculptor as opposed to the painter, and he
thus championed the aspects of formal austerity and demanding craftsman-
ship thought to subvert issues of mimetic fidelity.7 There was also debate
over what relationship, at the level of the subject, existed between aesthetic
judgment of a statue and the broader sensory engagement with an exter-
nal object. Are statues, as Locke would hold, objects like any other that
imprint through sensation on the “white paper” of the human mind?8 Or do
their human forms uniquely transcend the symbolic to present the purest
expression of the human spirit and the ideal of beauty, as in Hegel’s view?9
Or does the anxiety of resemblance in the statue create a middling space,
as Kant argues when discussing sculpture’s role in mediating the tension
between illusion and appearance—where the more animated in texture and
hue a statue appears, the more aesthetic pleasure a viewer derives from it?10
Perhaps no eighteenth-century text engaged with these questions more
fervently than Johann Gottfried Herder’s 1778 essay Der Plastik (Sculpture).
The book was noteworthy as one of the first attempts to devote an entire
volume to sculpture alone, apart from the other visual arts and architecture.
And in general, Herder shared with contemporaries like Winckelmann and
Falconet an interest in the sublime bodily perfection of classical Greek sculp-
ture in stark contrast to forms of Baroque excess. He was somewhat unique,
though, in lambasting the universalizing and rationalized aesthetics of the
Enlightenment that attempted to transplant Greek notions of beauty into the
modern age. As such, Herder was among the first aesthetic historicists. But
the true novelty of Der Plastik was in how he understood the relationship
between the senses and the burgeoning field of modern aesthetic philoso-
phy. In previous work, Herder had argued that any proper aesthetics must
be delineated toward the sense best capable of ascertaining the art in ques-
tion. Sight may work for painting, but not as well for music. Expanding
upon the empiricist perspective on the sensory accumulation of knowledge,
22 The Sculpted Ear

Herder was one of the first to challenge the conception that the eye was the
sole organ through which states of beauty could be ascertained. Instead, he
argued sculpture made evident the role that tactility played in ascertaining
the beautiful essence of an object in three dimensions—such as the human
body—in ways that painting and literature could not. “What is so uncom-
monly certain and definite in a sculpture,” Herder writes, “is that, because it
presents a human being, a fully animated body, it speaks to us as an act; it
seizes hold of us and penetrates our very being, awakening the full range of
responsive human feeling.”11 More specifically, Herder acknowledged that the
sense of touch allows for a unique perceptive process denied to the eye that
allows us to see the statue as two kinds of presence. The first is as a unified
body—a presence in the world—as opposed to a simple amalgamation of
unrelated surfaces jumbled together. The second is as an entity competing
for space among the living, in contrast to the two-dimensional bodies of
painting or the tangible lack of embodiment in music. Reception and space
were both important components of aesthetic judgment for Herder, and the
senses working collaboratively provided the only recourse to accomplish
this goal with regard to sculpture.
While the intent behind Herder’s proto-Kantian recourse to a multi-
sensory aesthetic paradigm reconciling the discords between Cartesian
rationalism and Lockean empiricism was laudable, it manifested with unin-
tended consequences. In the end, he could not move far enough from the
narrow ahistorical conceptualization of sculpture from antiquity that domi-
nated his age. Never mind that the Greek concept of sculpture they lionized
was far more open toward the possibility of animation (and of sounding)
than often thought by Enlightenment writers.12 A larger issue was that by
the height of Romanticism, the austerity of form they prized made statues
seem more like pedagogical devices than actual works of art. This idea was
no doubt in the mind of American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt when he
pithily defined a sculpture as “something you bump into when you back up
to look at a painting.”13 The most critical problem, and source of the most
formal innovation, was the sculptural primacy given to the human body as
object, regardless of the quality of subjective judgment. This problematic
anthropocentrism validated by Enlightenment aesthetics was increasingly
questioned by a litany of modernist and postmodernist sculptors working
throughout the twentieth century. Wildly different in method and craft,
they shared in practice a desire to experiment with ideas about embodi-
ment and representation, turning away from the primacy of capturing beauty
 Animation Introduces Animation 23

expressed by the human form. Peter Gay refers to this attitude toward sculp-
ture within modernist aesthetics as the “anti-mimetic” turn, drawing from
the influence of early twentieth-century experimentalists such as Auguste
Rodin and Constantin Brancusi.14 Although both were driven away from the
human form by aesthetic concerns, the practices of anti-mimetic sculpture
that developed in their wake owed as much to social and political concerns
as aesthetic boundary pushing. European sculptors responded to the failure
of Enlightenment rationality in wake of the First World War and the rise
of German and Italian fascism by turning toward influences from nonca-
nonical places and times.15 The perpetuation of a social dimension to art
continued to gain relevance through the 1960s, as a further fragmentation
of form in the work of minimalist and other avant-garde sculptors centered
in New York reflected a more general fragmentation in the experience of
modernity under capitalism and Cold War anxieties. As the intersections
between previously separate aesthetics of form, material, space, and time
became diffuse, sculptors began to increasingly experiment with combining
them, creating works that would have been unrecognizable to practitioners
and aesthetes from prior generations.16 The very notion of sculpture was
continually becoming unmoored from the universal desires of Enlighten-
ment aesthetics, instead becoming a field of possibility driven by attention
given to moments, places, and subjective experiences.
The world of art criticism held mixed reactions to these moves. Arbi-
ters of high modernism like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried greeted
this liquidation of formal coherence with a great deal of skepticism. Others
embraced the potential this fluidity held for the construction of meaning.
One of the most influential pieces in this regard was a 1978 essay called
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in which Rosalind Krauss mapped some
the implications behind this aesthetic shift. Responding to concerns that
the entire concept of sculpture had become increasingly meaningless as
notions of material and embodiment continued to expand, Krauss argued
that the trajectory of sculptural aesthetics since the onset of modernism was
defined by an increasing recourse to negation of form as a form in itself.
This meant a mediation away not just from ideas about the universal beauty
of the body but the very idea that sculpture was defined by its status as an
object in space. Within the expansive paradigms popularized during the
1960s, space and object could blur together, manifesting as an ephemeral
continuum of possibility drawing in artist and nonartist alike into a histor-
ically contingent complex of creation, aesthetic judgment, and experience.
24 The Sculpted Ear

Sculpture, Krauss concludes, “is no longer organized around the definition of

a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the percep-
tion of material. It is organized instead through the universe of terms that
are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation.”17
Embedded within this blurring of subject and object were the possi-
bilities of more resonant, productive relationships in which statues could
become models for an exteriority of habitation and dwelling in a human-
built world. If the use of words like “habitation” and “dwelling” seem to echo
a Heideggerian stance, this is because an aging Martin Heidegger pursued
this particular avenue himself in a short 1968 essay titled “Art and Space.”
The piece captures Heidegger’s attempt to ponder the marriage of sculpture
and space as a means to create nothing less than a concept of antimeta-
physical art. Rather than thinking of space as a void that the sculpted body
fills with rugged autonomy, he understood space as an integral part of the
sculpture’s extension into the world—and thus the sculpture itself. Sculp-
ture’s primary form becomes not the body, but the extension of that body,
promoting others to think of themselves as extensions in a similar fashion.
The word Heidegger uses to describe this elasticity is “radiance,” intended
to capture the sheer magical qualities of being-in-the-world in ways uncor-
rupted by the limitless cooptation and production inherent to modernity.
What was once the object of aesthetic judgment (the statue) becomes for
Heidegger a model for bodily extension into the habitable world.
Despite being written by a philosophical titan, “Art and Space” remains
a fairly obscure part of discourses on art criticism. But it is significant in
that it creates an epistemic crack through which a mentality surrounding the
sonic obliquely sneaks into the sculptural milieu. In his turn toward sculp-
tural questions, Heidegger chose to collaborate with Spanish Basque sculptor
Eduardo Chillida, who also viewed sculpture as a limitless melding of body
and space. Chillida, though, uniquely framed the elastic aura that sculpture
foregrounds in terms of a “vibrational harmony” not dissimilar to musical
sound. He intimates as much in a 1967 interview, where Chillida states that
“sculpture and music exist in the same harmonious and ever developing
space. The volume of musical sound fills the silence with tension; similarly
there could be no volume in sculpture without the emptiness of space. In
the void the form can continue to vibrate beyond its own limits; the space
and the volume together, selecting from all the potential structures inher-
ent in the form, build up its final shape. The rhythm is determined by the
form and is renewed with it.”18
 Animation Introduces Animation 25

Andrew Mitchell, one of the few Heideggerian scholars to pay heed to

the collaboration with Chillida, argues that this vibrational quality between
body and spirit is extended to manifestations of bodies in space. These
bodies resonate affectively with one another to the point that the subject-
object dichotomy becomes fluid and “confrontation” gives way to vibrational
resonance. This creates what Mitchell terms a “poetic space of relation”:
expressions of an intimacy between nominally discreet bodies where the
lines between artist, material, interloper, space, and culture become fluid
and collaborative. “Sculpture can no longer be viewed as a confrontation,”
Mitchell concludes, because “a confrontation requires two parties.”19
At the time of his interview, the musical metaphor planted by Chill-
ida was already becoming anything but metaphorical. For the ephemeral
transformation of sculptural practice identified by Krauss and Heidegger
coincided with technologies of preservation making sound more material-
like than ever before. The consequence was that sound could legitimately
enter the realm of sculpture as both a material presence and a spatial delin-
eator, defined as much by its material and object properties as its immaterial
ones. The term sound art has become something of a catchall designation
to capture the variety of practices developed in this wake that utilized
sound beyond the confines of music. Early figures like Pierre Schaeffer and
John Cage experimented with the capabilities of sound itself as an object,
extracted from, resonating with, and commenting upon the environments
from which they were drawn. By the 1960s, sculptors began to utilize
sound as a means to create variety and genre blurring while in combina-
tion with more orthodox sculptural materials, often containing elements
of live performance or participatory arrangements.20 Then there are the
large-scale sound installations pioneered by figures like Max Neuhaus
combining material, architecture, space, and sound that serve to, as Bran-
don LaBelle argues, make the visitor “aware of one’s own body, as ear canal,
as sensitive skin, as vibrating sympathetic vessel.”21 Instead of penetrat-
ing the viewer through the idealism of physical form, à la Herder, sound
installations penetrated the listener with a tangible ontological force, often
for the purpose of producing physiological reactions privileging experi-
ence over contemplation. Such engagement outlined the power and allure
of deploying sound in sculptural projects, since it could invoke emotional
responses with immediacy. Resonating the ear and the body provided a
different, more encompassing experience than appealing to the eye alone
ever could.
26 The Sculpted Ear

One may think that the mere presence of modern sound art validates
and elucidates the relationship between sound and statuary that had trou-
bled denizens of Western sculpture for centuries. Yet sound art is far from
a panacea for the woes of the sounding statue. Yes, it has brought together
sound and sculptural practice in useful pedagogical and hermeneutical terms.
But in this role, where sound becomes an ontological body, sound art only
obscures the issues of embodiment and being that sonicity has raised when
attached to anthropocentric statuary. For all of its novelty regarding sonic
autonomy in space, sound art simultaneously represents another feint to
outflank the same troubling and unanswerable metaphysical issues caused
by sounding statues. And in this task sound art was as much a vulnerable
failure as it seemed successful in its more limited aesthetic endeavors. Even
considering its radical gestures toward issues of embodiment and space,
sound art still relied upon the same inside-out approach common since the
Renaissance: holding identity as an aesthetic object first prior to working
within the field of cultural meaning. The names may change, but the prob-
lems remain the same.
The seeds of this failure are documented in the myriad of criticism
directed at sound art in recent years. These arguments are a wealth of produc-
tive negation, exposing the essentialisms that place sound within the same
rubrics of art theory traditionally associated with painting and sculpture.
Together, they expose the problematic objectification of sound from multi-
ple angles. Some, like Douglas Kahn, think that sound art is too narrow a
term for the diverse practices—often consisting of nonsonic elements—of
the artists often associated with it.22 Others, like Alan Licht, hold that the
concept of sound art is not particularly contemporary, drawing upon estab-
lished relationships between the visual and musical arts dating back centuries
in the West to cynically postulate that its contemporary resonance is driven
by economic concerns.23 Brian Kane goes further, questioning whether sound
art actually extracts the desired object status for itself or merely creates a
dichotomy between sound and its sociability that imbues sound art with
the same dry autonomy of classical art those championing it have hoped
to avoid.24 And Budhaditya Chattopadhyay criticizes the object-orientation
of sound art as a whole, relating that the inherent experience of the sonic
privileges a more fluid subjective mix of not only listening, but “memory,
imagination, and contemplation.”25 The tenor of these statements suggests
that the moniker sound art is simultaneously ahistorical, escapist, even
neoclassical. Consideration of a broader history of the sounding statue gives
 Animation Introduces Animation 27

warrant to push the tone of these criticisms even more. I contend that the
propensity of sound art to recast sound within the guise of a material aesthet-
ics derived from the history of sculpture becomes something of a Faustian
arrangement. There was, of course, no Mephistopheles of Western art nego-
tiating and cementing these terms through a blood-soaked quill, no smoky
backroom to house this haggling. Nevertheless, the way this relationship
has unfolded in practice seems surprisingly concrete when considered as
a grand bargain. Objectified sound is given an aesthetic recourse to mate-
rial embodiment and the discreetness of spatial boundary in exchange for
a silence that secures the aesthetic efficacy of the anthropocentric statue.
The benefit for sound art is apparent. Sound no longer needs connection
to the anthropocentric body to become a materially affective phenomenon
where spatial presence, movement, and affect become the cornerstone of its
aesthetic oeuvre. And if sound can become sculptural, what possible need is
there for the statue to allow sound a foothold and bring with it all of its asso-
ciated cultural anxieties? Far from securing a place for the sounding statue
as an art object, sound art becomes a compromise that merely compromises
the ability for the sounding statue to escape its liminal aesthetic position
and enter the realm of the mundane.
When taking together the twin-sided objectification of classical sculp-
ture and sound art with the transformative sense of embodiment in modern
sculpture, sounding statues seem to be left with no tangible place of histor-
ical belonging, a specious ontology of nowhere. This is the power inherent
in trying to bypass the death imagination surrounding the essence of statu-
ary at all costs. Once sound was attached to that imagination, there was no
recourse back into the aesthetic oeuvre without detaching it from the statue
entirely. Bringing them back together necessitates an embrace of that which
makes the statue unique among the arts in the cultural milieu of the West.
And this embrace requires burying the hegemonic presence of the aesthetic
while revitalizing the death association and other cultural meanings that
statues have held all along. To this way of thinking, the subsummation of
the cultural statue in modern thought was fundamentally misguided, and
the creation of a hierarchy of judgment toward the statue that valued the
aesthetic first and foremost yet another of the Enlightenment’s weapons in
its endless war against magic. But, to cop a famous if somewhat overused
phrase by Bruno Latour, we have never been completely modern in that
sense. Crafting an absence for these inherent cultural meanings in statues
only serves to illuminate their presence, and make quixotic any hope that
28 The Sculpted Ear

their denial will somehow make them disappear from the modern landscape
entirely.
I can think of no better articulation of this critique than a provocative
argument given by philosopher Michel Serres in his 1987 book Statues,
the esoteric second entry in his “Foundations” trilogy. To hammer home
that any attempt to disassociate the statue from the concept of death was
misplaced and unethical, Serres opens the book’s first chapter (“The Rocket”)
by juxtaposing two seemingly incongruent sites: the 1986 explosion of the
Challenger space shuttle over Cape Canaveral and the Carthaginian practice
of sacrificing children within a heated metal statue of Baal Hammon, a ritual
that supposedly inspired the aforementioned commentaries on Moloch and
was dramatized to great effect in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbo. What
draws together these two events, Serres contends, is a shared sensibility
between ancient and modern cultures for constructing objects of sacrifice
in the name of ideals, which are pursued with fervor and devotion that
could only be defined in terms of religiosity. Undergirding these events
were countless structural and rhetorical similarities. The Carthaginians
were sacrificing humans via colossal idol in the name of divine favor and a
place in the heavens, all the while denying they were sacrificing anything
other than animals. NASA, meanwhile, was sacrificing humans via rocket
in the name of scientific progress and a footprint among the stars, all the
while denying such sacrifice as anything other than accidental. Serres uses
this memorable polemic as a way to articulate an inherent and intractable
thread of magic and ritual practice permeating the essence of modern ratio-
nality to the core.

Like the earth that carries us and the sky that contains us, we have
inherited millions of years of formation and therefore remain archaic
for more than nine-tenths our depth, plunged up to our eyeballs in
the tremendously long past of the wait for science. . . . [W]e don’t
recognize Carthage in Cape Canaveral nor the god Baal in Chal-
lenger, in front of the same deaths. Nor the statue in the rocket, both
metallic and hot, black boxes full of humans. . . . There is a history
of science or of these technologies, certainly, and even several, but
more profoundly there is an anthropology of them. The human-
ities teach this anthropology, without knowing it: when they speak
of statues, they shed light on those of our museums or cemeteries,
but also and above all on torpedoes and missiles.26
 Animation Introduces Animation 29

Statues, for Serres, are less aesthetic objects than receptacles filled to the brim
with the echoes of cultural desires. Even structures built without anthro-
pocentric form in mind (like the rocket) encapsulate those forms within
its body, of those who build that body, and of those who witness and revel
in its cultural enactment. The implication of this thought reaches beyond
the scathing critique of modernity that Serres presents. It also indicts the
entire ethos centered on using aesthetics to isolate the art object from its
lived environment, as Enlightenment writers were so keen on accomplish-
ing. Attempting to do so, Serres argues, would be as doomed to failure as
using science as a rational bulwark against the fascinations driving cultural
practices.27 Only by accepting that statues are as beholden to anthropolog-
ical meanings as much as rational or aesthetic ones can we begin to grasp
what statues really are beyond their material guises.
Serres points us toward a more expansive way of understanding the
relationship between sound and statuary, one that includes (if not fore-
grounds) a different face of the anthro- in anthropocentric. Sounding statues,
if nothing else, present moments of impact in which the veil obscuring a
sounded history to the living ear lifts and reveals that which had always
been there. In doing so, they illuminate the obscured ordinariness of this
relationship while taking it seriously in all its various guises—not only the
more renowned Laocoöns and Commendatores that populate this text, but
the singing Elvises, immolating wicker men, and firearm-vomiting heads
that expose the deficiencies within a tradition of aesthetic critique that
deems them unworthy of acknowledgment. To put it succinctly, sounding
statues are here whether Western art wants them or not. Maybe, though, the
machinations of Western art are not the most important arbiter by which
to judge their efficacy. Statues may be materially marble or bronze, but
they are ontologically plastic in the way Catherine Malabou uses the term,
holding within their own milieu the potential for metamorphosis beyond
the confines of the aesthetic.28 But this sense of plasticity only emerges
when catalyzed by a human element, perhaps the only term upon which
we could say that Herder and Heidegger would be in agreement. Sound
may be the most plastic of the statue’s attributes. And none of this move-
ment is possible without the doubting ear as a first interlocutor, giving
tangible experience to phenomena arising from sites from which there
is little to no expectation of sound. In other words, getting at this history
does not require a more inclusive aesthetics, but a parallel sensory-laden
anthropology.
30 The Sculpted Ear

A useful roadmap toward such an anthropological move, in the broader

context of listening, is provided by Holger Schulze in his 2018 book The
Sonic Persona. Schulze argues that the focus on the abstraction of episte-
mology to comprehend cultural objects neglects and obscures the intimate
way of knowing that can only emerge from the sensory experience of the
body—a very Serresian notion, indeed. This engagement of the senses at
the level of the sonic is inherently perpetual. Sound is always already pres-
ent as the physical constant of the wave and as an expectation, part of an
apparatus of spatial habitation that carries Heideggerian undertones. This
status of physical and social expectation suggests, for Schulze, the neces-
sity of constructing a theory of listening sourced in those moments of sonic
impact, a thinking through sound instead of a thinking about sound: “Sonic
events are not a set of frequencies, of amplitudes and oscillations, of reflec-
tion and abatements in a given, arbitrary environment. In contrast, they are
exactly this present environment in all its highly specific material aspects,
its density, its dynamics, its agility and stiffness, its softness and inclina-
tion to resonance, its multitude of intertwined layers and zones, mixtures
and knots that form the arena, the ground, the substance of sound. This
substance of sound translates perceptually into the substance of listening.”29
In some respects, this passage treads close to a line of recent thought in
sound studies regarding the perceived ubiquity of the ontology of sound as
an experience of physical force prior to the establishment of a hermeneu-
tical or representation schema.30 Schulze, though, is highly critical of any
attempt to posit an objective science of acoustics covering the experience
of sound. In fact, he critiques this very idea through an intriguing exegesis
on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific perspectives on
acoustics from figures like Hermann von Helmholtz and Bell Labs physicist
Harvey Fletcher. A sonic materialism derived from early pioneers in modern
acoustics, Schulze contends, is important not as an endpoint for the expe-
rience of sound but as a means to conceptualize a similar materiality in the
senses that become the basis for an aesthetics of immersion. He borrows a
term from Serres (syrrhesis) to more accurately capture the embodied and
multisensory experience that defines this sense of immersion and to rein-
force the idea that this experience stems from the engagement of the subject
as opposed to the affect of the sound. This idea is nicely articulated in the
following passage: “As optics are truly different from visual aesthetics, so
are acoustics truly different from auditory aesthetics: a technical model for
calculating selected, idealized physical effects must not be confused with a
 Animation Introduces Animation 31

comprehensive understanding of sonic experiences and corporeal effects in

humanoid aliens in a given material environment. The analysis of sound in
the framework of electroacoustic theories of communicative scarcity provides
almost no feasible means for the syrrhesis of sound in a framework of tech-
nocultural abundance of sensory artifacts. The material senses are one major
experiential and generative, one substantially pervasive force.”31
Sound may be the catalyst for any given event in the sonic milieu,
Schulze reasons, but without the human element of a sensory hermeneu-
tic to hold and frame that event within the cusp of consciousness, the event
carries no recourse to meaning. In true Serresian fashion, both ontology
and epistemology funnel through the mechanisms of sense.
Schulze may frame his call for an anthropology of sense in terms of an
aesthetic, but his framework does much to revitalize the obfuscated cultural
meanings associated with the sounding statue as well. In essence, his ideas
are quite similar to a concept of ontography, a term coined by Michael Lynch
in the field of science and technology studies during the mid-2000s. Lynch’s
useful neologism refers to the ways in which the recourse to ontological expe-
rience is always mediated by specific cultural ideas, concerns, and frames of
reference. Ontographical inquiry dispenses with the metaphysical absolut-
ism implied by philosophical ontology, instead focusing on who perpetuates
those ideals and for what purpose. Or, as Lynch puts it, a transition is made
from omnipresent “matters of fact” to more localized “matters of concern.”32
Schulze’s sensory materialism certainly stretches the intended reach of
ontography, which Lynch more narrowly applies to unpacking concerns
of social discourse. Yet the emphasis on subject-centered intensities that
Schulze calls for opens new ground that plays specifically upon the ephem-
eral strengths of sound, which carry through even in an age saturated with
mechanical reproduction. He reminds us that in the present, technologies
of sound reproduction guarantee an awareness about the impact of sound
even when it is not physically present or affecting the body in any tangible
sense.
Making this anthropological (or ontographical) turn has important
implications for the place of sounding statues in the methods and scope
of historical acoustemology. The problem of how to frame the experience
of sound when that sound is no longer present becomes a key component
here. One of the premises associated with acoustemology more generally
(drawing from anthropologist Steven Feld’s ideas regarding the term in the
mid-1990s) is that cultures take shape in part through the sonic environment
32 The Sculpted Ear

within which they develop and thrive. Therefore, the aim of a historical
acoustemology is to try and elucidate that process as much as possible in
historical contexts, either through analysis of written descriptions of sounds
or attempting to recreate the sounds themselves based on those descrip-
tions using contemporary technology. But because statues have not been
thought of (at least in Western aesthetics) as objects intended to hold sonic
identities, they have fallen outside of the sphere of inquiry typically associ-
ated with the area. Drawing them back in begets some interesting questions
regarding the value that sounds accrue in the process of historical recon-
struction. What does it mean to try and reproduce sound with historical
fidelity from a source in which the expectation of sound was, at best, negli-
gible? How does one go about searching for this trace within the anecdotal
accounts dotting the historical record? Sound art, I think, casts an unex-
pected shadow over the ways in which we might go about this work as
well. In its modern pervasiveness, sound art has attuned us to the possi-
bility of extracting an already existing palette of sounds from objects and
spaces from which we least expect them. This expectation of everything
and everywhere sounding inevitably filters into any reconstruction of the
historical ear. I will show throughout this book that this mentality manifests
as a double-edged sword, as much an opportunity as a reason for trepida-
tion. As heirs to the modern science of acoustics, we have a more tangible
understanding of the constitution and behavior of sound than our predeces-
sors. Applied to subjective descriptions of sounding statues, this allows for
a broader template of descriptive possibility when attempting to expound
upon ephemeral traces located in historical sources. At the same time, the
language and concepts used by these accountants to describe their expe-
riences with sounding statues expand the horizon by which the cultural
impact of these noteworthy objects can be understood. These sounds were
never just sounds unto themselves, but tied into a delicate mix of science,
religion, politics, and performance, among other things. What results is an
acknowledgment that framing a scholarly understanding of these instances
solely in terms of physical sounding is unnecessarily reductive, similar to
thinking about statues solely as aesthetic objects instead of dynamic facil-
itators of cultural engagement.
Further afield, an anthropological move toward sounding statuary brings
forth different ways to think about touch, the other sense instrumental in
the development and perpetuation of sculptural aesthetics in the West. To
touch a statue was as important as looking at one—for aesthetic purposes
 Animation Introduces Animation 33

as with Enlightenment thinkers like Herder, but also for epistemological

purposes (as anyone remembering William Molyneux’s famous thought
experiment to John Locke can attest). But tactility held an understandably
diminished importance within a field where sound itself constituted an
ephemeral object. While touch could be incorporated into the performa-
tive milieu of sound art, it was no longer capable of functioning (or even
needed) as a vigorous sense of aesthetic judgment. Its diminishment became
a kind of double estrangement, given the already marginal place of touch in
Western art as a whole. Sound art provided the ear with an avenue into the
sculptural ideal that could not be reciprocated for the hand through music, at
least with the same level of veracity. Touch and hearing, the two senses that
Serres thought of as cousins sharing a space outside of the cultural domi-
nance of vision, could no longer be considered on equal aesthetic ground.
This conclusion, though, assumes a sensory isolation for touch that bears
the mark of the conceptual mind and not the experiencing body. Such is the
legacy of thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom tactility rested as
one distinct part of a broader sensory whole. The sense of touch, as with its
cousin hearing, carries a wilier and more diverse history than that. It is a
history, Constance Classen writes, that “continually overflows the boundar-
ies of any scheme of interpretation, just as the sense of touch overflows its
own boundaries and merges with other sensory phenomena.”33 And while
a practice like sound art retreats from the potential of that multifaceted
history, the sounding statue has long maintained an important if subtle
role for tactility throughout its many expressions. Most of the intense sonic
experiences attributed to statuary, upon the mediation of reflection and
thought, were considered the result of affective contact of some type. The
touch of Pygmalion, as we will see later, was a prerequisite to the subse-
quent sounding life displayed by Galatea when she stepped down from the
pedestal in his workshop. Automata needed the intervention of a hand (not
quite as magical as Pygmalion’s) to activate their perpetual mechanisms and
enact their awe-inspiring performances. Even the unseen forces that reso-
nated sound through metal and stone bodies were thought to be touching
their objects in some sense. Perhaps a fateful gust of wind, or the breath of
God, or the motions of Democratian atoms or Leibnizian monads, or even
other sounds moving through the spaces between. Perhaps it was the spatial
cacophony of New York’s urban noise, which once exerted so much force that
it pushed a bronze statue of Horace Greeley in Greeley Park off its marble
perch in 1912.34 Perhaps even a bolt of lightning, touching its object with a
34 The Sculpted Ear

resounding force that it explodes and becomes statue no more, a fate that
befell a bronze eagle adorning the spire of the Union Soldier Monument at
the National Cemetery in Knoxville during a 1904 thunderstorm.35 Contem-
porary sound art was not the site of genesis for the collaboration between
touching and sounding. Such a relationship—like the sounds of statues—
was always present, if you knew where to feel and where to hear.
Taken as a whole, the move toward a culturally based, sensory-laden
history, philosophy, and anthropology of confluences between sound and
statuary begins the work of addressing several issues relevant to incorpo-
rating these events as viable sites of inquiry. At base, this move begins the
difficult work of dismantling the hegemony of aesthetic thought that has
been at best unsympathetic if not outright hostile to this issue. Absent the
overriding problem of the aesthetic imagination, we can approach these
manifestations with fresh ears, granting them an intellectual rigor that
Serres, among others, would appreciate. Such a move would be potentially
transformative in several different respects. First, it dislodges magic, idola-
try, the metaphysics of presence, and technological intervention as problems
for aesthetics to overcome or ignore. Instead, these attributes become key
devices in ascertaining the mobile and diverse meanings given to sounding
statues when imagined or confronted. Second, a new intimacy between sound
and statuary can lead to thinking about sounded relationships even when
sound is not physically present, a nonperceptual adjacency to sound that
Seth Kim-Cohen refers to as “non-cochlear.”36 Though this term comes from
an aesthetic context, it proves useful for elucidating a variety of social and
psychological states that will manifest throughout the book. Most import-
ant, though, is how this move puts reception at the heart of unpacking
these manifestations in context. The focus becomes less about the specta-
cle of Magnus’s talking head, of burning cats in effigies, or of a mysteriously
singing Elvis. Rather, we can give much-needed attention to why Aquinas
wanted to destroy the head, how English Protestants heard these screams as
specific signifiers, and what a practical joke tells us about how random Seat-
tle residents hold differing ideas toward the interplay between acousmatic
voice and sound technology. Attaching sound to a statue has often carried
the consequence of both objectifying and materializing that sound in a way
that mediates away the potential of the ear as an organ of ascertainment.
Flipping this arrangement introduces a measure of nuance accounting for
the diversity of means in which individuals and groups can hear to contem-
plate meaning in the event between sound and statuary.
 Animation Introduces Animation 35

This focus on hearing within the anthropological fold brings us back

to the mad science of Homer Simpson. It is reasonable to suggest that his
creation lacks the craft of a Bernini or the single-minded desire of a Pygma-
lion. You might even say that his grotesque creation should not be considered
a statue any more than the work of a child anthropomorphizing an array of
carrot and celery sticks on a snack plate. Yet Homer created his sounding,
embodied ruse as much out of love as any Pygmalion, and its rapid rise up
the corporate ladder, even in a bureaucracy as mismanaged as the Spring-
field Nuclear Power Plant, is a feat the fleshy brilliance of Apollo and Daphne
would find hard to replicate. This success may have cheated the imposed
confines of anthropocentric statuary through a fortuitous mix of a recorded
voice and the cataracts of an elderly man. But the fact that sound can place
a heavy finger on the scale of embodied fidelity is precisely the point. The
trope of animation in statuary, as we have seen, has long been predicated
upon imaginative impulses within those external to the objective fact of the
statue itself. Modern Western aesthetics was built to discipline and medi-
ate those impulses as antithetical to the deployment of a proper subjective
judgment. Understanding any event between sound and statuary requires an
uncoupling and transcending of those limitations. It necessitates an empa-
thy with the existential apparatuses, both microscopic and cosmological, that
people create in the moment and in the aftermath of those events to explain
their sensorial presence. In essence, we should be less concerned with the
form of Homer’s creation than the forms of cultural fascination that gravi-
tate from its wake.
Why, pray tell, would anyone seek to silence anything so innocuous as
that?
Chapter 2

Breathing Voice into

Laocoön’s Mouth

There is a certain irony in the idea that the lasting blow to the aesthetic verac-
ity of sounding statues in Western thought came from a statue never accused
of making a peep. What kind of statue could hold such power, condemning
its sounding brethren to the cultural void without even having the courtesy
to sound itself? The answer, as with many harbingers of change, stemmed
from the ubiquitous nature of celebrity. Unlike the litany of sounding stat-
ues that spent their existence on the margins of cultural consciousness, the
statue I speak of was not only widely renowned—it was essential to the devel-
opment of sculptural aesthetics some two hundred and fifty years prior to
its use as an instrument of silencing. Laocoön and His Sons, as it came to be
called, captured eyes from the moment it was unearthed from the grounds
of a Roman vineyard in 1506. And its emergence could not have been timed
better, arriving during the heart of the Italian Renaissance and a culture
of artists searching for embodiments of the classical aesthetic ideal from
Greece and Rome. In this respect, the statue was wildly successful. Inter-
ested parties thought the group of marble was the same Laocoön described
by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History as “a work superior to any painting
and any bronze.”1 The connection was given credence by Michelangelo, and
the sculpture was installed in the Belvedere Court Garden in the Vatican as
part of the personal collection of Pope Julius II. There, the Laocoön became
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 37

one of the most fervently studied sculptures of the late Renaissance, subject
of hundreds of letters, poems, and facsimiles. It was immediately heralded
as a quintessential example of the Pergamene baroque style in Hellenistic
sculpture, rare in how complete it remained after centuries in the ground.
This fame would turn out to be somewhat disingenuous, as the unearthed
marble was later found to be a copy of a bronze original sculpted by three
Rhodesians in the late third or early second century BCE. Nevertheless, the
marble copy garnered as much attention as any individual original sculp-
ture made during the Renaissance and beyond.2
At least some of this renown was due to the dramatic scene the statue
presented. The Laocoön captures the moment, detailed by Virgil in the Aeneid,
in which the namesake Trojan priest and his two progeny are crushed by
a pair of divine serpents summoned by the god Poseidon—a horrific end
brought about in retribution for the priest’s sins or a testament to his virtu-
ousness, depending on the source. The statue fixes in time a moment prior to
that demise, where the ability of sculpture to capture the essence of human
suffering comes into question. And there is much to garner from the Laocoön
with regard to this representation of pain. From a distance, one may notice
the contorted form of the bodies as the serpent interposes its coiled form
between Laocoön and his terrified young sons. Closer inspection reveals the
anatomical error in Laocoön’s eyebrows: overwrought transverse furrows
noticed by Charles Darwin, of all people, that may have been accentuated
by the sculptors for purposes of expression.3 But only one part of the entire
Laocoön and His Sons sculpture became relevant to the fate of the sounding
statue—Laocoön’s mouth. Frozen on the cusp of a scream, the mouth opened
a chasm in the relationship between beauty, form, and pain in ideas about
classical sculpture, more so than any twisted body or nonidiomatic eyebrow.
Indeed, there lies a minute disjunction between the entire piece and the
mouth in isolation. While Laocoön’s posture and eyes indicate a desire to
escape a state of suffering, the mouth communicates a bizarre impression
of subtlety, given the mortal circumstance endured by the subject. What
precisely is the slightly downturned mouth of Laocoön trying to express to
us, and how deeply should we interpret that frozen moment in the context
of the statue’s broader narrative?
Answering this question was foremost in the mind of Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, one of the most admired writers and intellectuals in eighteenth-
century Germany. Primarily known during his lifetime as a librettist for
theatrical productions, it was a 1766 essay regarding the Laocoön that became
38 The Sculpted Ear

his hallmark, influencing aesthetic criticism well over two centuries after his
death.4 In the work, Lessing famously argued that the rather stoic presenta-
tion of Laocoön’s pained expression was evidence that sculpture could not
depict a moment as vibrant and horrifying as the scream without sacrificing
the formal presentation of beauty thought endemic to classical sculpture.
This stance, in turn, reflected a larger question for Lessing: whether sculp-
ture was capable of representing any kind of emotional intensity the way
he thought inherent to poetry. His answer was a resounding no. Laocoön’s
mouth became the site through which Lessing crafted an aesthetic theory that
systematically cleaved apart the arts beholden to nacheinander (time) from
those beholden to nebeneinander (space).5 By removing nacheinander from
the purview of sculpture, he wanted to remove any possibility of express-
ing the moment captured upon the mouth of Laocoön—the chilling and
grotesque sound of the scream itself.
The gambit presented by Lessing was a brilliant attempt to outflank the
philosophical problem of the “invitation to idolatry” that sound presented.6
He tried to circumvent questions regarding sonic presence by embedding a
silencing mechanism inherent within the art form of sculpture itself. If stat-
ues could not maintain their proper aura while even representing a scream
in form, he held, then there is no basis to consider the imposition of that
sound through the medium of sculpture. The presence and affect of the
scream would have to be explored through the more expressive and appro-
priate oratory arts, where nacheinander held sway. The veracity of Lessing’s
protestations suggests a profound anxiety that sound would find a way to
filter into the presentation of the Laocoön regardless. Not everyone shared
his concern. Other commentators like Jacopo Sadoleto and Johann Joachim
Winckelmann were more ambivalent toward what Richard Brilliant calls
the “imagined potential of . . . [the] soon-to-be-heard scream of pain, never
uttered.”7 Even so, the regime of stony silence Lessing postulated won out
for well over two hundred years after Laocoön was first published. What
Lessing offered, in essence, was a systematic framework arguing that the
full artistic potential of sculpture could not be achieved unless its absolute
silence was assured. His genius was to transform what had fundamentally
been a metaphysical question into an aesthetic one.
Lessing gave sound quite a hurdle to clear in order to carve its way back
into sculpture. The anthropocentric form central to sculpture’s represen-
tational schema was also central to the common charge of idolatry in the
aesthetic thought of the Enlightenment. Thus any sound deemed to emanate
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 39

from a statue was likely to be interpreted with the identity of that statue in
mind. And the interpretation of that sound often assumed the connotation
of vocality, a concept already tied to a precarious metaphysics of presence
that only enhanced the proximity of the statue with the death of the body.
The visual and the aural feed back upon one another, entering into a chain
of mutual reinforcement that threatened to eject the statue from any sense
of rational aesthetic order. It is easy to understand why sound, for Lessing,
gave idolatry another mechanism though which it could erode the proper
aura of the art object and imbue it with a magical fancy that would be diffi-
cult to overcome through the discipline of reason alone. Better to excise
sound altogether, lest it gain a pernicious and damaging foothold on the
aesthetic imagination.
Given the formidable barriers that Lessing constructs, it is fascinating
that sound nonetheless manages to breathe its unwanted presence into the
pages of his essay. This takes the form of the most oblique and momentary
of respirations, buried within the confines of language. As part of his intro-
duction into the presentation of Laocoön’s staid mouth, Lessing engages
directly with Winckelmann’s own account of the sculpture in the widely
influential Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of the Art of Antiq-
uity) that had been published two years prior.8 Lessing sought to challenge
Winckelmann’s idea that the expression upon the sculpted orifice evinced
calm because the Greek ethos of masculine virtue could not countenance
an overt demonstration of pain. “The expression of so great a soul goes far
beyond a representation of natural beauty,” Winckelmann opined about the
Laocoön. “The Artist must have felt in himself the strength of the soul which
he has impressed upon his marble.”9 While Lessing saw a profound wisdom
in this observation, he concluded that the show of a so-called “great soul”
could not transcend the aesthetic demands of the beautiful form. Laocoön
fails for him as a work of art not because of what it represents, but how it
represents it. In making this argument, though, Lessing passed over some
intriguing implications inherent in the conclusion of Winckelmann’s state-
ment: “and [the artist] breathed into the forms of [the marble] no common
soul” [emphasis mine].10 In fairness, breath was merely an ancillary mecha-
nism to the broader point about representation and perhaps did not warrant
additional scrutiny. Yet this quality of ephemera does not render the reference
to breath unimportant. The idea of an artist “breathing life” into a creation
was well-trodden terrain by the time of the Enlightenment. Statues were no
exception, evident in the widely prolific influence of Prometheus creating
40 The Sculpted Ear

humans by breathing into sculpted clay, or Ovid’s Pygmalion, where divine

breath brought an inanimate creation to life at the behest of the artist who
molded its body.11
Reading Winckelmann’s passage in hindsight, one may be tempted to
understand the act of breathing a soul into an inanimate object as mere
metaphor. Lessing’s relative dismissal of the passage in his own work seems
to reinforce this idea. Even during the height of Enlightenment rationality
and natural science, however, the history behind such a statement would
have been regarded as anything but metaphorical. This history tells us of
a resonant relationship between breath and soul that carried deep cosmo-
logical significance. When invoked with regard to statuary, it summoned
forth the famous Platonic dictum about the dangers of mimesis and fidel-
ity in art. Laocoön’s scream was dangerous in Platonic terms because it
allowed the specter of the voice to become mapped in form upon a medium
defined by stillness and silence. The moment the scream became etched in
stone, it drove a moment defined by its temporality into a repetitive state
of timelessness. A sculptor “breathing soul” into the statue he created was
even more dangerous, since that person was tapping into a well of cosmic
or divine power that had the potential to animate the statue with the gift of
sound and movement. Laocoön’s frozen gesture of a scream, if embodying
such power, could rupture the artifice of the statue in its entirety and give
the pained voice a horrifying and viscerally sonic reality.
What power could facilitate this nexus drawing together breath and
soul, sculptor and sculpted with such comprehension, lurking behind Less-
ing’s quest to inscribe silence into the statue with intractable permanence?
This medium in question, undergirding the order of things for a period
of roughly two millennia, was known by the Greek word pneuma. Most
often translated as “spirit,” “wind,” or “breath,” pneuma was thought to be a
multifaceted substance influencing cosmological thinking in religion and
science, not limited to Greco-Roman tracts about physiology, early Chris-
tian ideas about metaphysics and theology, or early modern atomism, among
others. Because of this longevity and mobility, pneuma has proven a complex
subject to understand with any sense of clarity. It is a material that Giorgio
Agamben, in his analysis of the concept of phantasm in the Middle Ages,
referred to as “perhaps the most imposing intellectual cathedral in medie-
val thought.”12 Imposing is an accurate assessment, considering the era of
pneumatic viability spanned beyond the period outlined by Agamben, from
pre-Socratic Greece until arguably 1887, when physicists Albert Michelson
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 41

and Edward Morley failed to detect pneuma’s early modern cousin aether in
a series of experiments. This failure taints the legacy of pneuma to a certain
extent, retroactively remapping the body of writing on the subject through
the absence of sheer physicality. The observational void reinforces the post
hoc perception of pneuma as a jack-of-all-substances, serving whatever func-
tion was deemed necessary by whoever was conceptualizing it, and making
its presence known only through the mask of observable phenomena. There
is an understandable temptation, all things considered, to discard pneuma
into the positivist dustbin of disproven cosmologies, passing Agamben’s
cathedral without a second glance and resisting the work of tracing its folds
and crevasses.
Choosing to enter the vast cathedral of pneumatology, though, offers
alternative and compelling narratives to the source of historical trepida-
tion toward the sounding statue in Western thought. Most notably, pneuma
offers a more dynamic means to frame the quandary of understanding sound
emanating from statues as evidence of a disembodied vocal manifestation.
As the most potent signifier of the idolatry that Lessing was trying to write
against, voice pointed toward the kind of spiritual inhabitation that was
metaphysically problematic because of its acousmatic properties. There
was never any sure way of knowing the source of such sounds. Pneuma, as
the physical manifestation of spirit in the human world, served as the first
avenue through which the charge of idolatry against the sounding statue
could be circumvented. Even when broader thought on pneuma rested
upon a metaphysical foundation, its simultaneous designation as a mate-
rial substance that touched and influenced every element in the physical
world remained potent. Whether or not pneuma was actually present was not
as important as the idea that people believed that it was present and based
their ideas about both observable and unobservable phenomena, including
the anatomical functions of the body, on its understood existence. Likewise,
the understanding that sonic manifestations from statues were evidence of
vocal inhabitation should be taken at face value, whether from those who
believe in the veracity of such manifestations or skeptics in the cloth of those
like Lessing.
While the discourse on pneuma reflected a pre-Cartesian synthesis of
metaphysical and physical realms, this body of thought also defined pnuema
by its patterns of movement as opposed to its constitution. More specifically,
this manifested through the idea that pneuma was a vessel promoting various
types of circulation both within and permeating the body. As a circulating
42 The Sculpted Ear

mechanism it connected together discrete forms, while also facilitating

the affectation of one form upon another. This included sound in general,
and the voice more specifically, as both were thought to be formed and
driven through pneumatic circulation. In essence, pneuma created a material
recourse for explaining sonic makeup and power, producing the sound that
gave the voice form and presence, and contributing to its perceived affective
influence over external bodies and minds. Nor was this power restricted to
deities. Because pneuma was a cosmological constant between heavens and
earth, the affective power it provided the voice was potentially accessible to
anyone.
Ideas about pneuma, therefore, transcended the sounding statue beyond
the scope of mere idolatry and the power to animate it beyond the realm of
the magical. At the heart of the denigration of its sounds within aesthetic
rubrics were a variety of ethical and political concerns that those sounds
brought to the fore. Who was making these sounds, how were they making
them, and for what purpose? Absent an empirical and rational recourse for
the eye to judge a substance without visibility, the ear by necessity became
the primary organ of inquiry. So the age of pneuma, by definition, became
an age in which hearing was an active sense of knowledge accumulation, as
opposed to one of passivity. And sounding statues, in the fear and curiosity
they espoused, were a primary site through which this sense of an active
hearing became manifest.
•••••••

In broaching the vast monolith that constitutes this history of pneumatic

thought, I want to start with the scholar who likened it to an imposing phys-
ical structure in the first place. Agamben devotes an entire chapter of his
book Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture to tracing the devel-
opment of pneumatology in the ancient world, for the express purpose of
ascertaining its specific connections to love poetry from the Italian duecento.
To establish this connection, Agamben starts his analysis with a passage from
Dante’s Vita Nuova (1295), where the Italian poet references how the “vital
spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began
to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were
strangely affected.”13 Agamben uses this fragment to argue that perspectives
grounding Dante’s use of spiritual allegories solely within the medical and
physiological terminologies of the time are noticeably incomplete. Sans the
input of metaphysical pneumatology, these allegories can only be regarded
“as we might one of those mutilated statues that time has detached from
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 43

Greek temples or from the tympana of Romanesque churches and which now
smile at us enigmatically in museum galleries.” What follows is a thorough
inspection of pneumatic doctrine, starting with Aristotle’s famous definition
from De generatione animalium casting pneuma as the material invigorating
both semen and the cosmos that was so influential on the medieval physio-
logical discourse in question. Agamben traces this amalgamation of material
and metaphysical through its physiological roots in Greek medicine, where
the vital pneuma housed in the heart is pumped throughout the body via the
arteries (while the blood uses the veins) and helps make the body capable
of sensation. This vital pneuma is coupled with a psychic pneuma housed
in the brain, responsible for governing the enactment and interpretation of
the various senses. He then shows how these physiological threads were
subsequently embedded within broader ideas about metaphysics: first, by
the Stoics, who conceived of bodily pneuma as substantially homogeneous
with cosmic pneuma; then, by later Neoplatonists, who understood pneuma
as a vessel carrying the soul from the heavens, becoming the source of the
imagination within the body, and facilitating the ascent of the soul back into
the heavens after death. In one remarkable paragraph, Agamben lays out
how pervasive and interconnected these ideas about pneuma had become
by the time Dante was writing.

The synthesis that results is so characteristic that European culture

in this period might justly be defined as a pneumophantasmology,
within whose compass—which circumscribes at once a cosmology,
a physiology, a psychology, and a soteriology—the breath [empha-
sis mine] that animates the universe, circulates in the arteries, and
fertilizes the sperm is the same one that, in the brain and in the
heart, receives and forms the things we see, imagine, dream, and
love. Insofar as it is the subtle body of the soul, it is in addition the
intermediary between the soul and matter, the divine and human,
and, as such, allows the explanation of all the influxes between
corporeal and noncorporeal, from magical fascination to astrolog-
ical inclinations.14

Agamben uses this description in part to lambaste the privileging of

scientific attributes within pneumatology to the detriment of its attributes
perceived as magical. He understands this move as an attempt to map the
rationalist and positivist values of the Enlightenment onto medieval thinkers,
44 The Sculpted Ear

who often thought of science and magic as integrated. More important,

though, is the emphasis he gives to the word breath—as opposed to spirit
or wind, the other translations often given for the Greek word pneuma. This
recourse to breath offers three useful starting points in ascertaining the
connections between pneuma, voice, and sounding statues. First, he estab-
lishes the primacy of the body in theories of pneumaticism. While spirit
and wind imply an emphasis on the concepts of divinity and naturalism
respectively, breath holds the respiratory process as broadly allegorical for
pneumatic constitution in general. Second, he recognizes the central role
the concept of breath plays at every level of pneumatic presence, from the
physicality of reproduction to the metaphysics of divine intervention. Third,
and most important, Agamben emphasizes the defining characteristic of
pneuma as its principle of circulation. That is, pneuma was never understood
as a fixed presence, but one constantly defined by movement both within
and through the discrete bodies it contacted. In this sense, breath seems the
perfect metaphor for the entire apparatus of pneumaticism: unseen except
when affecting other bodies while ever moving, and capable of being heard
if not explicitly located by the ear.
Where exactly does the breathy prevalence that pervades Agamben’s
pneumatological framework come from? Answering this question requires
a step further back than Agamben takes. While he is correct in stating that
Aristotelian descriptions on pneuma find root in older Greek thought, this
root is even older than the Hippocratic medical texts that he supposes. Most
scholars trace the source of pneumatic doctrine and its emphasis on breath
to Anaximenes of Miletus, who conceived of a material monism based on
the universal presence of air during the sixth century BCE. The emphasis
on air stemmed in part from the desire to find a substance of “infinite and
indeterminate” status to challenge an earlier cosmology by Thales based
on the ubiquity of water.15 The first iteration of pneuma was understood as
a particular type of rarefied air imbued with a divine essence that perme-
ated the physical world—thicker than fire, but thinner than water or rock. It
was a perpetual substance that was always in a state of motion, holding no
traceable source, but most importantly, explained through the metaphor of
breath. The cosmos, for Anaximenes, was always breathing. But respiration
was also the mechanism connecting humans to this divine power within the
air. Breathing reinvigorated an interior soul comprised of air itself moving
through the body. In placing a concept of soul within the confines of natu-
ral material, Anaximenes established a precedent of how to think about the
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 45

central dialectic between soul and body through a system based on physi-
cal processes.16
Breath would continue to be a central tenet of pneumatic circulation,
even as the monism of Anaximenes diffused into the polymorphous pneu-
mas that defined later Greek thought on the subject. Aristotle, for example,
divided the external pneuma of the air from an innate, a priori pneuma that
resided within the body. He then conceived of this innate pneuma as the
regulatory mechanism moving throughout the entire corpus, integral to a
range of carnal processes from the senses to memory and reproduction.17
Breathing maintained a central role in maintaining bodily temperament. In
the short treatise “On Breath” (Peri Pneumatos, in Latin De Spiritu), Aristotle
held that one of the ways in which the body gained nutriment, in addition
to the process of digestion, was from the breath drawing the nutriment out
from the circulatory system.18 Aristotle also used the breath as a means to
critique the coterminous relationship between soul and air that was essen-
tial to the cosmology of Anaximenes. How can the soul be made solely of
air, he wondered, if air was by nature inert? Something in the body must be
the catalyst to invigorate this “neutral substance,” Aristotle reasoned, turn-
ing it into the active principle that circulates throughout. “Surely, if [air]
becomes animate or becomes soul, it suffers some change and alteration,
and so naturally moves towards what is akin to it, and like grows by the
addition of like. Or is it otherwise? For it may be contended that the air is
not the whole of the soul but is something which contributes to this poten-
tiality or in this sense makes it, and that which has made it is its principle
and foundation.”19 The implication is that breath becomes a powerful site
of transformation and a unique marker of embodied distinction, even as
it performs the necessary maintenance of bodily functions. Breath of life,
indeed.
Aristotle’s categorical breakdown of pneuma and its various embodied
entanglements also gave a tangible, physiological connection between breath
and voice. He famously defined the voice in “On the Soul” (Peri Psuches, best
known by the Latin title De Anima) as “a sound that signifies,” but Aristotle
more specifically understood the concept of voice as a sound attached to the
imagination that derived specifically from the pneuma in question.20 That
is, voice functioned as part of a mechanism that carried pneuma from the
sources of higher reason out of the body and into the external world. In this
way, voice carried meaning and served as the fulcrum for language through
its pneumatic principles. But this movement was not only the vehicle for
46 The Sculpted Ear

speech. The Aristotelian voice, much like the breath, could act as a valve
of external release to combat any systemic imbalance that could harm the
health of the body.21 Voice also served as a medium of pneumatic interaction
between discrete bodies. Instead of a direct transmission of sound from one
source to another, Aristotle conceived of sonic diffusion as a form of echo.
An imprint of the original sound, articulated by the voice, moved through
the pneuma like “ice slowly developing across a lake,” eventually resonat-
ing with the pneuma present in the listener’s ear.22 What the receptor heard
was not an actual physical sound that we can call the voice, but a kind of
pneumatic trace consisting primarily of logos. The grain of the voice—the
pneumatic soul—remained safely ensconced within the body.
While Stoics like Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus did not adhere to the
veracity of breath and air with the same vigor as their predecessors, they
still envisioned a pneumatic cosmology defined by circulation and substan-
tial variation affecting sensation. Stoic pneuma manifested within the body
with the homogeneous substance delineated by function, taking on special-
ized tasks related to health and maintenance, which was controlled by the
pneumatically derived soul located in the brain, interacting based on precise
relationships of tension and release.23 As with Aristotle, this interior pneu-
matic system maintained bodily function and temperament. Yet this systemic
interaction between internal and external pneuma became the basis not only
for bodily function and temperament, but also served as the mechanism
driving perception. Sarah Iles Johnston provides a thorough description of
how this pneumatic process worked with regard to sight.

Vision occurred when an individual’s pneuma . . . flowed out of

the part of the soul associated with consciousness (the “leader” or
hegemonikon) into the corporeal eye; once in the eye, the pneuma
introduced tension (sunentasis) into the outside air that lay just
beyond the eye, causing the affected air to take on the shape of a
cone. When this entensioned cone of air simultaneously was illu-
minated by sunlight (thus bringing the “outside” air into harmony
with the fiery pneuma that had emerged from “inside”), the cone
became capable of receiving the forms of objects at which the indi-
vidual gazed.24

Stoic pneuma maintains the affective power argued by Aristotle, but extends
its ability to alter substances outside of the body. Air, remember, had to
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 47

be drawn inside of the body for Aristotle to grant it pneumatic properties.

While Aristotle granted the voice more leeway of external movement, the
innate pneuma responsible for the vocal echo remained inside of the body.
The example given above shows that the Stoics extended the circulation of
bodily pneuma to outside of the body, affecting other substances to create
the means by which a person ascertained the physical world.
The Stoic voice, like vision, consisted of its own pneuma and had a
distinct process of circulation within the body. Enacted within the hegemon-
ikon, the vocal pneuma moved through the larynx into the mouth and was
responsible for the motions of the tongue that created diction and speech.
This Stoic ideal of the voice was radically different from its predecessors,
however. Aristotle understood the voice as noncorporeal, becoming mere
echo transporting logos between bodies when moving out from the cusp of
the mouth. Within Stoicism, since the voice was considered its own part of
the bodily pnuema, it was itself understood as a corporeal object. Chrysip-
pus outlined this perspective with the blunt yet effective phrase “voice is a
body, since everything capable of action and influence is a body.”25 Plutarch
aptly expressed the broader implications of this argument in his short essays
regarding various Greek conceptualizations of the voice. Writing in response
to the Stoic ideal of voice as a body, the Roman philosopher considered the
implications of this phrase through the example of the vocal echo. The fact
that voice reverberates upon a physical surface and echoes—“as when a ball
is cast upon a wall,” in Plutarch’s parlance—suggests not only that both the
voice and affected surface are material, but that hearing is the means by
which that materiality can be ascertained.26 Though not himself a Stoic,
Plutarch does articulate a legacy of Stoicism that positions the ear as the
organ most attuned to the movement and presence of pneuma, a concept
we will return to later.
Understanding the voice as something material, fully capable of pneu-
matic effect upon the external bodies continued to appear in a litany of
sources contemporary to Plutarch. Galen, in his medical treatises from the
second century CE, offered a tripartite theory of pneumatic movement and
transformation indebted to earlier sources. Air taken into the lungs was
converted into a subtle type of pneuma, transferred into the heart where
it became a more potent “vital” pneuma, and moved through the vascular
system into the brain to become the “psychic” pneuma necessary for higher
brain function in humans.27 Galen also opined on whether the vocal pneuma
stemmed from the heart or the brain, a debate of considerable discord in
48 The Sculpted Ear

medical thought at the time. Medicine, though, was not the only area in
which these ideas about pneuma were being challenged and developed.
Seneca, continuing Stoic orthodoxy into the Roman years, implied that all
manner of vocal expression—including timbre and volume—were subject
to the properties of pneumatic movement.28 These ideas carried broader
social significance than mere philosophical musing, as controlling pneu-
matic circulation became central to masculine doctrine. Roman men trained
in oration and rhetoric were taught to make their voice sound as deep as
possible, as a way to exteriorize the strength of their innate pneuma as a
performative act.29 Breaking of the voice was often heard as an indication
of diminished virility; thus, abstinence from sexual activity to preserve the
potency of innate pneuma was also understood to protect the power of the
voice.30 And the voice was still instrumental in maintaining bodily temper-
ament as well, an idea held over from Aristotelian thought. Writing in the
fourth century CE, the Roman emperor Constantine compared wine gener-
ating froth to the body expelling the excess melancholic pneuma from the
body via singing, a nod to Aristotle’s idea of the voice as a mechanism of
controlling body temperament.31
These material threads connecting voice and pneuma to the body became
an important trace as the metaphysical prominence of pneuma began to
overshadow its physiological dimension during late antiquity. Some of this
change was due to the influence of Neoplatonic thought, which posited a radi-
cal and complete idealism in which all corporeal things stemmed from the
soul and eventually returned to the heavens. Pneuma, as Agamben showed,
served as the vessel through which this circular journey took place, becom-
ing both imagination and the bridge between sensory perception and the
noncorporeal mind in its corporeal guise. Such prominence of the meta-
physical extended to emerging Christian and Jewish doctrines during the
late Roman Empire. Adriana Caverero notes that pneuma was marked in
these bodies of thought by the Latin word spiritus and the Hebrew word
ruah—concepts encompassing both the breath of creation from God and the
physical force of wind deriving from spiritual force sans the material ground-
ing long associated with the word pneuma.32 That pneumatic metaphysics
became so dominant starting in the early Middle Ages reflected a core onto-
logical problem that had plagued materialist ideas about pneuma from the
start. Simply put, proof of the existence of pneuma could only be surmised
through what were perceived as its observable affects. Unlike rock, water,
or even the air, pneuma could not be bottled and subjected to experimental
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 49

scrutiny. This state of imperceptibility allowed for a different kind of breath

to emerge in this absence, one that placed the divine and unknowable source
of pneuma back into the exclusive domain of the metaphysical.
As the concept of corporeal pneuma became intertwined with the incor-
poreal spiritus in theological discourse, the voice became an important device
in finding points of convergence between them. One of the most notable
thinkers to use the concept of voice in such a way was Philo of Alexandria,
who addressed these concerns some three hundred years after Aristotle. At
base, Philo perpetuated a theory of pneuma where the substance served as
both the center of reason and source of the voice, ideas in resonance with
older Greek sources. The third, unique component was the spark of “divine
inspiration” from an external, spiritual source that transformed the voice
from meaningless sound to sound with meaning.33 This idea represented
a marked change from earlier ideas about vocality, in which the voice was
created by a physical reaction within the body and given meaning by the
innate soul (Aristotle), or was a pneumatic body unto itself (the Stoics). Voice
was now a product of a soul with direct ties to its heavenly source, operat-
ing within the body while rendering it a passive vessel and nothing more.
Embodiment may not have conceptually vanished as ideas about pneuma
turned to metaphysical sources, but the body no longer carried the same
role in producing breath or voice it once held.
Thomas Aquinas demonstrated the legacy of this pneumatic disem-
bodiment on ideas about the voice in his massive thirteenth-century text
Summa Theologica. Influenced primarily by Aristotle’s thought on the
subject, Aquinas attempted to rectify the inconsistencies he saw pervading
the Greek philosopher’s theory of pneumaticism, particularly with regard to
the relationship between breath and the soul. Among other moves, Aquinas
declared that carnal breath could no longer be considered coterminous with
the concept of pneuma. Instead, breath was merely a physical process of a
lower order, subsumed within the divine breath housing the “power of the
soul” that generated and perpetuated life and was itself the product of “the
power of a heavenly body.”34 In other words, anatomical functions were not
themselves part of the soul, only enacted and driven by soul. While Aqui-
nas did acknowledge the Aristotelian legacy of bodily pneuma by locating
the pneumatically derived soul within a chamber of the heart, the ultimate
source sustaining that soul through the pneumatic connection was God.
Thus Aquinas perpetuated one of the core pneumatic ideas from Neopla-
tonic thought—the circulation of the soul through the medium of pneuma.
50 The Sculpted Ear

Extending this pneumatic circulation to the voice, though, was another matter
entirely because of its ephemerally aural nature. Sound, as William Layher
points out, was the source of a great deal of ontological angst for medieval
thinkers since its source and quality could not be ascertained through obser-
vation. Aristotle’s concept of the voice as a sound infused with soul provided
a useful model for explaining the distinctive qualities that seemed to sepa-
rate voice from other nonvocal sonic manifestations. Aquinas understood
the voice to emanate from the heart, when the soul located there struck air
and forced it into motion toward the windpipe. Prior to its discharge from
the mouth, the imagination added meaning to the sound in order to emerge
as a linguistic utterance.35 Far from being a body within a body, as the Stoics
thought, pneuma was now the only body that mattered, traveling an inert
and fleshy pathway from heart to lips in its vocal transformation.
When the body was involved in medieval pneumaticism, it was increas-
ingly understood as a potential site for corruption of the soul, the pneuma
that carried it, and the voice they produced together. To that point, there had
been a long history dating from Aristotle of separating vocality from animal-
istic utterances and noises—sound without meaning and therefore bereft of
soul. But the idea that the physical body could be used as a backdoor to the
apparatus of pneumatic circulation by external forces was evidence of the
degree of abstraction between body and soul pervading Western thought
through the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy. Those without the capacity,
or with a limited capacity, for soul-laden reason were particularly susceptible,
and it is perhaps unsurprising that these ideas often carried a misogynistic
bent. Brenda Gardenour Walter notes that Aquinas, along with a number
of other late medieval scholars, thought that women could be more easily
possessed by demons because of their perceived bodily weakness, lack-
ing the strength and moral fortitude needed to resist inhabitation. These
demons were thought to gain a foothold in the female body through cool
and moist regions and orifices bereft of invigorating pneumatic circulation.
Once inside, these demons corrupted the interior pneuma, the senses, and
ultimately the soul, manifesting within and on the body in several ways.
The possessed were subject to hallucinations, grotesque transformations,
and stricken with foul breath and noxious vapors that they could use to
summon storms or emit poison. Their voices, stripped of reason infused
by the imagination, devolved into meaningless utterances and animalistic
noises. Only by reintroducing the cleansing power of divine prayer could
this influence be purged, returning pneumatic circulation to normal.36
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 51

What is so intriguing about this body of thought on corrupted pneuma

is how, even in its misogynistic guise, it nested the means by which the body
could reemerge as an important thread in pneumatic thought. Voices of the
possessed, for all of their perceived moral and ethical failings, affected the
outside world with considerable force. This power of transformation was still
dependent on the circulation and expulsion of pneuma, however tainted the
substance may have been. The body carried ultimate responsibility for these
powers, providing the space through which the corruption nested, circulat-
ing through the same fleshy tunnels ideally perpetuating an uncorrupted
pneuma. In any case, no matter how medieval thinkers like Aquinas tried to
connect pneuma to the transcendent divine in absolute terms, the physical
body could not be completely mediated away. This opened a window through
which the idea of a pneumatically affective, material voice resonant with
the spiritual connection of pneuma could resurface. The aeration, or reres-
piration, of pneuma had begun in earnest. Some, like John Milton, merely
adopted a more fervently materialist conceptualization of the Christian soul,
a subtle resubstantiation of pneuma.37 Others utilized materialist doctrine
as a critique of the Aristotelian tradition in favor of incorporating fusions
of Stoic cosmology with early modern science. Italian naturalist Tommaso
Campanella, for example, sought to critique Aristotelian instrumentality
by attributing the function of the body to the different corporeal pneumas
instead of a centralized soul—an idea that influenced Thomas Hobbes, among
others.38 And French mathematician Jean Pena, in a 1557 preface to an edition
of Euclid’s text Optics and Catoptrics, argued for the ubiquitous existence of
an “animabilem spiritum” (“animal spirit”) composed primarily of air filling
the space between earth and heavens.39
The most fervent adherents of an airy material pneuma tied to the body
in early modern thought were those closest to the atomist revival in the
sciences. In the Greek imagination, these would have seemed an odd pair-
ing. Atomism, as delineated through an intellectual tradition including
pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus and Aristotle’s contemporary Epicurus,
understood the world as populated with discrete entities working in tandem.
This was a far cry from the uniformity and interconnectedness at the heart
of Stoic pneumaticism, which developed as an antithesis to many of the
atomist doctrines. Yet for proponents of a physical science based upon parti-
cle movements working in the mid-seventeenth century, the homogenous
legacy of pneuma served an important metaphysical purpose. H. Floris Cohen
has argued that the resurgence of atomism qua material particles took a turn
52 The Sculpted Ear

toward atheism when associated with thinkers like Hobbes and Margaret
Cavendish. Pneuma, already carrying a long history of bridging material and
metaphysical divides both in philosophy and the sciences, allowed atomism
the benefit of spiritual adjacency. This recourse toward pneuma created what
Cohen calls the “Baconian Brew.” Combining the scientific contributions
of figures like Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Isaac Newton, and framed
within the equally ancient moniker aether, the brew cobbled together “gener-
ous dashes of Stoic pneuma . . .[ ,] Plato’s world soul, [and] Descartes’ subtle
particles of matter . . . ground into an extremely fine, all pervasive [material]
substance” that could also account for perceived phenomena of metaphys-
ical origin.40 Instead of being an unexplainable substance accounting for
observable occurrences, pneuma became a discrete substance accounting
for sublime occurrences. In this guise, pneuma could bring the materiality
of particle science into the realm of spiritual magic. It could also address
the problem of the inert hollowness of mechanistic conceptualizations of
physiology after Descartes, addressing the problem of soul by attributing
it to “forces” instead of tepid “organizations of matter.”41 The form of aether,
then, provided recourse for the material basis of pneuma to survive amidst
the scrutiny of what would become Enlightenment natural science, while
still maintaining its long-held cosmological connections.
Those considering the affective power of pneuma, equipped with this
early modern physiological and scientific knowledge unavailable to their
medieval predecessors, worked to resuture that pneumatic voice within the
carnal folds of the body. Bruce Smith catalogued some of these changes in
the specific context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, informed
by writings from James I’s court physician Helkiah Crooke. For one, nonlin-
guistic utterances previously thought of as animalistic sounds without
soul were considered to be evidence of continuity in human connections
to the natural world. Changes in the timbre of the voice were more read-
ily accounted to external changes in air temperature, pressure, and weather
that facilitated interior changes in pneumatic constitution or circulation.
Most important, though, was the reintegration of the embodied soul into
the physical processes of the body, and the effect this had on how the voice
was conceptualized. “To early modern ways of considering the matter,” Smith
concluded, “the word ‘voice’ meant, first and foremost, a concatenation of
bodily members: muscles, gristly tissues, fluids, and ‘soul.’”42 Mirroring the
rise of transcendental pneumaticism in the Middle Ages, the embodied pneu-
maticism of early modern thought still carried threads of the Janus-faced
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 53

metaphysics from earlier. There remained a sensitivity to the Aristotelian

distinction between voice (as significant sound) and noise (as inconsequen-
tial or soulless sound). And the soul was considered as much a physical fact
as ever, whether it stemmed from the Aristotelian heart, the Galenic brain,
or the Cartesian pineal gland. Yet there seemed to manifest an expansive
notion of what the voice was during the heyday of early modern science
and philosophy, as much respirated physical breath as airless divine breath
and connected to the carnal mechanisms of the body like never before.
Even so, the lack of substantial pneumatic constitution that could be
observed and measured remained a bothersome trait for some. Foremost
among this line of early modern thinkers was the noted English scientist
Francis Bacon, for whom observation was paramount to the development
of the sciences. Bacon certainly believed in the existence and prevalence of
pneuma, as he devoted a substantial section of his Nova Organum (1620)
to outlining its characteristics. However, he was careful to separate what
he called pneumatical bodies from those he called “tangible bodies,” with
a distinct material presence and composition. “[Of] Things, which we call
pneumatical, or untangible,” he wrote, “no judgment can be form’d of the
Distention, or Rarifaction, of the Matter they contain.”43 Bacon threads a
tenuous line in his conceptualization of pneuma, casting it as a substance
containing matter and classifiable properties, yet still something that cannot
be tangibly ascertained. This duality between material and ephemera perme-
ated his conceptualization of the voice as well. Simply put, the idea of a
pneumatic propellant giving an unseen power to the voice could not be qual-
ified by rigorous experimentation in acoustics. Far from being an agent of
affect charged with pneuma, the aerated voice in Baconian thought became
passive and affected. For one, Bacon thought the voice became substantially
altered upon contact with any hard substance. Nor did he think the heat asso-
ciated with pneumatic circulation could have any ascertainable effect upon
the strength (meaning volume, not timbre) of the voice. And because he
thought that sound moved in a sphere away from its source, any voice was
more likely to move around a solid obstacle than pass through it. At best,
sound could penetrate and effect physical objects by utilizing a pneumatic
resonance inherent to both. In the section “Of the Passage and Interception
of Sounds,” Bacon argued that because every material contained “pneumatic
parts,” or small corpuscles of pneuma within hard bodies, a pneumatically
infused sound like the voice could penetrate a hard substance by moving
through these parts in material resonance.44 Mere passage was the limit of the
54 The Sculpted Ear

voice’s powers, though. Such is the double-edge regarding Baconian thought

on the pneumatic potential of voice. Bacon had found a way to preserve the
Aristotelian immateriality of the voice in an era where materialism in the
sciences held sway.45 In another, more profound way, he planted an idea that
had to that point been unthinkable: that perhaps the voice was not infused
with pneumatic power, but simply a physical manifestation of expelled air
and nothing more.
Bacon’s disempowerment of the pneumatic voice was a portent of
change for pneuma under the skeptical eye of the hard sciences. The inher-
ent unobservability of the substance would only become more a problem for
pneumatology as a whole, as Enlightenment and nineteenth-century science
further refined available tools of observation and measurement. Whatever
survival pneuma endured within the encroaching sphere of modernity could
not mask its precipitous decline as an affective force. The innate Aristote-
lian and Galenic pneuma thought to regulate bodily function had faded into
obscurity with the rise of modern anatomical models and methods. By the
mid-nineteenth century its early modern cousin aether had also waned in
influence, thanks in part to Michelson and Morley. Atomism, the broader
natural philosophy through which pneumatic thought gained second life,
moved from indefinite substance to discrete particles through the work of
nineteenth-century English physicist John Dalton and the subsequent rise of
modern atomic models of physics in the early twentieth century. Even pneu-
matic theories of sensory perception were undermined as well, replaced by
a turn toward physical resonance as the anatomy of the ear became better
understood beginning in the mid-seventeenth century.46 Pneuma, some-
thing that Max Weber once called a substance that “swept through the great
communities like a firebrand,” seemed destined to endure only as a histor-
ical artifact of cosmologies past.47
Judging pneuma on the false promise of existence alone, though, fails to
account for the pervasive cultural relevance it maintains, even as an object of
historical ephemera. This legacy goes beyond the use of the prefix “pneuma-”
as an aerated linguistic marker in the English words for respiring machines
and respiratory diseases. Even in its conceptual dormancy, pneuma still holds
a haunting fascination as the quintessential absent presence for ontologi-
cal thought. Longevity and perseverance are certainly factors contributing
to this status. Yet a more potent legacy for pneuma lies in its status as the
first conceived substance to be defined by movement, ascertained by its
affect upon bodies, and irreparably rupturing the idea that objects could
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 55

only be what they appeared. Such an effect can clearly be ascertained on the
voice, that most ephemeral of quasi-objects to begin with. Frances Dyson
has made a compelling argument that pneuma, because it was defined by
its state of movement and flux, became the “wires” through which ancient
Western thinkers could transform the voice from physical sound into a kind
of telephonic transmission that was simultaneously “ontotheological” and
“audiophonic”—a direct connection to the divine but also a device to move
the voice outside of the body.48 Just as important, though, is the role that
pneuma played in what the voice could do through that network of meta-
physical wiring, Bacon and his scientific legacy notwithstanding. It is here
that the dual ontology of pneuma, as both metaphysical presence and mate-
rial substance weaving together all things, comes to the fore. The pneumatic
voice was, simply put, an object of power. And this power was not limited
to voices thought to be of divine origin. The same substance thought to
force Apollo’s breath into the body of the Stygia at the Oracle of Delphi
also powered impoverished Victorian women whose soul-infused song was
thought to cleanse the fetid air of industrialized urban neighborhoods.49
Conditioning and virtue played a role in whether or not the potential of the
pneumatic voice could be actualized, to be sure. Yet there existed no obvi-
ous ontological barrier to a voice—any voice—accessing this power. Quite
the democratizing substance, this pneuma.
Since Aristotle has been a constant presence in the discourse on pneuma,
it seems appropriate to express this implication through a syllogism. Because
pneuma was everywhere, and pneuma was the source of the voice, then voices
could come from anywhere—from humans, acousmatic sources of divin-
ity—and affect any thing. Given this pervasive reach, one can imagine the
pneumatic quandary caused by something like a statue. Already straddling
a tenuous mimetic line between animated person and inanimate object,
between voice and noise, between living body and preserved corpse, the
statue presented a ripe vessel through which pneuma could do its phantas-
magorical work. What, one wonders, could the pneumatically infused voice
possibly do to any objects it encounters?
•••••••

To wit, there have been many instances, even entire cultural practices, attrib-
uting pneuma as the cause of sounds made by statues.50 For those intimately
involved with these sonic objects, they presented an opportunity to commune
with forces beyond their earthbound enclaves. For Enlightenment aesthetes
like Lessing, they served as one of the bases for undermining the cultural
56 The Sculpted Ear

veracity of sounded statuary in general, trapping them within a cage of magic

and idolatry. But taking the emanation of sound as the extent of the perceived
pneumatic influence on statues assumes an artificially narrow perspective
on the nature of pneuma. It suggests that acousmatic sound represented the
only physical trace of pneumatic presence, which could be accepted with-
out question or dismissed under scrutiny. Such a conclusion underestimates
the omnipresence centuries of thinkers gifted to pneuma as both a cosmo-
logical and physiological force. Because pneuma was defined as much by its
constant and inexorable movement as the traces it left in its wake, focus-
ing on the resultant sounds of the pneumatic encounter puts the cart before
the horse. The history of pneumatology is charged with sonic threading at
all points material and metaphysical. Voice, though not the only manifes-
tation, is certainly the most prominent one. It constituted the one topos in
which the vitality of animating breath met the imagination sparked from the
pneumatic mind, exiting the carnal body through the guise of the linguis-
tic utterance. Yet the imprint that voice, propelling outward as a sounded
object, was thought to leave on the statue was not always grasped within the
purview of the sonic. Vocal marking could also take the form of what Jacques
Derrida called “natural writing,” an inherently pneumatological construct in
which the word, articulated in metaphorical terms, maintained close prox-
imity to the voice and the breath that animates it. Derrida, of course, was
critical of natural writing and its propensity to exile the nonpneumatolog-
ical technique of writing to the meaningless shell of the body.51 But those
objections do not change the pervasiveness of such writing throughout the
age of pneumatology, nor the perceived weight these written manifestations
may have carried among those who believed in them.
Consider the relationship between pneuma and the epigram, a practice
wedding voice, writing, and statues thought to have originated around the
time of Homer. As a technique, epigram predates the first philosophical
musings on pneumaticism from Anaximenes.52 Yet these inscriptions were
conceived as more than written poetry upon or about a stilled and silent
form. Epigrams often took the form of odes to statues in the voice of the
writer, but could also be written in the voice of the figure represented by the
statue. Critically, as Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf observe, they were
composed to be spoken aloud in the presence of their object, with the voice of
the reader acting as an “accomplice” to help the written text breathe life into
the statue.53 The implication behind these aural performances of epigrams
is articulated by Gross with regard to thirty-four surviving epigrams written
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 57

about a bronze cow sculpted by Myron in the fifth century BCE. “The ener-
getic, often hyperbolic wit of such poems seems aimed at revealing a power
intrinsic in the object itself, and yet they also try to valorize the speaker’s
own right to confer life and value upon that object, to inscribe and animate
the material thing by means of the poetic word. . . . The poetic text thus
doubles or supplements the work of the visual artist, taking advantage both
of what is visible and of what is invisible in the figure. It is a wonderfully
elusive game.”54
That “invisible” thing to which Gross refers seems quite pneumatic in its
description. Statues made in the time of Myron were thought to be full of
the substance that pervaded the air, to the point that the display of empnoos
(breathing) on their embodied form was considered a marker of mimetic
fidelity.55 What was needed to facilitate a connection between person and
statue was a spark linking their mutual pneumatic facility together. Writing
created the circuitry through which the connection could be made. But it was
recitation, as a kind of vocal incantation, that was the mechanism locking the
pneumatic circuit into place. These pneumatic connections between sculptor,
writer, reader, and statue become even more explicit in later manifestations
of epigram writing. An example from eleventh-century Byzantium, described
here by Bissera Pentcheva, connected the form of the epigram, the power of
the voice reciting it, and the pneuma circling between and through them in
more explicit terms.

Thereby the emphatic power of language, its enunciated presence,

would have emanated from the body of the spectator as she or he
lent voice to the poetry. The empnous words would also have simul-
taneously penetrated the body of the viewer, mixing the pleasure of
words with the pleasure of seeing the scintillating agitation of the
statues’ metallic gaze and coruscating metal surfaces. The charis/
grace of the andrias would join the charis of the performed poetry.
The epigram had the potentiality of animation, which became real-
ized in speech, in exhaling pneuma. At the same time, the Greek
understanding of pneuma as simultaneously voice, sound, and fire
unified enunciated words with the coruscating glitter of metal: the
fulfillment of an pneumatikos andrias.56

The English translation of pneumatikos andrias is literally “pneumatic statue,”

but the pneumatic connections here go beyond the statue itself. It is the
58 The Sculpted Ear

reciting voice that gives fuel to the encounter, triggering the latent pneu-
matic properties of both written word and bronze statue, connecting the
already invisible circuitry always connecting the three together.
The pneumatological aurality embedded into written epigrams was espe-
cially prevalent in Renaissance Italy, where a potency of interplay existed
between the various arts. Among the most notable examples involving stat-
ues was the “Congress of the Wits” (Congresso degli Arguti), a group standing
in the Palazzo Braschi in Rome centering on a battered Hellenic figure that
was given the name Pasquino by locals. The assemblage was unearthed
during the city’s extensive sixteenth-century urbanization, and carried on
conversations with one another or addressed the public utilizing anony-
mous texts pasted upon their façades. Their playful discourse in one sense
reflected the social theatricality and personal gestures in oral performance
common in Rome at that time.57 Yet within that ethos lay a deeper trace to
the pneumatic impulse carried in the legacy of that kind of writing. Kathleen
Wren Christian, with regard to another group of statues found at the Roman
Academy sculpture garden of Pomponio Leto, ties these aural epigrams to
the mode of poetics developed during the quattrocento that facilitated the
“revelation of anima (soul) and spirit” in painting and sculpture.58 This power
of animation, in Christian’s formulation, was enacted through the ingenium
(genius) of the artist combined with the bodily fragmentation and relative
anonymity of the ancient statuary with which they engaged. The underlying
lesson here was to say that the animating power of pneuma was best kept
in the hands of the inspired creator, reinforcing the sacrosanct relationship
between sculptor and sculpture.
As we have seen, though, the pneumatic potency available to the voice
was thought to be ubiquitous, and therefore difficult to keep under wraps.
The question became how to discipline those for whom the pneumatic voice
would serve only to goad the deadness of their intended objects. Epigrams
played a role in this act as well. Christian identifies an example of an epigram
crafted about a sleeping nymph statue of which there were several exam-
ples in fifteenth-century Rome. The text, far from inviting the reader to
enter an aural interplay with the interiorized pneuma of the statue, deliv-
ers a stern warning against interrupting its prevalent silence. I sleep as I
listen to the murmur of the soothing water. Be careful, whoever approaches this
marble cave, Not to disturb my slumber: drink or bathe in silence, warns the
Nymph through the inscription of the written word.59 This sense of warn-
ing was further articulated by a famous 1544 epigram by Giovanni Strozzi,
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 59

which broadcast his desire to “awaken” the figure in Michelangelo’s sculp-

ture Night located in the Medici Chapel in Florence. “Night, which you see
sleeping . . . , has life,” Strozzi wrote. “Wake her if you don’t believe it, and
she will speak to you.” When Michelangelo responded to Strozzi in the
form of another epigram, the sculptor made it known the statue’s prefer-
ence to remain silent and undisturbed. “Not to see, not to hear [or feel] is
for me the best fortune. So do not wake me!”60 These stories suggest the
acknowledgment of some deeper power embedded within the act of writing
an epigram. Innocuous jokes and political texts on the surface of Pasquino
were one thing, but inviting the statue to come alive through the spark
of the poetic, pneumatized voice crossed a deliberately placed line. One
suspects that Michelangelo’s epigrammic response smacks of a paternalis-
tic impulse to protect his creation, while leaving the reasons for enacting
that protection enigmatic. Did he have pneuma in mind while crafting his
response? What does it mean to say Michelangelo “gives the statue a voice
and finds an intention to back that voice, but in a way that cancels both the
statue’s own speech and speech of others,” as Gross intimates?61 And, most
important, why bother to nullify the play of mutual speech unless there is
something perceived to be empowering about it?
Perhaps the best way to unpack these questions is through an exam-
ple. Take one of the most famous literary examinations of the moment of
engagement between flesh and metal: Aleksandar Pushkin’s 1833 narrative
poem The Bronze Horseman (Mednyi Vsadnik). Often read as an allegory
about the relationship between empire and citizen, the work is tinged with
an unmistakable veneer of gothic Romanticism. It is also nothing less than
a direct articulation of the anxiety surrounding the lifelike fidelity of stat-
ues. Pushkin’s choice of subject was well founded. Falconet, who sculpted
the bronze equestrian sculpture of Peter the Great written about in the
poem, constantly championed its lifelike fidelity to the point of arguing
with those who thought the horse’s neck was too thick.62 But in the context
of The Bronze Horseman, the horse becomes the least of the protagonist’s
worries. The story revolves around an impoverished citizen of St. Peters-
burg named Evgenii, who is caught in one of the Neva River’s periodic floods
and forced to take refuge on top of a marble lion in the shadow of Falconet’s
statue. He escapes once the water recedes, only to discover that the young
woman whom he intended to marry has perished in the flood. Evgenii goes
mad and wanders the city as a vagrant, eventually finding himself in the
shadow of Peter’s statue yet again. He proceeds to angrily curse it for his
60 The Sculpted Ear

troubles, thinking that the silent monument was a safe object upon which
he could air his grievances. With a sudden transformation, an enraged Peter
and his horse come to life and vengefully pursue Evgenii down the street.63
The poem ends with the young man’s body floating facedown in the Neva;
whether by suicide or murder-by-statue is left unresolved.
The means by which Peter’s statue came to life is likewise never fully
explained. Evgenii’s voice was clearly the flashpoint igniting the Tsar’s violent
animation, but what exactly did that voice ignite? Did it summon the venge-
ful spirit of Peter himself, angered at his eternal slumber being disturbed by
a wretched nobody? Or did the voice merely tip the balance of life-like into
lively sans the spirited subject—a manifestation of what Roman Jakobson
saw as the cancellation of the signification gap between animate and inani-
mate?64 Perhaps there is value in treating this fictional occurrence as if it were
an actual event. If pneuma was diagnosed as the underlying cause behind
Peter’s animation, two important implications could be drawn from such
an argument. First, it gives a material tangibility to an event that could be
dismissed as magical fancy. And second, the possibility of a material expla-
nation begets a potential trepidation toward that substance as a source of
power. Though purely fictional, The Bronze Horseman presents an interesting
ethical case study on the manifestation of that power. A pervasive mate-
rial force would also have the potential to be a democratizing one. Were the
peasant Evgenii’s voice pneumatically fueled, it would raise the possibility
that absolutely anyone could manifest the power of animation through the
efficacy of breath. Concerns over the misuse of animating powers upon stat-
ues by those outside of a chosen handful were part of discourses on divinity
and magic as well.65 But given the long history of understanding pneuma
as a substance that pervades all things, a pneumatic reading of The Bronze
Horseman opens the possibility of the most miniscule voices tapping into
an essential power, even if in the end the act did not turn out so well for
Evgenii himself.
Lessing wrote Laocoön sixty-seven years before Pushkin penned The
Bronze Horseman, and twenty-one years before the premiere of Mozart’s Don
Giovanni, another tale in which the voice unwittingly awakens a vengeful
statue that in turn influenced Pushkin’s poem. One gets the sense that maybe
he saw this coming. For within the aesthetic barriers he wrought, Lessing
also (perhaps unwittingly) embedded a commentary on the efficacy of the
political voice in the twilight of Baroque representation and power. A nota-
ble byproduct of Enlightenment thought regarding the liberated individual
 Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth 61

was the idea that access to spheres of power was no longer the exclusive
purview of the traditional gatekeepers in the aristocracy and the church.
Pneumatic cosmology, while on its last legs in the mid-eighteenth century,
still presented a formidable historical presence with the benefit of rational
grounding through culturally accepted scientific thought. Could there have
been a tangible concern that some force existed—pneuma or otherwise—
to empower liberated voices, and give some bite to that increasing bark? If
so, then The Bronze Horseman could also serve as a Lessing-esque allegory
warning against engaging with statues as if they were on the cusp of becom-
ing alive. To do so, and tip the tenuous semiotic balance between life and
death, would undermine the sense of order that aesthetic boundaries both
mimic and reproduce.66 Taking the breath and sound out of Laocoön—and
by proxy Peter the Great and any other statue—thus becomes a safety valve
against the changing relationship between authority and society brought
on by the Enlightenment.
This is, perhaps, a charitable view of Lessing’s intentions and legacy
toward the sounded statue. Because he chose to use the Laocoön as the pièce
de résistance of his theories on aesthetics, it was impossible from the start
for him to escape the cosmological gravity of pneuma as a historical concept.
And even though the ontological vanishing of pneuma became a mark in
Lessing’s favor, such an obvious ex machina only reinforces the failure of
his attempt to unsound the statue through the avenue of rigid aesthetic
categorization. At base, he falls into the trap that Nietzsche outlined by
conceptualizing the Laocoön through the lens of his own cultural predispo-
sitions. Had Lessing opened his ears to what the Greeks said about classical
sculpture and the pneumatic universe embedded in every marble and bronze
fold, he would not have put such a burden on the mouth of his protago-
nist. Guy Métraux makes this point especially clear by arguing that even
statues predating the Laocoön were thought to be full of respirated pneuma
whether their mouths were agape or closed, shown by movement in cloth-
ing or subtle bodily expressions.67 The ideal of statuary upon which Lessing
built his wall of silence never actually existed. Those statues were never
meant to be breathless, or voiceless, or soundless in any imaginable sense.
Interjecting pneuma into the sonic encounter between subject and statue,
then, disrupts the entire framework through which that encounter has been
imagined and reproduced in the work of art. It questions the impulse to
dismiss the encounter as an irrational magic, without recourse to broader
systems of circulation that fueled the breath through both person and statue.
62 The Sculpted Ear

It elucidates the inability to understand the voice as something other than

an inert object devoid of airy presence, in spite of the long history in which
voice was itself an affective object with pneumatic ties. Most of all, it centers
the ear as the organ of inquiry through which to engage with this history,
deflecting the commanding aesthetic role of eye and hand for a hearing that
carries a social and political bent. By drawing attention to Laocoön’s mouth,
and emphasizing that he could not possibly be screaming, Lessing inadver-
tently challenged us to hear that scream with all possible fidelity.
Chapter 3

Imperial Possessions

In retrospect, there is a distinct possibility that Lessing’s quest to squelch the

scream of Laocoön collapsed into rubble for good a world away, among the
ruins of the Mysorean capital of Seringapatam on the Indian subcontinent.1
In the culminating battle of the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1799), an East
India Company army led by Lieutenant-General George Harris (commander
in chief of British forces in Madras) besieged and defeated the remaining
forces of Tipu Sultan Fath Ali Khan, the Mysorean ruler who had been in
conflict with the company since his ascension to the throne almost twenty
years earlier. The dramatic storming of the city on May 4 was followed by
several days of looting by the victorious soldiers, and after order was restored,
company prize agents set to the task of dividing the vast assets of Tipu’s
estate. Objects claimed by British officers involved in the siege were among
the most splendid and elaborate of the deposed ruler’s belongings. Richard
Wellesley, the governor-general of India who pushed hard for the campaign
from the beginning of his appointment in 1798, received the jeweled sword
that Tipu had carried when he was shot in the head and killed. His brother
Arthur (later to achieve fame as the Duke of Wellington, conqueror of Napo-
leon Bonaparte) took a jeweled sporting pistol and a number of short swords
and daggers encrusted in emerald and gold. In all, the equivalent of three
million pounds of gold was claimed from Mysore’s treasury in addition to
the usual spoils of gems, pottery, and clothing. The amount of confiscated
material was so great that the young Colonel Wellesley noted that some
64 The Sculpted Ear

soldiers were obligated to leave part of their portion behind (most unwill-
ingly, I would imagine).2
One object not left behind was a curious tiger sculpture found in a build-
ing of the palace complex—the ragmahal—devoted to Tipu’s collection of
musical instruments. Finding such a sculpture was not unexpected, since
much of his court iconography revolved around representations of tigers.
But this particular tiger was quite different from those adorning the rest of
the palace. Consisting of painted wood, its monetary value was negligible
compared to other objects in his collections. What it lacked in intrinsic worth,
though, was more than recompensed in spectacle. Prone beneath the tiger
was a man dressed in European attire, whose neck was precariously exposed
to the tiger’s revealed teeth. The man’s eyes and mouth were painted with a
blank expression conveying a dual sense of horror and amazement. Yet, as
if the form was not grotesquely mesmerizing on its own merit, the sculp-
ture also incorporated the macabre sound of the mauling as well. By simply
turning a crank, one could hear pitched representations of both panthera
growl and human death scream punctuated by the musical accompaniment
of a small button organ built within the tiger’s torso.
Tipu’s Tiger, as the object came to be known, was something of an oddi-
ty—a “Man-Tyger-Organ” seen by the British as both “toy and instrument,
silly and fierce, a cross between an organ grinder and a player piano, a piece
of fine artisanship but hardly an aesthetic object of any standard.”3 On display
in London from 1808, it became one of the most magnetic tourist attractions
of any object taken from India during the colonial period. This popularity, in
one sense, would appear dependent upon the broader, fantastical othering
of Tipu Sultan through the literature, art, and poetry of the nineteenth-
century British Empire. Indeed, tales of the cruel “Tippoo Saib” even outlasted
the company that deposed him (it was liquidated in the wake of the Sepoy
Mutiny of 1857) and would continue well into the twentieth century.4 At the
same time, it seems reasonable to assume that the queer sonicity of the tiger
almost certainly amplified his aura of otherness long past the time it would
have dissipated otherwise. The oddity of the tiger made it an ideal object by
which both the East India Company and later the British public could encap-
sulate the moral justification for a significant and controversial military action
in Mysore, and more broadly the entire British colonial project in India—part
of what Maya Janasoff calls the “imperial arrogance” of this period.5
One aspect defining an event between sound and statuary is how it can
transcend humble or mysterious origins and embed within a pan-cultural
 Imperial Possessions 65

circulation of imagination and thought. Yet these events can also manifest
within specific intercultural contexts, subject to whims and flights of fancy
that speak to more localized and temporalized matters of concern. In this
regard, I want to argue that it is impossible to understand the reception of
Tipu’s Tiger without understanding the ways in which it was imbued with
the specific and multifaceted power of an occult imagination rampant in
nineteenth-century Britain. This premise is built upon a central irony: that
two of the object’s inherent components (the automaton and the organ)
carry strong ties to the technological rationalism of Western modernity,
yet hold powerful and diverse magical histories as well. Together with the
tiger’s façade, they become part of an esoteric whole threading together the
object, its namesake, and the empire that consumed and enchanted that
object over the course of two centuries. Such esotericism does more than
simply bring to the surface a general cultural unease with the relationship
between India and the Empire reflected in the discourse surrounding the
tiger’s public display. Nor does it merely represent the complicated dispo-
sition of Tipu himself: grounded both in traditional modes of Muslim and
Asiatic kingship, while carrying a global imagination and a vision for south-
ern India influenced by European modernity yet independent of its colonial
structures. The sum, in fact, becomes even weirder than these parts. What
these esoteric intersections weaving through the tiger’s sculpted and sonic
forms really leave is the unmistakable question, in any parlance, of who
exactly is accomplishing the act of possessing.
•••••••
Born in 1750, Tipu was the oldest son of Haidar Ali, a Muslim military
commander for the Hindu Wodeyar dynasty, a line that could trace its roots
in Mysore back to the late fourteenth century. Haidar gained enough author-
ity and prestige throughout that decade to seize power from the puppet
Krishnaraja Wodeyar II in 1761, meaning that the young Tipu ascended
from general’s son into the more affluent role of heir apparent. As a teen-
ager, Tipu experienced the rigors of combat while campaigning against the
neighboring Maratha Empire (which included the First Anglo-Mysore War
in 1766), at the same time attaining the elite education befitting a future
ruler that his father lacked. Through tutors, he was forged in the tradi-
tional practices of Iranian kingship and became fluent in Arabic, Persian,
and important local Indian languages such as Kannada, Telegu, and Marathi
necessary for military and diplomatic endeavors.6 After Tipu came to power
following the death of Haidar in 1782, he utilized this extensive training to
66 The Sculpted Ear

quickly shore up his power base and establish himself at a time of insecu-
rity. Ensconced in the last stages of the Second Anglo-Mysore War, Tipu
immediately assumed personal executive, judicial, and military authority
and sought to distance himself from the declining influence of the Mughal
Empire in Delhi, at that point a puppet state under control of the neighbor-
ing Marathas. Not only did he refuse to pay traditional homage as a new
king, but by 1786 had adopted the title of padshah, which had been utilized
by the Mughal emperor in India to that point.7
Provocative gestures like this were necessary to establish legitimacy
from the start. As the son of a Muslim usurper in a majority Hindu prov-
ince surrounded by both European colonial powers and rival kingdoms, Tipu
understood the necessity of constructing a personal mystique speaking to
diverse cultural interests to further his aims in Mysore. His adoption of the
tiger as a personal symbol was quite deliberate in this regard. Tigers, as Kate
Brittlebank has shown, carried a long history of court power and authority
among the Hindu princes, dating back to medieval India. They also marked
the influence of the power of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, whose symbolic
prestige had long been influential in the states of southern India and whose
recognition Tipu had sought from the beginning of his rule.8 Cultivating
images of tigers in art, literature, architecture, and clothing served the dual
purpose of grounding his rule within both Muslim and Hindu notions of
kingship that helped cement his legitimacy among Mysore’s citizens, rival
states, and the British and French colonial bureaucracies.
In addition to deploying the power of symbol for political legitimacy,
Tipu cultivated an image of cosmopolitan kingship that would have looked
strangely familiar to the panoply of enlightened despots holding court in
Europe during the eighteenth century. His recognition of the importance of
cultural diversity in displays of personal wealth was reflected in his astound-
ing collection of objects from around the world. He had an extraordinary
library, featuring over two thousand texts on religion, philosophy, medicine,
and science in several different languages.9 A separate wing of his palace
featured glassware, pottery, telescopes, and mechanical watches, accumulated
through the recruitment of artisans and craftsmen from the Ottoman Empire
and Western Europe during the early part of his reign.10 His savvy political
mind is shown through various letters to British, French, and Ottoman digni-
taries seeking economic partnership or political advantage. They also show a
remarkably egalitarian disposition across lines of class, gender, and religion,
which he saw as part of a history of Indian monarchy that had been lost by
 Imperial Possessions 67

the time of the Mughal Empire, though whether he lived up to this disposi-
tion in practice has been a source of considerable debate.11 Tipu also followed
in his father’s footsteps and became a student of modern military technol-
ogy. He facilitated the production of European-quality muskets locally, hired
foreign engineers and metallurgists to identify caches of sulphur, silver, gold,
and coal for weapons production, and devoted substantial resources to the
study and military applications of rocketry.12
European accounts regarding Tipu prior to the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War
emphasized this nuanced view of his ruling character, as several accounts
written during the 1780s spoke of his graceful demeanor, agreeable personal-
ity, and keen political mind. Lieutenant-Colonel Russel, an officer in a French
hussar regiment working with Haidar Ali during the Second Anglo-Mysore
War, wrote in 1782 that Tipu was an “upright, sensible and grateful gentle-
man” who openly spoke of politics and military matters, especially when
out of earshot of his more myopic father.13 A few accounts even spoke of
his cosmopolitanism in racial terms, like Lieutenant Robert Cameron did
when he described Tipu as “fair [skinned], with a pleasing countenance” in
comparison to the native Indian “blacks” that he ruled over.14 Governor-Gen-
eral Richard Wellesley, who had significant political reasons for casting Tipu
in the dimmest light possible, wrote of his concern for the “example he sets
to other [Indian] rulers” with his organizational acumen and declared that
“in the long run, such an example can have a disruptive influence on the
empire.”15 These descriptions were naturally subsumed by tales of the cruel
and despotic “Tippoo Saib” after the fall of Seringapatam, but even as late
as 1814 he still maintained a grudging respect in British circles. That very
year, Sir Walter Scott wrote that the recently abdicated Napoleon Bonaparte
“might have shown the same resolved and dogged spirit of resolution which
induced Tippoo Saib to die manfully upon the breach of his capital city with
his sabre clenched in his hand.”16
Scott’s allusion to Napoleon was not merely rhetorical flourish. During
the 1790s Tipu was often simultaneously complimented and denigrated as
an “Indian Napoleon” for both his sense of statecraft, his military prowess,
and his perceived arrogance in resisting Britain and its Indian allies. Some
have even argued that the posthumous vilification of Tipu was simply an
extension of his close relationship with the hated French.17 But the way in
which the British caustically denied Tipu’s modernity during the course of
the nineteenth century seems to go beyond mere association with France
or Bonaparte. Even before his demise, Tipu became singularly synonymous
68 The Sculpted Ear

with an unenlightened barbarity that affirmed the moral basis of the British
colonial project in India. The decadent persona of the “Tiger of Mysore” was
reproduced ad infinitum in the years after Seringapatam, starting with stories
spread by soldiers who participated in the campaign and quickly expand-
ing into newspapers and literature. Examples include rumors that circulated
regarding Tipu’s feeding of captive soldiers to feral tigers in pens and cele-
brating the act with decadent artwork on his palace walls. Books like William
Kirkpatrick’s Select Letters of Tippoo Sultan to Various Public Functionaries
(1811) claimed to give the British public an inner window into Tipu’s mind
and used his own words to play up his perceived inner barbarity. No less
than six melodramas with Tipu as a main character were put on in London
between 1800 and 1827, often farces of the sultan’s decadent court life. And
the same ruler that Scott had lauded for a “dogged spirit” in 1814 had by 1831
transformed into a lecherous villain desiring to possess an Englishwoman
for his own nefarious purposes in his novel The Surgeon’s Daughter.18
The British had many political and social reasons to transmute Tipu
from an Indian Frederick the Great into the decadent “Tiger of Mysore”
constructed by Regency-era popular culture.19 One reason is that in the
aftermath of his demise, Tipu was far more useful to colonial propagandists
as a vanquished other who was never really a threat to British interests in
India at all. Ashok Malhotra notes that the death of Tipu coincided with a
litany of stories and images of dead tigers symbolizing Britain’s absorption
of India into the Empire.20 This symbolic killing of the tiger appeared in quite
a few practices after Seringapatam. The campaign medal given to soldiers
who fought in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War featured a lion leaping on its
hind legs toward a defensively backpedaling tiger. This same period saw a
surge in aristocratic hunting parties preying on tigers, spurred by bounties
on skins and the desire for trophy heads to display on estate mantels. Tipu’s
Tiger, the alluring oddity garnished from the deposed sultan’s vast collec-
tions, was in many ways the ultimate tiger trophy, and it quickly became
the central object embodying the historical transformation of Tipu himself
in the British imagination. Its mere existence was held as incontrovertible
evidence of Tipu’s hatred and disgust for the British, displayed in a way
thought proper for an unenlightened Indian despot. It also, perhaps, became
the trump card by which the British could posthumously emasculate Tipu
without inadvertently proving just how worrisome an adversary he was in
life: a generous case of methinks the Empire doth protest too much.
•••••••
 Imperial Possessions 69

Descriptions of the tiger could be found as early as 1799, in an official

memorandum written by Captain Benjamin Sydenham just after the Siege
of Seringapatam that was widely published in British newspapers. This,
along with an illustration of the tiger drawn by James Hunter in 1800,
introduced the British public to the tiger and seeded its eventual fascina-
tion with the object. However, the most comprehensive description of the
tiger’s unique form and mechanisms can be found in an 1835 issue of the
London-based periodical Penny Magazine. Called a “Man-Tyger-Organ” by
the author, the passage is worth quoting in full as one of the few accounts
detailing its mode of operation before significant modification of its inte-
rior structure by nineteenth-century British craftsmen.

The handle seen on the animal’s shoulder turns a spindle and crank
within the body; to this crank is fastened a wire, which rises and falls
by turning the crank: the wire passes down from the tiger between
his fore-paws into the man’s chest, where it works a pair of bellows,
which forces the air through a pipe with a sort of whistle, terminat-
ing in the man’s mouth. The pipe is covered by the man’s hand; but
at the moment when, by the action of the crank, the air is forced
through the pipe, a string leading from the bellows pulls a small
lever connected with the arm, which works on a hinge at the elbow;
the arm rises in a manner which the artist intended to show suppli-
cation; the hand is lifted from the mouth, and a cry is heard. The cry
is repeated as often as the handle is turned; and while this process is
going on, an endless screw on the shaft turns a worm-worn wheel
slowly round, which is furnished with four levers or wipers; each of
these levers alternately lifts up another and larger pair of bellows in
the head of the tiger. When by the action of one of these four levers
the bellows are lifted up to their full height, the lever, in continuing
to turn, passes by the bellows, and the upper board being loaded
with a large piece of lead, falls down on a sudden and forces the air
violently through two loud-toned pipes, terminating in the animal’s
mouth, and differing by the interval of a fifth. This produces a harsh
growl. The man in the meantime continues his screaming or whis-
tling, and, after a dozen cries, the growl is repeated.21

Regarding the organ assembly in the wooden body of the tiger, Arthur J. G.
Ord-Hume notes similarities to a barrel organ—a type of semiautomatic
70 The Sculpted Ear

musical instrument where an external crank rotates a horizontal wooden

barrel on the inside of the instrument. In a typical barrel organ, the rotation
of the barrel pulls open a set of bellows via worm gear, which then expels
compressed air into a series of pitched pipes. Because a series of pins on
the barrel dictates which pipe(s) are opened to air from the bellows, vari-
ous combinations of pins create a simple melodic sequence. The assembly
in the tiger differs slightly since the crank controls both the interior organ
and the devices controlling the mimetic sounds and movements. The crank
is attached to a small shaft that controls an elongated bellows attached to a
soundboard, upon which eighteen copper pipes arranged in order by ascend-
ing intervals of roughly a semitone are anchored. The compressed air from
the bellows is controlled by a series of round ivory buttons that function like
the external keys of any standard organ. Though they are not shaped nor
patterned like a modern keyboard, there are similarities to a type of small
French organ built during the late eighteenth century.22 As one would expect
with an instrument as old and well worn as the tiger, significant portions
of the organ assembly were replaced at some point during the nineteenth
century, including the chest bellows and most of the individual copper pipes.23
Since the tiger was made of wood and brass instead of more valuable mate-
rials like gold, it was probably overlooked by looting soldiers who stripped
apart many of Tipu’s more valuable commodities. Governor-General Welles-
ley, taken by the symbolic meaning of the object, recommended that the
tiger be sent back to England and placed on display in the Tower of London
as a treasure of international prestige. But the East India Company was hesi-
tant to allow the Crown to claim its most unique spoil. Instead, the tiger
was shipped back to London and kept in warehouse storage until placed on
display in the upstairs portion of the East India House Museum. After the
British government absorbed the assets of the company, the tiger ended
up in the hands of the Indian Section of the South Kensington Museum
in London, renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899. It remained
a popular exhibit well into the twentieth century, until it was damaged
during the Second World War (strangely enough, from employee miscon-
duct instead of German bombs) and taken out of open circulation for good.
After the war, it underwent a massive restoration at the hands of organ
maker Henry Willis III and returned to display in the 1950s. The tiger was
encased in glass, so that patrons could no longer work its aged mechanism,
and surrounded by various artifacts from Mysore that were purchased by
the V&A over the years.
 Imperial Possessions 71

For an object with such a rich historical life, few corroborated details
exist regarding the circumstances of its creation. Recognition for the actual
construction of the tiger has been given to a diverse array of people, none of
whom have emerged from the fog of anonymity. The internal mechanisms
have been credited to nameless French engineers or Dutch organ makers
brought to Seringapatam by Tipu in the late 1780s. The woodcraft of both
the tiger and the victim, by contrast, are consistent with similar wood sculp-
tures found in Mysore during the late eighteenth century. The sculptors were
thought to have come from a class of artisans known as chitrakars common
to the city, or from artisans in the nearby town of Channapatna that were
well known for creating painted wooden toys.24 With few tangible details
available, speculation on its origins was rampant throughout British circles
during the nineteenth century.25 The most commonly accepted story held
that Tipu commissioned the tiger around 1793, on the heels of a massive
defeat at the hands of the East India Company in the Third Anglo-Mysore
War the year before, with the intent to soothe his bruised ego while having
a lark at British expense. Others, however, suggested that Tipu came into
its possession secondhand, part of his massive interest in collecting oddities
from abroad. In an entry on the East India House in a popular tourist guide
of London published in 1840, author J. C. Platt mentions in a footnote on
the tiger’s exhibition that “the whole machine is very rude, and it is probably
much older than the age of Tippoo.”26 His suspicion may have been based
on Hunter’s illustration, where the sculpted man’s clothing looked closer to
that of a seventeenth-century Dutch trader than a British soldier. This led
to speculation that the tiger was originally built for a different Indian ruler
within the Dutch orbit and later repainted with red clothing.27
Though the tiger’s origins may have been shrouded in mystery, the
increasing fascination of the British public with the peculiar object was
beyond doubt. From the start, it was one of the most popular exhibits at the
East India House Museum, gathering crowds who waited in line to hear its
perverse sonic performance and henceforth becoming a staple of the London
tourist experience. And its status only grew as Tipu Sultan became more
ensconced in the imperial imagination regarding the decadent otherness of
India more generally. One British report written just after the fall of Serin-
gapatam claimed that turning the crank was part of Tipu’s afternoon ritual to
“amuse himself with this miserable emblematical triumph of the Khodadaud
[“God given”] over the English Sircar.”28 By the time of Waterloo, claims that
the tiger was Tipu’s favorite piece among his massive collection of objects
72 The Sculpted Ear

transformed from idle speculation into something approaching common

knowledge. Such attachment was taken as evidence of a cruelty toward the
British alluded to through decades of rumored atrocities. “A human being,”
wrote James Forbes in his 1813 memoir, “who could pass his hours of relax-
ation and amusement in this savage manner [of playing the tiger], may be
easily supposed to have enjoyed the death of a European who unhappily fell
into his power, whether effected by poison, sword, or bowstring.”29
Linking together the perceived crudeness of Tipu Sultan with that of
his mechanical tiger must be seen as a contrast to a broadening aesthetic
sensibility capturing the sense of exotic beauty associated with India since
the 1760s. The aforementioned Forbes, who worked as a writer for the
East India Company and became a prolific sketch artist during his nearly
twenty years on the subcontinent, produced hundreds of representations
of architecture and natural phenomenon that circulated widely during the
1780s. Together with James Wales, who created paintings based on Forbes’s
sketches, these works became instrumental in the connection of the Indian
landscape to the idea of the natural sublime. The naturalist exoticism of
these works was especially resonant with the concept of the sublime put
forth by Edmund Burke, who argued that the exotic images were instru-
mental in producing the extension of consciousness necessary for sublime
feelings.30 This rubric provided another avenue by which the decidedly
“unnatural” tiger, despite its idiomatic façade, was considered an abomina-
tion. Yet this emerging interest in the sublime during the first half of the
nineteenth century is simultaneously essential to a deeper understanding
of the British fascination with the tiger. Not all conceptualizations of the
sublime from this period perpetuated transcendence through engagement
with the natural. Others took the awe inherent in the Burkean sublime
and transformed it into an annihilating force—Kant’s paradox of present-
ing the unpresentable, or Schopenhauer’s death of the subject through the
power of the sublime, or, most especially, the protagonists of novels by
Shelley and poetry by Keats, cornerstones of what Vijay Mishra calls the
“gothic sublime.” For Mishra, this dark side of the sublime ethos is marked
by the shattering of discourse in the gap between meaning and lucidity.
All that remains are the nervous fragments emanating from the object
(which is “ungraspable”) or the mind (“itself highly overwhelmed by the
highly overdetermined” experience).31 It is within those remaining pieces
of the object—themselves perhaps more graspable—that meaning, however
nervous and suspect, comes to pass.
 Imperial Possessions 73

An aural manifestation of the gothic sublime tied to the aural emana-

tions from the tiger certainly affected its status as an object of sculpture. By
the turn of the twentieth century, when a wave of reassessment took place
regarding Indian cultural artifacts taken throughout the Imperial period
that were housed in British museums, the tiger was notably left out of this
aesthetic rebranding. Richard Davis argues that around 1900, a state of
what he calls “indophilia”—a rather Rousseauist impulse to cite the perceived
spiritual purity of Indian artifacts in contradistinction to the depredation of
urban, material culture—began to manifest in a certain segment of the Brit-
ish museum community. Led by E. B. Havell and a group called the Indian
Society, a trend developed to reinterpret Indian artwork within the bounds
of Western aesthetics. Havell was instrumental in selectively defining these
attributes, identifying “idealistic, mystic, symbolic, and transcendental” as
characteristics of Indian art—attributes not dissimilar in his mind to the
already rehabilitated artistic practices of the late medieval Gothic tradition.32
The influence of this post-Victorian mentality toward religious sculpture
from the Indian subcontinent was profound. After the First World War,
British museums began to incorporate objects of religious imagery in their
display collections, and by the late 1940s exhibitions at the British Royal
Academy of Arts were presenting such works with an attention to form,
craft, and beauty not granted these objects in the nineteenth century. The
tiger, however, was a notable exception. While it was incorporated into the
Royal Academy exhibit, this was done solely on account of its popularity
with the public, with little regard to its aesthetic relationship to the other
sculptural works on display. A similar situation arose at the tiger’s perma-
nent exhibition site at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where curators felt
obliged to display it despite the limited space available for their collection.33
While Davis correctly identifies the reasons why Tipu’s Tiger was left out
of the British aesthetic paradigm toward Indian art built during the twilight
of the Empire, his argument only captures one important element that fed
the tiger’s long and complicated cultural life. For one, he does not directly
address a similar exclusion of the tiger from modern ideas about Indian art
from the Indian perspective. The closest he comes is by acknowledging that
Tipu’s Tiger has never been subject to a repatriation request by the Indian
government, possibly because of its association with a Muslim ruler who
carried power in a mostly Hindu-populated region.34 But more problematic
is his treatment of the tiger as simply a smaller part of the broader “taxo-
nomic shift” (a term he borrows from James Clifford) in ideas about Indian
74 The Sculpted Ear

art in the British imagination. Rather, I think that the staying power of the
tiger rested upon its complete and utter disregard for taxonomic identity of
any sort. Though it takes the outward form of a statue, the tiger’s relegation
to an aesthetically bereft curiosity relies more upon the jacquemart within
than the animal without. The façade may have engendered a passing connec-
tion with the gothic sublime, but the automaton and barrel organ settled
underneath its wooden skin held the deeper and more profound enchant-
ment that made the object so memorable.
•••••••

Tipu’s Tiger maintains a stronger historical connection to the automata devel-

oped throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
since most modern descriptions refer to it with that term. The correlation
is a bit of a misnomer. In actuality, the tiger is only a semi-automaton,
since it lacks a self-perpetuating mechanism.35 For this reason, it has more
in common with Wolfgang Kempeler’s chess-playing Turk than Jacques
Vaucanson’s Canard or Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz’s Musicienne. Yet the lack
of self-perpetuation is not the only aspect that separates the tiger from these
more famous devices. Most automata of the period found their roots in the
artisanal field of clock making that developed during the late Renaissance.36
As the spring and gear mechanisms that powered timepieces became more
complex during the seventeenth century, clockmakers in France, Switzerland,
and southern Germany began to experiment with using these apparatuses to
power small facsimiles of birds, small animals, and humans. These techno-
logical advances in autonomous clocks also perpetuated some relevant social
and philosophical threads that weave through the development of these
machines. The first was widespread acceptance of the Newtonian concept
that the rational order of nature functioned like a clock, down to the precise
physical and mental processes of human beings. The second stemmed from
the Cartesian notion of an incorporeal consciousness that framed the bodies
of living creatures as soulless machines. This meant that the inherent ratio-
nality of craftsmanship could properly represent the carnal representations
of animals as well as inanimate objects like clocks and fountains.37 Vaucan-
son’s Canard is often cited as a primary example of this mentality—a duck
that quacks, but communicates nothing. Automata representing humans,
though, were more of a moral and metaphysical quandary, especially in an
age defined as much by the subjective autonomy of Kant as the mechanical
process of nature and society. Was the automaton, as Foucault would later
argue, simply a new mechanism by which bodies could become “political
 Imperial Possessions 75

puppets” for the ruling class?38 Or could the metaphysical allegory of the
clock provide a conceptual rubric for representing a moving, animate human
with machinery in less dire terms?
These questions manifested in unique ways with regard to the tiger, espe-
cially given its combination of human with animal. References to its “crude
mechanism” in nineteenth-century accounts referred to its lack of techno-
logical elegance compared with clock making. And when juxtaposed with
the work of Vaucanson and Jaquet-Droz, one can imagine how it might have
fallen comparatively short in the eyes of a pronouncing public. For one, the
tiger’s style of representation, perfectly acceptable within the standards of
South Asian artisanal practices at the time, was often judged cartoonish by
those comparing it to the desired realism of mimetic sculpture stemming
from Greek and Roman influence. The most damning attribute, though,
was the mimetic relationship the tiger carried to the sounds that its mech-
anisms produced. Part of the public appeal for musical automata was the use
of sonic ephemerality to mask their identities as machines. Many automata
maintained a level of technical precision that allowed even the most skepti-
cal listeners a moment of uncertainty as to whether they were witnessing a
“living” performance or not.39 Naturally, the ruse could not have lasted for
very long before listeners realized that they were hearing a machine panto-
mime a human. Yet even this moment of uncertainty would have escaped
the grasp of the tiger. After all, the likelihood of encountering a tiger attack
within the urban confines of nineteenth-century London was highly unlikely.
If the tiger’s relationship to other automata left something to be desired,
its status as a barrel organ did little to improve its reputation. At one time,
barrel organs were technological novelties given as high-status gifts between
monarchs, like the one that Elizabeth I gave to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet
III in 1599. But by the mid-nineteenth century, the reputation of the instru-
ment had declined precipitously—even in Britain, where barrel organs were
still produced and played in sizeable numbers into the 1840s.40 By the height
of the Victorian period, the barrel organ was mainly associated with urban
street performers and rural churches, hardly the signifier of technological
novelty it had been two centuries before. Novels like Edwin Waugh’s Th’
Barrel Organ (1883) turned the instrument into the subject of humor and
satire, encompassing the travails of rural, unsophisticated Englishmen having
to engage with machinery during the early years of the Industrial Revolu-
tion. In 1900, someone writing to the Musical Times under the moniker of
“An Old Organist” recounted a story from around 1860 regarding a barrel
76 The Sculpted Ear

organ in a rural church that nobody knew how to turn off. The wayward
device was taken outside by the four strongest parishioners to complete
its musical cycle without disturbing the service.41 Problems like these were
frequent enough that, when including the poor tuning of most barrel organs
and their awkward accompaniment of singers, the expediency and inex-
pensiveness of such devices were less appealing than one might think. A
letter written to the June 1834 issue of the Christian Observer, for example,
declared that he would “advise the introduction of a barrel organ, only where
there is a dearth of singers, or a torpidness of musical feeling.”42 By the mid-
nineteenth century, after most music halls and urban churches had replaced
barrel organs with modern mass-produced upright pianos, they moved to
become a quintessential part of street performance, increasingly an element
of what Deirdre Loughridge refers to as the “machine-made cacophony of
the urban soundscape.”43 Nineteenth-century London was rife with organ
grinders, and the city’s upper middle class, in particular, suffered from their
constant noise. Some spent considerable effort trying to pass legislation
banning their presence, or, like Charles Dickens, made a habit of paying
itinerant organ grinders to silence their instruments for a time.44
What the automaton and the barrel organ ultimately share, and what
becomes especially transparent when fused together in the form of the tiger,
are connections to occult and magical thinking that belie their reputations
as mere machinery. Automata, in particular, carried magical connections
long before the development of their modern counterparts, which Enlight-
enment reason did little to curb. Just as Daedalus was alleged by Aristotle to
have built a mercury-blooded mechanical man and Magnus had his myste-
rious talking head, Vaucanson created his mechanical devices with an ample
assist from what he saw as “occult knowledge,” much to the disdain of the
scientific community of his era (to wit, he even used barrel organ parts for
some of the interior mechanisms). At the time of the tiger’s introduction
for British consumption, E. T. A. Hoffman had written several of his stories
involving scientists who invigorated their automata through supernatural
means.45 Moreover, even the most ardent supporters and creators of autom-
ata in the eighteenth century questioned and ultimately dismissed their
aesthetic value, especially compared to the more historically refined art of
sculpture. Vaucanson, for one, took little interest in the aesthetic value of
his creations, seeing them only in terms of their contribution to the science
of mechanical engineering. Similarly, Jaquet-Droz saw his own mechan-
ical automata merely as a mechanical extension of the clocks he was so
 Imperial Possessions 77

famous for creating. Very few accounts from the period spoke of the sculp-
tural qualities of automata, or regarded them with reference to dominant
eighteenth-century conceptualizations of sculptural aesthetics. There is
little reason to believe that figures like Winckelmann or Herder would have
deigned to bestow automata with the same sublime authority as the yoke
of antiquarian marble.
While the barrel organ itself lacked such a far-reaching history with the
occult mentality, it gathered a magical charge nonetheless through its social
associations. By the mid-nineteenth century, the instrument was becoming
associated with Great Britain’s growing population of immigrants in places
like the East End of London. Middle-class ire toward these musicians was
voiced most stringently by Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1853, when
his disdain for the “vile yellow Italian” organ grinder led him to construct a
soundproof attic in his Chelsea townhouse.46 Such immigrants, mostly recent
arrivals from rural areas, were often stereotyped as superstitious and thus
able to charge their musical performances with magical power (an accusa-
tion leveled especially at the highly exoticized Roma). The barrel organ also
held an enchanted relationship with the laterna magica (magic lantern), an
object steeped in the history of early modern occult machinery and other
modern performance spectacles like the phantasmagoria. It was to these
visual manifestations of the spiritual on the public street that the barrel
organ provided the screeching, omnipresent soundtrack much despised by
London elites. And these magical connections were only heightened by the
more potent occult perceptions toward India in the Victorian imperial imag-
ination. Indian magicians performed to captive audiences in London, and
fellow late nineteenth-century magicians from the West sought connections
to what Henry Ridgely Evans called the “birthplaces of magic and mystery”
as markers of occult authenticity.47 No less a personality than Dickens culti-
vated an Indian alias and accompanying blackface for acts as an amateur
magician.48
These associations should not be excluded or minimized when considering
the impact of Tipu’s Tiger. However, part of its presence for nineteenth-
century audiences lay in the fact that the tiger could not be cleanly channeled
into a hegemonic discourse of empire, or even into a structure of feeling
integrating the growing associations of the Orient with a type of spiritual
knowledge lost to Western Christianity. Cobbled together, the tiger was
simultaneously rational and irrational, technological and magical, horrify-
ing and charming—words describing how many in Britain saw Tipu Sultan
78 The Sculpted Ear

himself. It was, to borrow a phrase from earlier, “a piece of fine artisanship

but hardly an aesthetic object,” something that was omnipresent and yet
nowhere in the imperial consciousness. Now you hear it, now you don’t.
It was, for lack of a better term, an object that could best be described as
weird. The etymological roots of the word bear out this interpretation. Orig-
inally stemming from the Old English wyrd (meaning “destiny” or “fortune”),
by the fifteenth century it gained currency attached to the “Weird Sisters”
manifesting in Elizabethan drama, characters who had the power of divi-
nation.49 The word gained its current usage, referring to something with
connection to the supernatural, in the early nineteenth century, often in
conjunction with portrayals of the Three Sisters in productions of Shake-
speare’s Macbeth. However, the supernatural connotation carries only part
of the affective power of weird. Unlike its common synonyms odd and
strange, there is no sense of passive curiosity embedded in something with
the designation of weird. Rather, the weirdness of a weird thing becomes
what Heidegger would call “ready-at-hand,” affecting those around it through
sheer power of its fascination perpetuated by the perception of occultish ties.
The question becomes how weird becomes ready-at-hand more specifically
through Tipu’s Tiger, and what this says about the prevailing notion that
the automaton is somehow the modern face of the sounding statue.
•••••••

There was quite a bit of weird inherent in the consumption of the tiger in
nineteenth-century Britain. The magical undercurrents of the barrel organ
and the automaton, combined with the imperial fascination with Tipu Sultan
and the spiritual interest in India more broadly, created a cultural atmosphere
in which the tiger became more than the sum of its parts. In essence, the tiger
was turned into what I want to call a weirdifact—an artifact, enchanted by
the blurred lines between rationality and magic, that feeds upon deep-seated
anxieties embedded within the cultural consciousness of those who empower
it and are thus encompassed within its enchanted power. What makes the
weirdness of a weirdifact, at least in the case of Tipu’s Tiger, lies partially in
its state of technological assemblage. The makeup of mechanical elements
with modern connotations cobbled together into a monstrous whole makes
the device seem outside the realm of modernity—from a faux-dernity, of
sorts. Yet a weirdifact does not exist merely as a testament to the fact that it
can exist, like a Rube Goldberg machine. Rather, a weirdifact uses the tether-
ing with a magical faux-dernity to draw forth a self-perpetuating attachment
within a cultural imagination akin to the functional repetition of the machine
 Imperial Possessions 79

itself. Though the crank may turn under the power of human hands, the
fascination that fuels the movement of that hand carries a deep cultural
presence that cannot simply be ignored or reasoned away.
In this case, the cultural anxieties fueling the weirdifact called Tipu’s
Tiger involved the broadening complications in the relationship between the
Empire and the Indian subcontinent. The ties between them were already
saturated with the magical gaze of exoticism from the British perspective,
a state only exacerbated by the tiger’s history and what it represented. And
herein lies the weirdness encompassing early attempts to ascertain the raison
d’être behind Tipu’s Tiger. Its value was as a signifier of Imperial domi-
nance for the home front. Yet even though it was captured, put on display,
and regarded as a decadent toy, the weirdifact cast its spell though the mere
charge of presence. Once a patron was beckoned to turn its crank, it became
an apparatus of capture that pounced upon the unsuspecting person with
its relentless sound. While on open display at the East India House, the
crank controlling these devices was turned constantly, much to the chagrin
of scholars attempting to use the House library kept in a neighboring room
for research. The transfer to the South Kensington Museum after the Mutiny
offered no respite. By June 1869, an article on the tiger in the London-based
magazine Athenaeum gave reason to hope that the noisy behavior would
cease. “Luckily, a kind fate has deprived him of his handle,” the report tells,
“and stopped up, we are happy to think, some of his internal organs, and we
do sincerely hope he will remain so, to be seen and to be admired, if neces-
sary, but to be heard no more.”50
Fate, indeed. Within this statement, and others concerning the oppres-
sive noise of the tiger in public space, lingered a broader concern speaking
directly to its most tangible weirdifact manifestation. Was it possible that
Tipu’s Tiger was actually more Trojan horse than trophy, ensuring the
survival of the Indian citizen-king’s modernity even as the British did their
best to suppress it?
There are several avenues through which the tiger has been heard as
a weirdifact, but nowhere did it manifest more bluntly (and weirdly) than
in the idea that the sound it produced represented the death scream of an
actual person. The rumored identity of the man beneath the tiger was Hugh
Munro, a young Scottish aristocrat who visited India on holiday in late 1792
and had the unfortunate fate to become one of the most high-profile victims
of a tiger attack during the entire British presence on the Indian subconti-
nent.51 The details are as engaging as they are lurid: on December 23, Munro
80 The Sculpted Ear

was spending time hunting for deer on Sangor Island in the Bay of Bengal
with three companions who worked for the company. That night, Munro left
the campfire to urinate in the bushes and was attacked by a pair of Bengal
tigers, ferociously mauled in the process. One of the companions would
recount the incident in a letter to a friend living in Calcutta, later published
in the “Deaths” section of the July 1793 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine and
reproduced in dozens of texts throughout the early nineteenth century. “I
heard a roar, like thunder,” the letter’s author recalled, “and saw an immense
royal tiger spring on the unfortunate Munro, who was sitting down. In a
moment his head was in the beast’s mouth, and he rushed into the jungle
with him, with as much ease as I could lift a kitten.”52 Munro’s companions
managed to kill one of the tigers and chase off the other with musket fire, but
the young man was mortally wounded. Despite their best efforts to return
him to Calcutta on a company ship, Munro died within twenty-four hours
of the attack and was buried at sea. Accounts of the tragedy spread quickly
from India to news outlets throughout the Empire, no doubt playing on the
reputation the Bengal tiger had in the European imagination as a ferocious
man-eater.
Tipu’s connection to a tiger mauling across the subcontinent in Bengal
would seem suspect, but a weirdifact has a propensity to draw out and
enchant even the most diffuse connections. The Mysorean ruler had no
direct connection with the victim. However, Hugh was the only son of Sir
Hector Munro, a highly decorated Scottish general who had served in India
intermittently between 1761 and his retirement in 1782. The last conflict he
served in happened to be the Second Anglo-Mysore War, fought against
the East India Company in response to the British defeat of French allies
at Pondicherry in 1779. Tipu himself commanded a large detachment of
his father’s forces in that war, while Hector Munro served as a divisional
commander in the company forces commanded by Sir Eyre Coote.53 Whether
Tipu knew or had personal thoughts about the elder Munro is unknown.
However, Munro was linked to company forces accused of atrocities against
Mysorean civilians in 1782–83, including an attack on the town of Anant-
pur rehashed for years afterward by the British and French press in which
several hundred women and children were allegedly killed.54 Munro was
never directly named in any of these published accounts, but innuendo of
his involvement persisted among company bureaucrats living in India at the
time. One can imagine a chain of circumstance that could be constructed as
surely as the tiger’s crank could be turned. The death of the younger Munro
 Imperial Possessions 81

came at a desperate time for Tipu politically, happening mere weeks after
his significant defeat in the Third Anglo-Mysore War, in which his young-
est sons were given as hostages to the East India Company. Considering
his need for a symbolic victory in the wake of an actual military defeat, one
can further imagine Tipu hearing the news of Munro’s son being mauled
by a Bengal tiger with delicious irony that he sought to exploit through an
already established apparatus of imagery and symbolism.
Of course, when clearing away the debris of imagination there remains
the conclusion that the connection of the tiger to Munro was made ex post
facto and had little basis in fact.55 A weirdifact, though, does not run on the
veracity of truth, only the enchantment of possibility. If the identity of the
hapless British soldier was indeed anonymous, then perhaps its death scream
could represent something more abstract? For some, the image of the tiger
standing over an Englishman spoke to the impotence of the British mili-
tary in conflicts with Mysore prior to the 1790s—the loss of hundreds of
soldiers to capture and incarceration. For the East India Company, prisoners
represented valuable bargaining chips that Haidar Ali and Tipu would use to
further their own interests at the negotiation table. They also represented a
tangible loss of masculine prestige, both mentally and physically. For many
prisoners, being forced to live under the harsh discipline of guards that they
considered to be racially inferior “blacks” upset the social order to which
they were accustomed. Officers, many of whom came from the landed aris-
tocracy, were forced to perform the sort of manual and artisanal labor they
felt was ill befitting their class status. The worst affront, however, were the
circumcisions undergone while in captivity to mark a voluntary or involun-
tary incorporation into Mysore’s army, accounting for roughly one-quarter
of all prisoners taken during the various conflicts. Linda Colley notes that
circumcision served the likely purpose of social inclusion rather than punish-
ment, but British circles ascribed the act solely within the significance of the
latter. The lost foreskin was not just a piece of the soldiers’ manhood taken
but also a “national humiliation” and a tangible reminder of the inability of
the East India Company to properly defeat Mysore and reestablish British
prestige in India.56
These personal and national emasculations were mapped onto the tiger
in several ways. The scream, of course, could represent the screams of pain
uttered by prisoners during their circumcisions (voluntary or otherwise)
conducted without the benefit of anesthetic. It could also be heard as a more
existential cry of loss, not only of a physical piece of the body but also of
82 The Sculpted Ear

the broader loss of bodily freedom and self-determination associated with

being a prisoner of war. There is, however, a more subtle reference found
with the tiger’s back left paw, which is placed very close to the groin of the
prone Englishman. This small detail has only been described by a few of
the historical accounts, and none of them ponder a broader significance
behind it other than as simply an affront to British prestige. It is certainly
possible that Tipu deliberately intended the tiger to place its paw so precar-
iously, knowing his skillful employment of image and gesture for symbolic
purposes. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that this is any truer than the
supposition that the voice belongs to the deceased Munro.
The kind of social alchemy that grafted Munro’s death scream and the
humiliations of captive circumcision onto the tiger manifests obliquely in
two oft-cited literary excerpts regarding the object from the early nineteenth
century. These passages are two of the only descriptions that speak of the
tiger’s sounding in explicitly vocal terms, thus giving a sense of how central
the death voice was to British conceptualizations of it. The first, in Barbara
Hofland’s travel novel A Visit to London (1814), frames an engagement with
the abstracted voice through the veneer of ordinary life. Protagonist Emily
visits the East India House during an excursion to the city, as it stood among
the list of must-see locales on any outsider’s trip to London. Once inside,
young Emily comes into the presence of the tiger, in what has become an
widely quoted passage: “‘This thing,’ said the Librarian, ‘was made for the
amusement of Tippoo Saib; the inside of the tyger is a musical instrument;
and by touching certain keys, a sound is produced resembling the horrid
grumblings made by the tyger on seizing his prey; on touching others, you
hear the convulsive breathings, the suffocated shriek of his victim. . . .’ ‘For
Heaven’s sake,’ cried Emily, clinging to the arm of Mr. Carberry, ‘do take me
home.’ The gentleman, turning to her, beheld her pale and trembling, and
lost not a moment in conducting her to the carriage.”57
Putting aside the fact that the description of the tiger’s mechanical work-
ings is fundamentally incorrect, there is much to comment on regarding
Emily’s sudden and dire response. Supriya Goswami notes that Hofland in
part plays upon the sexual overtones, especially toward young Englishwomen
of the time, inherent in the tiger’s act of “pouncing.” This would suggest a
visual acuity in Emily’s reaction, one that is commented on by her two male
companions to the exhibit.58 However, her sense of dread does not seem to
be triggered by the mere sight of the grotesque scene represented by the
tiger. Rather, it is the moment that the nameless librarian equates one of the
 Imperial Possessions 83

emanated sounds to a “suffocated shriek” that the young woman asks to be

escorted out. Was the idea of the sound representing a death voice simply
too much to bear? Or did she somehow know the devious trickery the tiger
was about to enact, and wanted to leave before she could be charmed by the
fascinating phantasmagoria of sound?
A more ambiguous yet telling reference lies at the heart of the second
work, John Keats’s satirical poem “The Cap and the Bells” (1819). Here, Keats
more directly addresses the metaphysical implications of reproducing the
death voice, albeit through a fictional lens. It is speculated that he may have
written the infamous passage, which imagines the tiger in the court of a
fictional fairy emperor named Elfinan, after a visit to the East India House
museum. Keats references the sound in a passage where Elfinan’s court magi-
cian Hum gives the main character, Eban, a taste of the emperor’s sense of
“refined vulgarity.”

“I thought you guess’d, foretold, or prophesied

That ’s Majesty was in a raving fit?”
“He dreams,” said Hum, “or I have ever lied,
That he is tearing you, sir, bit by bit.”
“He’s not asleep, and you have little wit,”
Replied the page; “that little buzzing noise,
Whate’er your palmistry may make of it,
Comes from a play-thing of the Emperor’s choice
From a Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys.”59

The fleeting reference to the “Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys” as

analogous to Tipu’s own alleged performance on the instrument has been
frequently commented upon, though many also read the reference as critiqu-
ing the decadence of Britain’s own Regency-era political class.60 The allusion
to Hum’s “palmistry” in the preceding line, by contrast, has often been over-
looked, yet holds another layer of historical intrigue that binds together
Great Britain and India. Palmistry (or chiromancy—the reading of lines in
a hand to predict aspects of life and death) had a long history as a popular
(if controversial) pseudo-science in England dating back to the Elizabethan
period.61 But by the mid-eighteenth century, it had become highly scrutinized
for its association with “gypsies,” which had become an all-encompassing
term among the English for wandering individuals who engaged in sleight-
of-hand tricks or outright thievery. Shortly after Keats wrote “Cap and Bells,”
84 The Sculpted Ear

Parliament passed the Vagrant Act of 1824 that banned the practice of palm-
istry and declared its practitioners to be punished as “rogues and vagabonds”
if caught.62 When palmistry came back into fashion in Britain during the late
nineteenth century, its most famous disciples like the Irish-born William
John Warner (popularly known as “Chiero”) claimed to have studied the
art directly from Brahmin texts in northern India.63 Keats himself may also
have had an interest in palmistry tied to the sense of fatalism he personally
developed toward the end of his life.64 With this in mind, there are several
possibilities to consider regarding the meaning behind this passage. Keats
is perhaps referencing palmistry to lampoon Hum (the court magician and
purveyor of the irrational arts) for ignorantly stating that the “little buzzing
noise” came from the mouth of the dreaming emperor. But he could also be
foreclosing the possibility of equating the vocal growl with the emperor’s
“raving fit,” deferring it to the machine where its presence is far less problem-
atic. This suggests the possibility that in some British circles, both the body
and voice of the tiger were thought of as synonymous with Tipu himself.
The texts of Hofland and Keats, combined with the pithy accounts and
speculation from newspapers and magazines, give credence to the idea that
some concept of the tiger as weirdifact was present during the height of its
fame. This awareness begets some interesting possibilities on the periodic
restorations performed upon the tiger during the nineteenth century. Beyond
simple cosmetic refurbishment, there was a complete redesign of the tiger’s
mechanisms at some point, perhaps to place some measure of technolog-
ical mitigation on the overt weirdness of the weirdifact. Ord-Hume noted
several of these changes during the course of his “autopsy” on the body of
the tiger during the early 1970s. For one, he found that descriptions of the
human cry from the earliest years of the tiger’s display indicated that the
bellows controlling that mechanism were much larger and thus pitched
higher and louder than their replacement. He also argues that prior to the
joining of the automaton and organ bellows onto the crank, the death scream
likely operated similarly to the way the growl operates now—filled with air
and depressed in a short, noisy burst. The reason behind the change could
simply have been to create a more efficient mechanism in consideration
of the constant use by museum patrons. The smaller bellows could have
been in deference to the scholars working in the library who constantly
complained about the noise. However, they could just have easily been to
temper the impact of the death scream as described by Hofland and Keats,
lest it be mistaken for a facsimile of the real thing. Cutting the volume and
 Imperial Possessions 85

making the noise constant instead of sporadic makes the apparatus sound
more weak and parodic, an attempt to defang Tipu’s Trojan horse and domes-
ticate it for quiet modern consumption.
If the intent behind the mechanical changes was to reassert some level
of techno-rationality upon the tiger through its interior mechanisms, this
task must be branded a failure. The tiger’s status as weirdifact remains largely
unchanged, even as its role in enchanting the relationship between the Brit-
ish Empire and India has faded into relative obscurity. Such a fate mirrors
that of Tipu Sultan, no longer the decadent “Tipoo Saib” of nineteenth-
century British storytelling. Yet the tiger remains on the periphery, too weird
and engaging to ever completely vanish from the public eye. Because of its
age, the tiger remains exhibited in the glass menagerie of Indian artifacts at
the Victoria and Albert Museum, pulled out only for maintenance and to be
played by curious researchers and journalists. On those rare occasions that
the crank is turned, however, we catch some residue of its enchanting power.
Two recent videos have chronicled such engagements. In the first, BBC
television journalist David Dimbleby describes the mechanism with a tone
reminiscent of an emphatic nature show host. When he turns the crank and
actuates the scream, Dimbleby laughs with an almost childlike glee at its
novelty. Just a moment after he asks aloud about the growl, it sounds with a
short puff that prompts the veteran journalist to yelp in surprise—no doubt
a reenactment of similar yelps from patrons of the East India House over
a century prior. The second video, though more formal, features an inter-
esting gesture toward the British possession of the tiger nonetheless. The
Victoria and Albert Museum’s Conservation in Action series brought in
Nigel Bamforth, a specialist in eighteenth-century instruments, to show how
the organ would have functioned in prime condition. After describing the
tuning and range of the pipes, he proceeds to jokingly play two songs that
were no doubt played on the organ many times in the past: “Rule, Britan-
nia!” and “God Save the Queen.” When finishing the melody for the latter,
Bamforth and the two conservationists helping him with the performance
grin widely and slowly turn to look at the camera. Their look of fascination
and strange amusement captures the ambivalence surrounding the tiger,
while also somewhat continuing the consistent erasure of the subtle, human
qualities inherent in the man with whom it is most associated.
These contemporary interactions show how little the fascinating power
of Tipu’s Tiger has dissipated since it was first unveiled to the eyes and ears
of the Empire’s citizenry. It continues to evoke a magical presence that has
86 The Sculpted Ear

defied easy and consistent classification. This state of flux has made it easy
to dismiss the tiger as anything more than a curiosity, thus preventing any
real attempt to judge it as an aesthetic work of any repute. Maybe, though,
this opens a space for the tiger that is not necessarily aesthetic or ideolog-
ical, but alchemical. Being so many individual objects at once through its
state of weirdifact, each comes to the surface through the attuned interface
of the sculpted ear. For some, the object is primarily an organ, imperfectly
sounding by nature of the unique casing in which it is housed. For others, a
semi-automaton threading a historical needle between magical and ratio-
nal, as the spectacle of techno/anthropocentric objects were often tasked
with doing. Most of all, the tiger preserves some of the aural essence of both
Tipu Sultan’s cosmopolitanism and the anxieties of an imperial culture that
worked so diligently to undermine that inconvenient worldliness. What the
Victorians heard as an odd and chilling scream could also be thought of as
the last laugh of a long dead and deposed sovereign.
Chapter 4

Hearing a Stone Man

Imagine a nocturnal patch of woods where two men laugh. Their mirth is
hearty, but not joyful. It sounds much like laughter that thinly papers over
a rot of fatigue and despair, the kind that foreshadows the cusp of madness.
Upon surveying the state of their clothing, madness would seem a
strong hypothesis. One man wears a fashionable black suit with a match-
ing open-collared shirt, sullied by a copious mix of soil and blood. The other,
smaller man dons a dirty white tank top, torn down to the navel, holding a
filthy black trench coat that he is in the process of putting back on while they
converse. Whatever activities have left their outfits in such a pitiful condi-
tion have also marked their faces. Both carry a fallow expression marked
by the creases and folds of sheer exhaustion. The man in black is clearly
in pain, implying that the blood on his clothes belongs to him; the smaller
man twitches his mouth and cheeks with the steadiness of a ticking clock,
betraying a mind-set overflowing with anxiety.
Despite this state, or perhaps because of it, they laugh. About a case of
mistaken identity involving a woman who mistook one for the other in the
midst of an attempted seduction.
Their banter is interrupted by a noise emanating from the darkness.
Noises are commonplace in the quiet of the isolated forest. But this is not
a snap of a tree limb or the rhythmic chirping of some unidentified species
of beetle. It is clearly a voice, uttering a dire warning directed at the man in
black.
88 The Sculpted Ear

Quite the surprise, the voice they both hear from the depths of the
forest. It cannot be a hallucination if they both hear it. The man in black
seems intrigued. The other frantically taps on his head with his fingers, as
if to drum the presence of the voice from his memory.
The curiosity of the man in black overcomes the smaller man’s trepi-
dation. They stumble through the darkness, searching for the source of the
interloper.
Again—closer this time—the voice taunts the man in black.
The man in black leans against a tree and chuckles. He points to another
nearby tree broken in the middle, with the top frayed in a way that makes it
appear to slightly resemble the human form. This, the man in black claims,
happens to be the statue of the man whose voice is vexing them so. “Read
what it says, ” he remarks to his colleague.
A look of fear and confusion cements upon the face of the smaller man.
He’s already convinced the voice they hear is that of an angry ghost. Now
the man in black is playing games. Thinking a tree is some kind of statue?
And what exactly is he supposed to read on a tree trunk in the middle of
the forest? He pleads with the man in black to reconsider his mad proposi-
tion, taking the pragmatic route by claiming that he cannot read in the dim
light of the moon. The pleas are futile. The man in black is insistent.
The smaller man walks up to the tree, despite his misgivings. With one
hand he raps the thick trunk with his bare knuckles. His other hand caresses
some wisps of frayed wood dangling near his face. The smaller man listens,
to his credit, with the utmost intent. “Here I await revenge,” he speaks, finish-
ing with a chortle as if to mime the possession of his body by the voice of
another. It takes the smaller man a moment to finish—“on the godless crim-
inal who slew me”—before backing away from the tree.
The man in black shakes his head and gestures in a way that says of
course, what else would a tree be telling you.
“The old joker,” he remarks while applauding with the type of sincere
sarcasm usually associated with aristocrats of a bygone age. “Tell him I expect
him at my place tonight for dinner.”
•••••••

The scene I describe above, where a dying madman invites a tree to dinner,
sounds straight from the narrative of a modern psychological thriller. Its
shadowed locale, desperate-looking characters, and bizarre dark humor could
easily have come from the typewriter of Cormac McCarthy or the camera
of David Lynch. But this scene was not originally written with noir in mind,
 Hearing a Stone Man 89

nor is it particularly contemporary. Rather, it comes from a modern adapta-

tion of Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni. The man in
black is the protagonist Giovanni, the smaller man is his servant Leporello,
and the broken trunk in the forest is the “statue” of the Commendatore,
the aged aristocrat Giovanni slew at the end of the opera’s first scene. This
version was the unique vision of German director Claus Guth, premiering
at a Mozart festival in Salzburg in 2008 and subsequently revived in Berlin,
New York, and several other locales. Guth changed the presentation of his
Don Giovanni from the traditional eighteenth-century standard in several
different ways. For one, he set the action in a foreboding and remote forest, a
locale echoing, for critic Rebecca Schmid, the first lines of Dante’s Inferno (“I
found myself in a dark forest”).1 (For me, though, the forest was reminiscent
of the gothic German Romanticism saturating the Wolf’s Glen in Carl Maria
von Weber’s 1821 opera Der Freischütz.) The only man-made structure was
the rusted remains of a bus stop, a far cry from the stately Baroque manors
featured in most productions. The characters, as is the case in many modern
adaptations, were clothed in modern attire. The murder of the Commenda-
tore was still a central event. However, Guth added the twist of the dying man
inflicting his own mortal wound, via gunshot, upon Giovanni’s abdomen. In
pain and slowly dying, the subsequent actions of a Giovanni contemplat-
ing his own demise played against his typical portrayal as an arrogant and
unrepentant seducer. And the Commendatore statue was not a statue at all,
but a tree fallen in the forest that someone happened to hear.
We will return to the profound moment where the beleaguered servant
Leporello struck the tree and listened to its resonant message. But first, some
more about the statue for which the tree serves as a proxy. The statue of the
Commendatore from Don Giovanni, if not the most well-known living statue
portrayed in Western literature and theatre, is certainly the most famous to
have ever been invited to dinner. Despite occupying a relatively small role
in the overall narrative, the statue has cast an outsized shadow upon the
Don’s exploits. If the raconteur protagonist was an archetype of the radi-
cal autonomous subjectivity associated with the Enlightenment, then the
Commendatore was the interposition of order and the ancien régime. Much
has been written about the profound implications of this relationship, which
Lawrence Kramer understood as representative of a crisis in the fabric of
modernity.2 Yet the Commendatore has managed to hold an indelible phil-
osophical weight on his own. Søren Kierkegaard regarded the statue as the
only character in the opera written with any sense of clarity. In stone, he was
90 The Sculpted Ear

“the outspoken consequent clause” imbued with the power of divine judg-
ment.3 Others interpreted the statue as embodying the masculine authority
of the father, tied both to Mozart’s perceived Oedipal fixation with his own
father, Leopold, and Freud’s patriarchal fascination with the statue of Moses.4
Magda Romanska best summarized these various threads in a 2015 post on
the blog for the Boston Lyric Opera, written in her role as the organization’s
dramaturg. “The figure of the Commendatore . . . was thus rich in meaning,”
she concluded, “symbolizing at once the authority of the patriarchal father
figure, the spiritual transition into the other world, and the Enlightenment’s
fascination with science and engineering.”5 The statue, in essence, introduced
a level of philosophical gravity to the same opera where the hapless servant
Leporello recounted his patron’s sexual exploits by locale, and Giovanni
turned the accompanying orchestra into his personal dinner jukebox.6
Such recalcitrance by the Don plays into the memorable circumstances
through which the statue emerges. During the eighteenth century, the stone
Commendatore served as the moral linchpin for the narrative, a trait shared
with most popular adaptations of the Don Juan narrative.7 In this role as
moralizing presence, the statue was not as strictly allegorical as one might
suspect. As Malcolm Baker argues, the spectacle of a speaking statue on stage
would have been perfectly acceptable within the imagination of a typical
bourgeois eighteenth-century European. Such a person would have viewed
the statue not just as a “static intermediary between the earthly and eternal,”
but as symbolic of the mobility in Christian belief during that era of what
constituted the presence of the dead in the world.8 For modern audiences,
skepticism toward this interstitial place of the dead has given the appear-
ance of the statue a more ironic tone: Giovanni invites the statue to dinner,
and the statue actually shows up—how weird! Nevertheless, Mozart and Da
Ponte’s version still adheres for those modern audiences, in part because
of how the statue is presented once he arrives. As an opera, Don Giovanni
has a distinct advantage in this regard compared to its literary and theatri-
cal brethren. The work welds body, sound, and narrative together in a way
that creates a visceral impact upon even an audience most resolute in its
cynicism.
While many have commented on the experience of seeing the Commen-
datore, the aspect of hearing him has been surprisingly underemphasized.
Such an interpretation squares with one of the prevailing frames in writ-
ing about the Commendatore’s presence in the opera: the statue is merely
a vehicle of vengeance, borrowed by a ghost for a particular purpose and
 Hearing a Stone Man 91

readily discarded at the conclusion of that task. The Commendatore is thus

cast as an incomplete subject, neither man nor statue, existing in a state of
flux. What we absorb when confronted by the Commendatore lies at the very
heart of this material incompleteness. We see the statue emerge. We hear
his footsteps resound through the orchestra. We understand the gambit he
presents to Giovanni. What brings all of this together, and what has been
underemphasized in writing about the character, is how the Commenda-
tore articulates these aspects, how we hear that articulation through sonic
gestures of vocality, and—most importantly—how this articulation was
crafted musically by Mozart. Superstition and religious dogmatism were
not the only drivers of how this voice was heard. Enlightenment science,
particularly in the realm of sensory perception, played a part as well. For in
Mozart’s time, the animated statue was an important mechanism for theo-
rizing sources of natural transformation and transmutation that could be
traced through the actualization of the senses.
The motives and influences behind why the Commendatore sounds the
way he does may not be entirely clear. But the legacy of how the character
statue sounds shaped ideas about the animated statue during the late eigh-
teenth century and continues to do so in contemporary performances of the
opera. A material relationship between body and sound that carries through is
essential to this continued relevance. “The Man of Stone has furnished critics
with many symbols,” writes Steven Rumph in his study of Mozart’s rela-
tionship to Enlightenment thought. “Yet, for Mozart’s age, the living statue
played the opposite role of a symbol. Its solid, unyielding surface drove the
subject back into the body and senses, away from the symbolic order.”9 The
voice of the Commendatore would follow this path back toward the body,
written to enliven and mimic the stone from which it emanated. He becomes,
in essence, a man of stone heard in all of his material splendor.
•••••••

Hearing the Commendatore’s material voice is inexorably tied to the broader

fascination with statues as models for human engagement in the world
starting in the seventeenth century. This movement begins, in a sense, with
Descartes’s passage in La homme about the statues from St. Germain that
was instrumental in his mechanistic theory of embodiment. But what was
mere novelty for Descartes would take on greater significance for a gener-
ation of empiricist philosophers that developed partially in reaction to the
Cartesian split between mind and body. At issue was the very nature of
sensory perception, in which the practical dominance of vision was starting
92 The Sculpted Ear

to come into question given the anatomical limitations of the eye. Philos-
ophers like John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume began to think
about the role of the body in space as a means to take up those visual limita-
tions, making perception a process requiring the entire body working in
coordination. Statues, this time as paragons of the bodily and sensory influ-
ence on epistemology, would again play a central role in imagining how this
process could unfold. Locke, in his Essay on Human Understanding, used the
appraisal of a statue as an example of how words facilitate the imprinting
of complex ideas upon the blank slate of the mind. That statue, as a form
that could be ascertained through the sense of touch, could be described to a
blind person who had never experienced one but had touched other objects
with a similar form. Berkeley, in his First Dialogue, mentions an example
of looking upon a statue of Julius Caesar as a means to indirectly perceive
what the actual Caesar looked like.10 Hume’s most direct use of the statue
was in critiquing the ethical implications in the transitive process of causal-
ity, but he also alluded to the statue as human proxy when noting that the
insensibility of deep sleep produces a de facto state of embodied stasis, like
the state of a marble statue.11
Use of the statue as a model for human embodiment took its most
profound form in a widely read book by Étienne Bonnet de Condillac called
Traité des sensations (1754). A prominent French theologian and ardent
empiricist, Condillac sought to expand upon Locke’s axiom that all knowl-
edge comes from the senses by enacting the deliberate, rhetorical animation
of a statue, one sense at a time. In establishing this analytical trope, he asks
the reader to imagine inhabiting the statue as its senses are brought to life,
creating an invigorating human spirit within the nameless and lifeless stone
automaton. His journey culminates in the birth of the statue’s subjectiv-
ity once the sense of touch is activated, in part to show the inadequacy of
the other senses alone in the work of self-realization. For Condillac, touch
was the primary means through which the statue—and the person—gained
knowledge of both itself and the outside world. These experiences drawn in
by the senses stoked the sensations inherent in the mind, were preserved
by the formation of memory, and thus became the basis of ideas and the
development of the intellect. The innate and transcendental of Descartes
were replaced by the emergent and physical, precipitated by the very tactil-
ity inherent in the formal aesthetic of the statue that had awakened.12
There are two important aspects of Condillac’s statue to consider for
the broader understanding of animated statues during the Enlightenment.
 Hearing a Stone Man 93

First is the inherent gradual process of the transformation. The statue does
not simply awaken through the devices of magic or divine intervention.
Rather, the process maintains a laborious and consistent pace as each sense
in turn manifests, and then engages in combination, to give the statue a
more profound sense of self and surroundings. Condillac’s purpose here
is in part methodological, as he prompts the reader to ruminate on the
strengths and limitations of each sense in turn. There is also a rhetorical
power to this device. In following the journey of the statue as each sense
becomes animated, readers are encouraged to reflect upon how their own
senses contribute to self-knowledge. The empiricist ideal is thus laid bare
as a rigorous examination of the self through the body of another. The
second, and more essential for the later exploration of the Commendatore,
is the material into which the stone of the statue transforms. Condillac’s
statue, as Mark Paterson notes, does not only gain awareness of itself and
its surroundings through the activation of the sense of touch. In the process
of understanding the notions of “space, solidity, and perspective,” the statue
also becomes less like the stone at its root and increasingly fleshy.13 As the
statue gains more sensory awareness of its surrounding world, the trans-
formation culminates in the statue becoming a living entity as opposed
to merely a statue enlivened with the senses. This distinction is essential,
creating separation from the oracular model of animation dating back to
antiquity. Statue oracles were predicated upon the spiritual inhabitation of
a vessel wholly separate from the material constitution of that spirit. The
soul that emerged with the senses in Condillac’s statue was a constitutive
part of that body, created by the very process of sensory awakening.
Condillac had provided nothing less than a new way of understand-
ing the animated statue in resonance with the newfound epistemologies of
Enlightenment philosophy. No longer was it confined to the divine incar-
nations prevalent through medieval and early modern sources, nor the raw
materialism of Cartesian mechanistic philosophy as represented by the
automaton. Animating the statue into a living, thinking subject was the
product of natural processes and a gateway to the empiricist affirmation
of the sense of touch as the primary gateway to knowledge of the world. A
device this potent would not remain the exclusive purview of philosophical
rigor. Other writers grappled with its implications, weighing the praxis of
nature, divinity, and machine in order to find median ground between all of
them. This particular cultural impact of Condillac’s statue would be felt most
profoundly through the arts, where narrative and image could restructure
94 The Sculpted Ear

the dry functionality of Condillac’s writing into tales exploring the moral
and emotional implications of a statue’s natural animation. And no story
provided a better platform for expanding upon these ideas than Ovid’s tale
about Pygmalion, which found new life during the mid-eighteenth century.
The process by which Pygmalion brings his sculpture Galatea to life was
ambiguous enough that it offered space for rumination upon the status of
the animated statue in the age of rationality and naturalism. Condillac, it
should be noted, did not start this new fascination with Pygmalion and was
in fact possibly inspired to write his treatise in part because of the story itself.
But he provided the philosophical core instrumental to making Galatea the
first animated statue to become a cause célèbre of modernity.
One of the earliest attempts to articulate the implications of a modern
Galatea—one influential on Condillac himself—came from French philoso-
pher André-François Boureau-Deslandes in his book Pigmalion ou la statue
animée (1741). On the surface, Deslandes was an unusual figure to comment
upon the Pygmalion story. At the time of publication, he was best known as
a French champion of the Newtonian scientific method. Deslandes had no
history as a commentator on statues, animated or otherwise. However, he
may have seen in the animation of Galatea a means to ground the concept of
metamorphosis under the rubric of science and natural philosophy. Deslan-
des understood all too well the intersections between magic and science
embedded within early Enlightenment thought. This may have been why
he tied together the animation of Galatea’s senses with documented cases
of sensory recovery in people who had been deprived of them.14 Like those
apocryphal individuals who gradually regained use of their eyes, Pygmalion
watched his desired creation animate in a series of painstaking steps over a
long period of time. But Deslandes left the ultimate source of the animation
purposefully obscure. Pygmalion may not have directly animated Galatea
through his magical hand, as in Ovid’s version. However, the goddess Venus
was the muse for the hand that wielded the chisel, and Pygmalion’s desire
was also surmised to contribute to the natural transformation from statue
into a living, thinking material.15
Deslandes was not alone among French thinkers in expressing a mate-
rial fascination within the Pygmalion story. Diderot, writing in 1763 about
a statue of Pygmalion and Galatea by Falconet, also sought recourse to the
science of the body to describe the magical wonderment elicited by his
experience. So lifelike was Falconet’s sculpture that Diderot imagined the
sculpted Pygmalion reaching out and animating his creation not just by mere
 Hearing a Stone Man 95

magical touch but by reaching into her chest and galvanizing her heart.16
The reference carried two obvious connotations. While operating as a meta-
phor for touching the emotional heart of his desired and transformed love,
it also served as a comment upon the anatomical role of the heart, pump-
ing life-inducing blood throughout the body of the statue. And an earlier
poem attributed to the young Voltaire also derived a process of animation
from natural sources, with the enlivening soul beamed out of the sculp-
tor’s eyes and penetrating the surface of the marble.17 Nor were these ideas
solely influential within the sphere of the French Enlightenment. Herder’s
Der Plastik, which was instrumental in linking the sense of touch with the
aesthetics of sculpture during the late eighteenth century, carried the subti-
tle Einige Wahrnehmungen uber Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem
Traume, or Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative
Dream. In less than thirty years, Pygmalion and Galatea had grown from
relative obscurity into one of the paragons of Enlightenment subjectivity.
Perhaps the most important figure influenced by the French empiricist
take on Pygmalion was Rousseau, whose scène lyrique of the same name
first performed in 1770 was responsible for popularizing the tale beyond
its philosophical life in Deslandes and Diderot.18 Rousseau’s characteri-
zation of Pygmalion was in many respects a doppelgänger of the earlier
sculptor created by Deslandes. Rousseau cast him as more than a mere
artist; rather, he was an artist-philosopher, divinely inspired to create but
not requiring divine power to directly animate the marble. This characteri-
zation fit well within the prevailing trends that cast Pygmalion as a rational
naturalist as much as a magician. Rousseau’s Pygmalion was also import-
ant as it translated the materialist thread of the story onto the medium of
the stage, where the animation could be interpreted and enacted by actual
bodies. This presented some obvious problems of facilitation, as replicating
the sort of gradual natural transformation envisioned by Deslandes would
be impossible to reproduce in a theatrical setting. Whatever solution was
concocted for the original Lyon performance is unknown, as no known stage
notes survive. However, based on the engravings made for the publication
of Rousseau’s complete works between 1774 and 1783, some suppositions
can be made. For the scene in which Galatea emerges from her pedestal to
engage with the world as a living being for the first time, an incense burner
was included among the stage props.19 The smoky atmosphere created by
the lantern obscures the figures on stage and can be interpreted in several
potentially illuminating ways. Fog creates the image of a metaphysical veil,
96 The Sculpted Ear

implying the magical hand at work in addition to the flesh-and-blood hand of

Pygmalion, a hand that cannot be shown operating as such. Fog also empha-
sizes a dreamlike quality to the scene, offering a visual counterpoint to the
statue literally awakening from material slumber and gradually feeling out
her new condition. Perhaps most important is the way that the fog gives a
visual benchmark to represent the process of transformation that cannot be
properly shown in space or time. The entire transformation sequence encap-
sulated one of the most important aspects of Rousseau’s staged version: to
assure the audience that the enlivened Galatea was, indeed, no longer made
of marble. As if to assuage any remaining doubt, the character tells us in
so many words. Upon touching her enlivened arm, Galatea remarks, “C’est
moi” (It is I). Leaving her pedestal behind and touching one of the many
unfinished marble statues adorning the studio of Pygmalion, Galatea says
the fateful words, “Ce n’est plus moi” (It is no longer I). Then, upon touch-
ing her creator, she responds, “Ah! Encore moi” (again it is I), reinforcing
her status as a creature of flesh and no longer the inanimate marble of her
statued existence.
Emphasizing the becoming of flesh with the semantics of language
served as more than a rhetorical device to simulate material change. It also
elucidated an important distinction Rousseau wished to emphasize in the
relationship between voice and the sonic body. Daniel Chua notes that Rous-
seau’s Pygmalion was in part a response to another version of the tale penned
by his great philosophical rival Jean-Phillipe Rameau over twenty years prior.
Rameau depicted the animation of Galatea as derived from the concept of
corps sonore—the natural, musical vibrations thought to emanate from the
human body that constituted the first sonic presence intuited by the ear. The
orchestral accompaniment broaches the barrier between reality and stage,
becoming a pneumatic presence that Pygmalion can both hear and query as
to its origin. For Rousseau, this ideal of animation implicated music within
the dominion of physical processes and response. Under such a schema, there
could be no autonomy and no expression of the necessary presence of the
soul. Rousseau’s Galatea must possess a soul in order to properly awaken,
and she must express her own sense of autonomy to communicate the pres-
ence of that soul to her creator and the audience.20 Yet Rousseau felt that
the singing voice of opera could no longer carry the burden of expressing
the unmediated presence of the self. Hence, Rousseau left the language of
Pygmalion unsung owing to the loss of what he understood as the “natu-
ral musicality” of the French language.21 The small accompanying orchestra
 Hearing a Stone Man 97

was tasked with carrying the emotive content of the characters. Depicting
Galatea’s self-awakening, more than simply the animation of a statue into
flesh, was Rousseau’s attempt to show the core musicality at root in the first
moments of subjectivity—a perspective he felt long lost by the time of the
Enlightenment.
Rousseau was not the first, nor the last, to argue the limitations inher-
ent in corps sonore as the wellspring of bodily animation. Condillac, in fact,
tackled this exact issue in his Treatise as one of the stages of becoming that
manifests before the emergence of subjectivity that comes with using the
senses in tandem. In the section entitled “Of a Man Limited to the Sense
of Hearing,” Condillac creates a rhetorical scenario that isolates sound as
the only sensory engagement available by which to experience the world.
A statue that only hears, he contends, would at first have no sense of itself
or the substance of the world surrounding it. Instead it would “become the
sensation that it experiences. . . . Thus at will we transform the statue into
a noise, a sound, or a symphony” that resonates with other bodies in prox-
imity.22 Eventually, Condillac continues, the statue would learn to discern
types of sounds and eventually develop a rudimentary aesthetic conscious-
ness based on its experience of hearing. Lacking the ability to produce sound
on its own, the statue would be incapable of producing something akin to a
voice, much less feeling the auto-affection of its own presence. The moment
of its first interaction with sound relies solely on the materiality of the body
to create a resonant relationship between the sounds with which it interacts.
The conflicting ethe of fleshy becoming and corps sonore exposed by the
Pygmalion craze were by no means resolved by the time Mozart’s Commen-
datore first emerged onto the stage. Far from it: the statue that Mozart
created through musical composition brought forth a deeper dimension of
meaning that further fueled these debates. In fact, even more so: the way
the Commendatore sounded profoundly blurred the ontological lines defin-
ing animated statues in general. In his wake, questions abounded. Was his
stone body an artifice, a machine utilized for a particular task and soon to be
discarded, or was it part of a continuum in which the statue becomes insep-
arable from the extratextual identity of the Commendatore?
•••••••

Ascertaining Mozart’s thoughts on the emergent ontology of animated stat-

ues and how those may have influenced his writing of the Commendatore
has proven suspect at best. It is doubtful he would have been familiar even
with Diderot’s treatise, much less those of Deslandes or Condillac. “We
98 The Sculpted Ear

may be tempted to assume that the young Mozart grew up with an aware-
ness of the breadth and scope of the international Enlightenment, somehow
absorbing its essence at each port of call,” writes David Schroeder, “. . . [but
t]he Enlightenment of Mozart’s early experience was the distinctive one of
Salzburg and his father, and its inseparability from authority figures made it
fairly unappealing to the boy with one of the most fertile minds of his gener-
ation.”23 Nevertheless, there are enough breadcrumbs scattered throughout
his biography to make the case for some tenuous intellectual connections.
The Salzburg of Mozart’s birth was the most intellectually open place in
the Catholic part of Germany, including a Benedictine university that was
instrumental in the development of influential thinkers like Leibniz.24 Later,
Mozart was embedded within circles of socialite intellectuals in both Vienna
and Paris, including Da Ponte, who would have exposed him to commonly
discussed ideas about philosophy and aesthetics.25 And he certainly would
have known about Rousseau’s Pygmalion, which premiered in Vienna in
1772 and influenced several works from Viennese composers throughout
the decade that were themselves influential on Mozart.26 Still, nothing in
the composer’s own letters and correspondence affirms any of these connec-
tions. We only know, from Da Ponte’s memoirs, that the prospect of writing
music for a libretto of Don Giovanni “pleased [Mozart] greatly” for reasons
unelaborated.27
While we cannot know for certain how Mozart regarded the spate of
animated statues populating the European stage, Don Giovanni was not his
first foray into the trope. Idomeneo (1781), an earlier opera seria collabora-
tion with librettist Giambattista Varesco, also featured a sounding statue,
albeit one with different attributes than the Commendatore. The subject
of the opera, written when Mozart was twenty-five for a commission from
the Elector of Bavaria, fits well within a trend in opera seria of drawing plots
from Greek mythology, in this case the Trojan War. It also presents an overt
theme of patriarchal discord that would become an important aspect of
Mozart’s later operas. The plot begins with Idomeneo, the aged king of Crete,
trapped aboard a ship during a storm. Desperate for salvation, he offers to
sacrifice the first man he sees when returning to his kingdom in exchange
for safe passage. That person, in a classically Greek contrivance, happens to
be his son Idamante. What follows are a fairly typical set of opera seria plot
conventions: a love triangle; a series of misunderstandings; a sea monster
attack. The action culminates in the third act, when the Cretan high priest,
wary of the devastation caused by the creature, demands the identity of the
 Hearing a Stone Man 99

intended sacrificial victim. Idomeneo admits the sacrifice is supposed to be

his son. Upon hearing this, a duty-bound Idamante demands that the ritual
be carried out. He is joined by Ilia, a captive Trojan princess who chooses
death as a display of her love for the Cretan prince. At the moment in which
Idomeneo is about to murder Idamante with a poised axe, the voice of the
god Neptune interrupts to pass judgment on the wayward king. “Love has
triumphed,” the deity thunders, credited in the libretto as la voce (the voice).
“Idomeneo shall cease to reign; Idamante shall be king, and Ilia his bride.
Then Neptune be appeased, heaven contented and innocence rewarded.”
Mozart located this final confrontation between the characters under-
neath a massive statue of Neptune in a temple. Elaborate sets designed
by Lorenzo Quaglio for the 1781 Munich premiere included a constructed
facsimile of the statue placed on stage for the vital scene. The voice that puts
a stop to the execution of Idamante is presumed by the characters (and the
audience) to emanate from the statue itself, becoming an inhabited vessel
in the tradition of Greek oracles. This created an interesting staging prob-
lem for Mozart and Quaglio. How could they convincingly simulate the
aura of a speaking statue being portrayed by an inanimate piece of wood?
Their solution was a common one for eighteenth-century opera productions:
placing a vocalist offstage and out of sight to furnish the deity’s bass-laden
declaration. The voice of Neptune becomes what Michel Chion called, in
the context of cinema, a visualized acousmatic sound, where the identity of
the sound is known even if its ultimate source and location are not.28 The
audience sees the statue of Neptune, hears the offstage voice identifying
itself as Neptune, and connects the two manifestations together within the
context of the production.
There is a temptation to read this staging choice as an implicit nod
to the metaphysical presence of Neptune’s vocal appearance. But the act
of intending offstage voices to carry metaphysical weight was an uncom-
mon practice in German opera until Wagner.29 Instead, Mozart may have
intended the accompanying orchestra to give a sense of metaphysical reso-
nance to the offstage voice. Acousmatic voices with divine origin were often
scored with an accompaniment of trombones and horns, a timbre utilized
during the late eighteenth century to emphasize the ethereal or supernat-
ural disposition of a character.30 The final scene of Idomeneo employs this
trope quite deliberately. Preceding the entrance of Neptune’s voice is a series
of homophonic chords played by the orchestral brass that halts the action
on stage. The vocal silence that follows reflects the awestruck disposition
100 The Sculpted Ear

of the characters as they prepare for the intercession of a deity into their
earthly affairs. This aural backdrop continues as Neptune makes his decla-
ration and lingers long after he finishes and presumably fades back into a
transcendent realm. Silence is broken by the entrance of a small group of
woodwinds, followed by a distraught Idomeneo ruminating in an aria about
the horror of his intended actions.
Mozart employed this orchestration technique to similar effect in Don
Giovanni during the graveyard scene in Act II that first introduced the
Commendatore statue. Prior to the moment of the fateful dinner invita-
tion, Giovanni is recounting via recitative his attempt to seduce a woman
on the street who had previously been with Leporello. The Don laughs at
the prospect of the woman being Leporello’s wife and is interrupted by the
statue of the Commendatore, who lectures Giovanni on his malfeasance and
warns of the inevitable comeuppance. As with Idomeneo, brass homophony
underlies the stern words of the statue. But Mozart adds some subtle folds
to the trope he first employed six years earlier. The Commendatore and his
accompaniment enter simultaneously, jarring the listener with a contrast to
the jaunty recitative of Giovanni and Leporello. After announcing his pres-
ence, the statue sings twice more during the course of the scene. The first
occurs when Leporello reads the inscription on the base, a screed swearing
revenge on the Commendatore’s killer. The statue taunts Giovanni, call-
ing him a scoundrel and telling him to leave the graveyard in peace. This
leads to the famous dinner invitation, first issued by a hedging Leporello
under threat of death from his master, in the form of a short duet (“O, statua
gentilissima”). The statue does not respond with vocal assent. He merely
nods, breaking an already unnerved Leporello and further provoking the
incredulity of Giovanni. The Don then makes a more forceful invitation, to
which the statue makes his second vocal utterance—an unambiguous “yes.”
Giovanni understands the source of this response without doubt and leaves
the graveyard with the spooked Leporello, wondering if the statue will make
good on his acceptance.
The undeniable similarities in the musical accompaniment between the
temple scene of Idomeneo and the graveyard scene in Don Giovanni suggests
more than a mere idée fixe of an animated statue. It also opens the possibil-
ity that the weight representing the supernatural ethos of these statues fell
primarily upon these musical cues instead of the actors portraying them.
Music, in this understanding, saturated the narrative by functioning as an
amalgamation of archaic necromancy and modern special effect. Orchestral
 Hearing a Stone Man 101

accompaniment became a signifier to the audience that the person they

were seeing on stage (or not seeing, as in Idomeneo) was otherworldly.
Laurel Zeiss argues that this interpolation was common in many eighteenth-
century operas needing to communicate the “permeable boundaries” between
the earthly and metaphysical to a listening audience.31 And Mozart was
nothing if not conscious of prevailing trends that he could utilize in his own
work. Yet this metaphysical thrust provided by the orchestra—particularly
in the case of Don Giovanni—also transformed the aesthetic burden carried
by the performer embodying the sounding statue on stage. By relieving
the voice of responsibility to communicate the supernatural aura associ-
ated with the statue, that voice is free to signify other performative aspects.
And since the physicality of the Commendatore’s voice does nothing in itself
to disclose the power that voice holds for both the Don and the audience,
it circles back onto the properties of its source.32 The statue, in essence, is
given an opportunity to be heard for its material properties, while through
the orchestral accompaniment, the Commendatore’s voice, as Kierkegaard
writes, “is enlarged to the voice of a spirit.”33
We can hear sound as a mechanism shaping this sculpted material-
ity from the moment the Commendatore appears during the dinner scene.
While the orchestra carries the load of supernatural representation via the
stunning return of a D minor chord first introduced in the overture, the voice
emerging from the Commendatore’s mouth labors under the weight of the
marble from which he was chiseled. “Don Giovanni, a cenar teco m’invitasi
e son venuto” (you invited me to dinner, and I have come) he sings, while
the orchestra continues to hang upon a rhythmically constant and harmoni-
cally unceasing strain. The statue sings with wide leaps of perfect fourths and
octaves, outlining the base harmony with little subtlety. After the exchange
of pleasantries about food and much pontification from a cowering Leporello,
the statue comes to the point. And for the moment that his words need to
carry the most metaphysical weight, the statue sings in his most statu-
esque register. “Tu m’invitasti a cena, il tuo dover or sai” (You invited me
to dinner, now you know your duty): the Commendatore repeats a single
note with a constant, unceasing, and wholly affective rhythm, ending with
a wide leap to punctuate the irony of his appearance. “Rispondimi: verrai tu
a cenar meco?” (Answer me: will you come to dine with me?): the sequence
repeats, transposed higher as the Commendatore poses his gambit to the
Don. “Rispondimi, rispondimi”: the repetition of his demand is articulated
with a repetition of his phrase-ending vocal leaps, transposed ever higher.
102 The Sculpted Ear

At every point, the stone body makes its material presence known through
the channel of the voice. Even if the source of judgment comes from beyond
the earthly realm, the gravity it enforces upon Giovanni and the audience
emanates from that voice, which transforms the flesh of the performer into
stone before our very ears.
This understanding of the Commendatore’s voice is a departure from
other sources casting it as another manifestation of a transcendent, moraliz-
ing presence—“a Catholic ghost who knows where to draw his fire,” as penned
by Michael Steinberg.34 Many have heard the seeds of that fire within the
sound of the voice itself. Zeiss, for one, contends that these “sostenuto utter-
ances” reinforce the supernatural aura of the statue in that the “ghost of the
Commendatore does not ‘speak’ in normal tones.”35 This implies that the
limited range and movement of the statue’s voice served as a means to tag it
as a manifestation from beyond, less dynamic in death than the voices of its
living counterparts. Others have pointed to a metaphysical role enforced by
the contrasting voice of Giovanni. Gary Tomlinson has argued that because
the character of the Don was built from the sensuality coming into vogue
during the late eighteenth century, such a dynamic sensory quality needed a
staid counterpoint in the stony authority of the Commendatore.36 Indeed, the
melody sung by Commendatore during the dinner scene is unornamented
and monophonic, in stark contrast to the mobile coloratura employed by
Giovanni.37 The comparatively limited range would fit within the way Da
Ponte wrote the character as an arbiter of moral judgment. As the stone of
the body echoes the stone of the law, the character sings only as much as
necessary to deliver its mandate. Michel Poizat noticed such an equation of
staid tonality and aristocratic authority in Idomeneo, Don Giovanni, and other
characters like the oracle in Gluck’s Alceste as the “agency of the superego.”
He goes so far as to call the “recto tono or quasi–recto tono” style of singing
associated with these characters as a “stereotype” that can only be answered
with the trope of the cry—as both Mozart and Don Giovanni provided.38
Yet there already exists an intriguing thread linking the Commendatore
to the very regimes of sensuality often reserved exclusively for the Giovanni
character. Movement and touch, rather than the voice and sound, have been
central to these particular understandings. (The requirement that Giovanni
join hands with the Commendatore as a final act of absolution, for example.)
But the foot has played as much a role in this tactile presence as the hand
that emerges later. Peter Szendy understood the footsteps of the Commen-
datore in structural terms, emphasizing how the statue’s gait heralded the
 Hearing a Stone Man 103

reintroduction of musical order in the form of the overture, bringing both

the narrative and the fate of Giovanni full circle.39 Stephen Rumph, who
more than anyone has linked Don Giovanni to the intellectual fascination
with touch during the eighteenth century, takes this musical linkage of the
feet even further. In Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics, he contends that
the heavy footsteps and incessant ostinato in the accompanying orchestra
meld together “bodily rhythm and prosody, translating footsteps into poetic
feet.”40 Voice becomes an assemblage of the entire sculpted body, part of the
inexorable forward momentum of the animated statue. The Commendatore
walks toward Giovanni while outlining the dire choice confronting the Don
and bringing the narrative closer to its conclusion. In this sense, the voice
becomes a manifestation that requires an anchoring in the realm of materi-
ality in order for its full effect to be felt by both Giovanni and the audience.
That voice must be understood as a clear and present danger, not a mere
product of the overactive imagination. Timbre and rhythm, it follows, need
to carry the same weight as the stone of the body and the words of the plea
to repent. This register is not forced upon the Commendatore by powers
divine; it is a register that he adopts of his own will, using the fact of his
material body to outflank the raconteur.
When this material side of the Commendatore’s voice is extended to
include the presence of the statue throughout the entire opera, then we can
begin to hear a state of becoming reminiscent of Condillac and Galatea. His
dinner intrusion may carry the most impact, but the phantasmagorical pres-
ence of Pygmalion in the shadows of Don Giovanni fully manifests when
taking the graveyard and the feast in toto. In the graveyard, the Commen-
datore has only just awakened from slumber: hence the lack of immediate
response to Giovanni and Leporello, the nonexistent vocal range, and the
labored movement of the head in agreeing to come to dinner. Time passes
before the fateful meal, and offstage the statue has gained more of his
senses. By the time of his confrontation with Giovanni, he can now walk
with a burdened but authoritative gait. He can make vocal leaps in octaves
and perfect fifths, while the smaller intervals are somewhat troublesome
and sparsely used. Everything about the Commendatore’s body and voice
suggests something other than the instantaneous possession of a ghost in
the machine. From standing to walking, from singing utterances to develop-
ing phrases, from shallow range and staid rhythm to diversified melody—the
Commendatore is slowly becoming acclimated to the world of the living once
more, even if only to enact his vengeance upon the soul of Don Giovanni.
104 The Sculpted Ear

Suggesting the prevalence of material signs in the Commendatore’s voice

is not an argument against the supernatural and theological overtones with
which that voice has often been associated. On the contrary, both material
and supernatural are necessary components to understanding the allure of
the Commendatore statue between the eighteenth century and the present.
There is no replacing one paradigm with another. What makes the Commen-
datore unique in this regard is how the statue manifests as both stone and
ghost, never fully inhabiting one state or the other definitively. Its voice can
thus become whatever the listener wants to hear. Such ambivalence may
not have been incidental on Mozart’s part, given his nuanced understand-
ing of prevailing cultural trends mentioned earlier. In other words, there
was an expectation that the possession of statues was not only possible, but
that representation of those statues in art should reflect the fidelity of that
possibility. The sensualist aspects of the statue take a supporting role while
maintaining an undeniable presence. As the sensualist paradigm of German
naturophilosophie became more influential in the early nineteenth century,
the Commendatore transformed into a figure shaped by the embodied pres-
ence of sight and sound for which Mozart had already laid the groundwork.
Rational skepticism of an animated statue was more pronounced, but the
Commendatore became a model for what such a phenomenon would be if
it actually did exist. Such a responsibility necessitated that voice and statue
be joined together onstage, not acousmatically separated as with Neptune’s
statue in Idomeneo. As a consequence, the need to express the metaphysical
nature of the Commendatore becomes less pronounced. In 1822, Giacomo
Meyerbeer suggested simulating the supernatural veneer of the Commenda-
tore by having a silent actor pantomime the part on stage while the vocalist
sings from offstage through a megaphone.41 By the time Victor Hugo refer-
ences the statue in his epic Les Misérables forty years later, the sonic line
between phantom and stone has become more opaque. “Another few minutes
went by. Then from the direction of St-Leu the sound of footsteps could be
heard distinctly—regular, thudding, numerous. This sound, faint at first,
then clear, then heavy and reverberating, approached slowly, without cease,
uninterrupted, with a calm and terrible continuousness. Nothing else could
be heard. It was at once silence and the sound of the Commendatore’s statue,
but that tread of stone had something tremendous and manifold about it
that gave rise to the idea of a throng and at the same time the idea of a
ghost.”42 The “tread of stone” becomes a necessary precursor to the “idea of
a ghost,” implying the preeminence of materiality in understanding what
 Hearing a Stone Man 105

constitutes an inhabitation of that object. The concept of becoming appears

in this passage as well: what starts out as something barely heard emerges
as a cacophony that cannot be ignored.
The apparent disjunction between Meyerbeer and Hugo regarding ideas
about the Commendatore would continue to take on greater importance.
Even if Mozart’s crafting of the voice attached to a piece of Baroque funeral
statuary was driven solely by musical concerns, that voice also became the
site of a new life for the Commendatore within the fluid intertextuality of
modernism. Or, to put this another way, the qualities that made the character
of the Commendatore seem like a real statue gained an important prevalence
lacking before. This new model Commendatore was not strictly beholden to
the instrumentality of aristocratic and divine power, a mere tool to rein in
the sensual subjectivity wrought onto the world by Giovanni. Instead, the
Commendatore had the capacity to become a sensual, modern subject unto
himself. Between the graveyard and the dinner, he had grabbed some of the
mantle of the sensual from Giovanni and made it part of his own embodied
milieu. The cold stone hand, as with the unornamented timbre of his voice,
showed the process to be incomplete. Yet the becoming was sufficient, as
with Galatea, to be seen and heard as something worldly—a “natural conse-
quence of Giovanni’s recklessness,” to recontextualize a statement by Bernard
Williams.43 And if the Commendatore comes across as more like the emer-
gent Galatea, then Giovanni’s reaction contains a healthy dose of Pygmalion.
Only Leporello seems genuinely superstitious toward the appearance of the
Commendatore and treats him as a ghost. Giovanni’s first instinct is to offer
the statue a drink, an extension of hospitality from one man made of stony
flesh to another made of fleshy stone. He, at least, seems comfortable with
accepting the personhood of the arrived statue, even if only in curious jest.
Perhaps no one understood this relationship between material becom-
ing and voice surrounding the Commendatore within modernism better
than George Bernard Shaw. The Irish playwright’s stage comedy Man or
Superman, completed in 1903 and premiered at the Royal Court Theater in
London two years later, demonstrated his intrigue with the complexities
of both Don Giovanni and the trope of the animated statue. Ostensibly an
exegesis on the nature of fatherhood set among the social turmoil of late
nineteenth-century Britain, the story revolves around two men—the young
radical John Tanner and the aged civil reformer Roebuck Ramsden—as they
negotiate their charge of Ann Whitfield, a young woman left in their care by
her father’s last will and testament. Shaw’s play is considered a hodgepodge
106 The Sculpted Ear

of Aristophanes and Molière—not to mention the philosophical tradition

of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche evident in the title.44 What makes Man
and Superman so distinct, though, is how Shaw addressed the most direct
source material for his story. Shades of allegory toward the Don Giovanni
character appear throughout the play. But in a more radical gesture, Shaw
writes an entire scene in Act III that distances away from the established
characters and setting. The sequence, a play within a play in the style of
Shakespeare, is framed as a mutual dream sequence between Tanner and
his friend Mendoza as they fall asleep listening to Mozart. At the start of
the dream, the actors playing John and Ann are engaged in a philosophical
discussion. They are not portraying their counterparts from the rest of the
play, but dreamy manifestations of Don Juan (Giovanni) and his object of
affection Doña Ana. Once the latter leaves at the conclusion of their discus-
sion, a third character appears amidst a lengthy description by Shaw. “From
the void comes a living statue of white marble, designed to represent a
majestic old man. But he waives his majesty with infinite grace; walks with
a feather-like step; and makes every wrinkle in his war worn visage brim
over with holiday joyousness. . . . His voice, save for a much more distin-
guished intonation, is so like the voice of Roebuck Ramsden that it calls
attention to the fact that they are not unlike one another in spite of their
very different fashion of shaving.” The reference to the voice of the statue
seems an odd divergence to end the description of its form and character. But
that voice becomes the means through which the imagined Don Juan greets
the entrance of the imagined Don Gonzalo (the Commendatore, named by
Shaw in the play as “The Statue”).
“Ah, here you are, my friend,” welcomes Don Juan. “Why don’t you learn
to sing the splendid music Mozart has written for you?”
“Unluckily he has written it for a bass voice,” replies the statue with
Ramsden’s voice. “Mine is a counter tenor. Well: have you repented yet?”
Shaw offers a thinly veiled parody of the booming entrance offered by the
Commendatore in the dinner scene of Don Giovanni, one that sets the tone
for the rest of his presence.
Reference to the voice of the Commendatore also appears later, when
The Devil appears to engage in the philosophical discussion. “Oh, by what
irony of fate was this cold selfish egoist sent to my Kingdom,” he says. “We
had the greatest hopes of him. You remember how he sang?” On cue, The
Devil sings in French with an operatic baritone similar to that of Mozart’s
Commendatore. The statue chimes in, with a voice of higher quality but also
 Hearing a Stone Man 107

in the range of the countertenor established earlier. “Precisely,” The Devil

remarks at the statue’s voice. “Well, he never sings for us now.”45
What is notable about Shaw’s imagined version of the Commendatore is
how the presentation differs profoundly from the one offered by Mozart and
Da Ponte. The Commendatore in Ramsden’s body walks with a “feather-like
step” and sings with the same dynamic tenor as his counterpart, Giovanni.
Missing is the thunderous baritone, matched by a deliberate gait suggesting
the great effort required to move the heavy stone legs, that characterizes the
statue in Don Giovanni. The implication is that on the ethereal plane in which
Tanner and Mendoza’s dream takes place, the statue can fully become that
which it cannot while confined to the earthly realm. This becomes another
indication that the Commendatore we see and hear at Giovanni’s dinner is
an incomplete subject, a work in progress, something between the stone of
its origin and the person that the statue represents.
Shaw’s long fascination with the Pygmalion myth (sans statue) was
already well established by the time he wrote Man and Superman. And a
hint of that interest in becoming something else became etched into the
character of the statue. Simply put, the dream statue of Shaw’s play-with-
in-a-play was no longer the vengeful stone body of the Commendatore’s
earthly inhabitation. His revenge accomplished, the Commendatore was
now free to pursue other states of being in the ambiguous beyond. He cast
aside his early modern Venetian garb for the late Victorian trappings of
Roebuck Ramsden. He was willing to let bygones be bygones, conceding
that the younger Don was the better swordsman and that no murder took
place since he died in a duel. Most important, he had transcended beyond
the need for his voice as Mozart wrote it—a gravely, dire material thing—and
could sing in the much higher and mellower countertenor that he presents in
the play. The Commendatore need not please The Devil or anyone else with
the stony intervallic leaps and repetitive pitch for which he had become so
famous. Shaw may have considered the entire exercise of the parodic dream
as a “trick of the strolling theatrical manager.”46 Nevertheless, he displayed a
nuanced understanding of the stone guest absent from more sober-minded
narratives entranced by the libidinal pyrotechnics of Giovanni.
This inherent modality between stone and flesh readily exploited by
Shaw was central to the modernist existence of the Commendatore character.
Animated statues were more productive as allegories than actual phenom-
ena in the modernist ethos. But they had become so intertwined with the
Don Juan mythos that alluding to, if not outright incorporating, an animated
108 The Sculpted Ear

statue became necessary. Modernizing the setting of Don Giovanni thus

requires addressing the modern skepticism toward the idea of an animat-
ing statue, since recourse to neither eighteenth-century superstition nor
the creative naturalism that informed Rousseau’s Pygmalion would do the
trick. There have been many creative examples attempting the address this
problem. Shaw, of course, planted the statue in a dream, since his turn-
of-the-century London had no avenging statues to be found. In James
Joyce’s Ulysses—a novel filled with oblique references to Don Giovanni—
both Stephen Daedelus and Leopold Bloom confront their own versions of
stone guests. These encounters are abstracted through different characters
and objects that they encounter throughout their day in Dublin. Yet they
adhere together through what Roy Carlson notes as a thread of defining
materiality in conjunction with “the insistent absence of the supernatural.”
The statues found throughout Dublin are all “cold and stony,” even when
they are not made of stone at all.47 The materiality that grounded these
modalities carved into the texts of Shaw and Joyce required the figure of
the statue as a spark, regardless of the direction and the objects onto which
the Commendatore was mapped.
Nowhere has the necessity of addressing the Commendatore’s status as
a statue been more salient, though, than for contemporary opera productions
like the one by Guth with which I opened this chapter. A change in scenery,
so common in many of these versions, both facilitated and funneled a radi-
cal reconceptualization of the Commendatore’s object status. And Guth’s
creative setting for the opera presented a unique problem: no graveyard,
and therefore no locale in which to encounter a funerary statue for the Don
to invite to dinner. His solution was to foreground the psychological impact
of the setting and circumstances. Stranding Giovanni and Leporello in the
woods at night, while under great stress, served as a fruitful device to elicit
the slow destabilization of rationality and sanity—particularly from the
nebbish Leporello. As for Giovanni, a character written with almost patho-
logical confidence, Guth undermines this trait with the convenient stomach
wound inflicted upon Giovanni during his duel with the living Commen-
datore. By the time the two characters reach the moment in which the dead
Commendatore reveals himself, neither man can fully conceptualize what
they are hearing: an actual voice in the wilderness, or the phantasmagoria
of a shared hallucination.
The encounter with the broken tree that Giovanni calls a “statue” reflects
in part the pathetic condition plaguing both characters. But it also stands as
 Hearing a Stone Man 109

a testament to the latent material power that undergirds the statue of the
Commendatore in the imagination. As a tree, the Commendatore is stripped
of any embodied signifier referencing his human form. The object is only
identified as the Commendatore at Giovanni’s insistence. Claiming the tree
is actually a statue, in one sense, provides a semantic veneer of significa-
tion that ties the scene back to the original context of the graveyard in Don
Giovanni. Leporello’s subsequent actions, though, are what transform the
arboreal into the statuesque in a more material sense. When Giovanni forces
Leporello to “read what [the tree] says,” his response is to strike the trunk
with his hand and listen. This miniscule action carries a long history in the
process of understanding what makes statues sound. The act of striking
more broadly ties into the complex of resonance, vibration, and voice tied
to material conceptualizations of pneuma, aether, corps sonore, and other
physical mediums that were thought to embody the sonically disembod-
ied. In essence, Leporello treats the silent tree as many others have treated
the sounding statues they have encountered, thereby reinforcing the tenu-
ous threads between tree and statue.
These statuesque threads extend into the dinner scene, where the
Commendatore is shed of his arboreal guise and manifests exclusively as a
disembodied voice whose source can only be seen by the audience. Neither
Giovanni nor Leporello look at the Commendatore beckoning his will from
the background. Whether this implies a kind of supernatural transcen-
dence or psychological shattering (the voice being a mutual hallucination
of the dying Giovanni and the mentally deteriorating Leporello) is up for
interpretation. But that voice maintains a noticeable physical effect upon
the characters, who shake and flail as if they can feel the sonic impact of
the voice within their bones. This presents another scenario in which the
Pygmalion-esque tropes of transformation and emergence are key. Phan-
tom Commendatore emerges from the staid physicality of the tree to inhabit
the more mobile and affective materiality of sound itself. Again, perhaps an
indicator of the character’s burgeoning death subjectivity: he casts aside the
limited vessel chosen for him by Giovanni and Leporello to sculpt his own
body, one of pure sonic movement.
Guth’s production is but one example among the hundreds of adaptations
that populate the long performance history of Don Giovanni. However, its
wide divergence from Mozart and Da Ponte’s original vision for the character
reinforces the ageless power the statue holds. Even though Guth utilizes no
actual statue beyond references from the libretto, the character maintains a
110 The Sculpted Ear

sculpted depth through the various guises he does inhabit. Absent a statue,
the aspects of vocality—timbre, rhythm, and range—that define this stat-
uesque quality gain further exposure and subsequent importance. Their
prevalence speaks to a material gravity that the Commendatore manifests
no matter the context. How he articulates his vengeance drags listeners into
his grasp and down to the depths as surely as it does the onstage Giovanni.
In this sense, the metaphysical status of the dead Commendatore becomes
mere fodder for speculation. A ghost may indeed inhabit the machine, but
the physicality of the machine and the grainy sound it perpetuates make
the inhabitation impactful upon those in its presence.
Chapter 5

Aural Skins

When famed African American performer Josephine Baker bought the

Château des Milandes in 1947, her intention was to create a place that would
serve as both her home and a means to build her legacy. The estate, nestled
in the Dordogne countryside of southwestern France, featured expansive
grounds and a stately fifteenth-century castle that was the ancestral home
of the Caumonts, an important aristocratic Huguenot family who lived there
until just after the French Revolution. The castle fell into disrepair during the
nineteenth century, underwent an extensive restoration between 1900 and
1914, and at the time Baker purchased it was in need of a postwar touchup.
Baker had the estate remodeled to include a resort, a museum dedicated to
her long performance career, and an “African village” to house the château’s
staff. Once renovated, Milandes became central to Baker’s late-career aspira-
tions. The resort and museum were an immediate success, attracting nearly
one million tourists over the course of the 1950s.1 And when her pleas for
racial tolerance while on a 1954 tour of Latin America brought questions of
communist sympathies, Milandes became a refuge from the public spotlight
as well. After returning to France, she and then husband Jo Boullion began to
adopt children of various racial and religious backgrounds that would form
the backbone of her “Rainbow Tribe”—a family intended to live the ideal that
Baker was no longer free to preach abroad due to the geopolitical concerns
of the Cold War. Her desire was laudable, even if her financial acumen was
not. Baker’s dream of constructing a permanent place that both reflected
112 The Sculpted Ear

and controlled her performance legacy ended when she was forced to sell
the château in 1969 after attempting to barricade herself in the kitchen to
prevent its loss. But the legacy of her modern association with the ancient
property continues to this day. Recent owners have done much to reconstruct
the spectacle of Milandes and restore its status as the tourist attraction it
was under Baker’s ownership, just as Baker had resurrected the estate from
obscurity once before. “Les Milandes wasn’t merely a home,” writes Matthew
Pratt Guteri, “it was an engineered landscape or built environment, like a
music hall stage, only much, much bigger. Every part worked in service of
the story, which was meant to be experienced in person.”2
One of the most memorable exhibits telling this story at Milandes
during the height of its popularity was a wax museum called the “Jorama.”
Depicting thirteen different scenes dedicated to Baker’s life and travels,
the exhibit also reflected her developing religious sensibilities, which had
become increasingly important after the Second World War.3 Among the
first scenes presented were Baker’s humble beginnings as a child in East St.
Louis dancing for her siblings in a basement. Another showed Baker dressed
in French military regalia to celebrate her work for the Resistance against the
Nazi occupation. Yet another presented a re-creation of her kneeling before
Pope Pius XII during her 1950 audience in Rome. The final wax figure in
the series displayed Baker at her most Marian, standing before a large cross
wearing a simple dress with nine children from the “Rainbow Tribe.” Reac-
tion to the Jorama from posthumous commentary has been mixed. While
some argue that the exhibit shows how Baker understood the nature of
modern celebrity long before more contemporary performers like Madonna,
others viewed the wax figures as overbearing and “coercive,” a sign of Baker
attempting to gain control of her image at a time when she had little control
of it outside the walls of Milandes.4
Of all the issues arising from the image and narrative crafting inherent
in the Jorama, the decision by Baker to cast her life story in wax would seem
to be the least noteworthy. Wax museums had been popular tourist spots
since the 1880s, thanks to the legacy and influence of Alfred Grévin’s Musée
Grévin in Montmartre and the Madame Tussaud museum in London. Yet
perhaps more than any stage performer from the twentieth century, Baker
brings the question of material to the fore. She had built and perpetuated
her popularity in Paris during the height of l’art nègre by making her body an
indexical surface mixing together elements of modern chic and premodern
primitivism. Anne Anlin Cheng persuasively argues in her quintessential
 Aural Skins 113

study on Baker’s relationship to this sense of modernist primitivism that the

erstwhile performer created an entirely new series of “political expectations”
that surround the body of black women. In doing so, she made her skin fit as
much into the modernist desire for “pure surface” as into the reductionist trope
of the Venus Hottentot.5 A statue crafted in bronze would seem to be made
for capturing this visual experience of Baker in her prime. The sleek sheen
of cast metal mirrored her racial allure as well as the sculptural elegance of
her performing body. For comparison, a modern replica of a Jorama statue
showing Baker during the prime of her career featured her wearing a floor-
length white gown and standing in front of a piano. While certainly well
crafted and lifelike, one can see how it failed to capture the glow of skin that
Baker became famous for in film and photographs in the 1920s and 1930s.
Equating Baker’s body with the metallic sheen of bronze makes the
choice of the duller, more permeable, less resonant wax to capture her legacy
all the more fascinating. Was it simply due to the Jorama being an indoor
space? Were there further economic reasons regarding cost of material, or
was she simply trying to capture the tourist magic that wax museums held?
In asking these questions, I admit the futility in attempting to intuit or read
into Baker’s own motives for casting herself in this material. Her desires have
proven elusive and the interpretation of them controversial in the litany of
biographies published in the years after her death.6 Rather, I want to argue
that Baker’s construction of the Jorama presents an intriguing confluence
of body and sound that, when read through the frame of an event between
sound and statuary, implicates the materiality of sculpture in ways rarely
addressed. The choice of wax, as opposed to bronze or other blended metals,
becomes important in two different respects. The first implicates a perni-
cious history between bronze and the racial identity of blackness. Though
it would seem to capture her skin from an outside gaze, Baker’s own rela-
tionship with blackness was at best ambivalent throughout much of her
career. Moreover, the resonance of both the color and material of bronze
has had profound implications toward representations of the black body. It
arguably brings in issues of silence and control that manifest as a kind of
violence against those whose image bronze sculptures intend to capture. The
second involves the underappreciated historical relationship between wax
and sound, which share more conceptual similarities than one might think.
Both have been primarily known for their ephemeral nature, as soft materials
that easily dissipate without the reinforcement of machines. Wax also holds
an important place in the history of the modern mechanical reproduction
114 The Sculpted Ear

of sound, occupying the material space as the medium of choice for Edison
and Berliner starting in the 1880s. As a material, its mere presence captures
the history of preserving sonic traces, even when not mechanically utilized
for that purpose. My contention is that by casting herself in wax, Baker
attempted to elude the thorny issue of race in her own representations while
simultaneously managing to capture the essence and history of her sonic
self without using physical sound at all. It is an event constructed from a
resonance between material histories rather than from the resonance of an
actual material.
•••••••

Baker’s meteoric rise from a youth of poverty in St. Louis to becoming the
talk of Paris during the 1920s has been thoroughly explored in other work
and need not be detailed here. The most common narrative held that Baker
found little success in New York competing with other African American
vocalists such as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. Only upon moving to Paris
to perform in La Revue Nègre, in a scene bereft of female African Ameri-
can singers and for an audience beholding the black body through a colonial
gaze, was Baker able to carve a niche for herself and subsequently build
an international following. However, her Paris debut at the Théâtre des
Champs-Elysées in October 1925 was fraught with interpretive ambiguities
that complicated this narrative from the start. Baker’s first performance on
the second of October saw her move wistfully and unexpectedly from arche-
typal minstrel show femininity to an alluring nakedness, clad only in pink
feathers and the elegant skin that would become her onstage calling card.
The nuance with which many commentators regarded these early perfor-
mances is somewhat surprising. While some spoke of her performance in
the familiar language of colonial exoticism, others found more difficulty
pinning down exactly how to articulate Baker’s stage milieu. Hence the tone
of E. E. Cummings’s well-known 1926 review for Vanity Fair that cast her as
“equally nonprimitive and uncivilized, or beyond time,” or Paul Brach’s argu-
ment that the effect of Baker’s spectacle was to breathe life into the postwar
malaise and the “grey and tired lives” of the French public.7 Not to mention
the litany of attention Baker garnered from the Parisian avant-garde already
grappling with the ambiguity of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and
Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde.8 Enrico Prampolini’s 1925 sketch
of Baker displays some of the results of this process, resembling a “Futur-
ist muscular robot” of steel that seemed purely skeletal, lacking any of her
other embodied attributes.9
 Aural Skins 115

These ambiguities in Baker’s embodied performance capital become

the building blocks for a different type of gaze than the one constructed
through the colonial structuring of race in the nineteenth century. French
modernism perhaps presented a unique moment in which the desire of
European subjects to escape the aesthetic torpor and disastrous failure of
Enlightenment reason met the desire of the modern black subject to carve
out a unique cultural space based on a pan-African historical imagination.
Such a process created what Cheng has called the “second skin,” a “mutual
fantasy . . . shared by both Modernists seeking to be outside of their own
skins and by racialized subjects looking to escape the burdens of epidermal
inscription.”10 A “second skin” became a surface irreducible to flesh and thus
could not be collapsed into simple discourses on racial difference. Rather, it
became a field of possibility and extension in which the limits of historical
hierarchies regarding the social image could be sidestepped, deferred, even
dissolved. In this way, the “second skin” was mainly a Parisian skin: neither
Baker nor any other African American performer could have been invented
this way in New York, London, or Havana. This does little to denude its
historical and aesthetic importance more broadly for the black body in the
twentieth century, and for Baker in particular. Her naked skin, for the French,
could be exotically beautiful while simultaneously emerging as the modern
surface upon which the aesthetic desire of a modern postwar France could
be built in public space. At the same time, Baker could bask in the modern
life created by sleek surfaces she portrayed on stage that were recreated in
painting, sketches, architecture, and (of course) sculpture. She, in essence,
turned herself into material to be sculpted in ways that transcended her own
body.
While this process of “second skin” in Baker’s embodied milieu may be
coterminous with Parisian modernism in its most potent form, it actually
draws upon a much broader philosophical discourse on skin often masked
by dominant discourses on race and the body. Cheng’s arguments bear a
remarkable resemblance to a critique from Serres regarding the historical
collapse of skin as mere bodily sheath of sense. Skin, for Serres, is much
more than simply the body’s organ of appearance. It is the means by which
the self extends into the world beyond mere appearance, taking the role that
Descartes had originally envisioned for the mind. Serres’s idea of soul was
not that of something extended from its locale within the body, but one only
activated by the engagement of sense. He thus regarded skin as the location
of something analogous to the soul, which sparks when the skin engages
116 The Sculpted Ear

with the world external to the self, and thus moves constantly as the skin
moves. “Body and soul are not separate but blend inextricably, even on the
skin,” he states, in a clear broadside upon Cartesian mind/body dualism.
“Thus two mingled bodies do not form a separate subject and object.”11 This
ability of external reach means that the skin is pure extension, and thus
not part of the body at all in philosophical terms. Rather, it is a body unto
itself—one, to borrow from a popular Deleuzian axiom, “without organs.”12
In Serres’s estimation, color (and therefore race) was simply an ancillary
empirical attribute of the skin separate from the role of skin as the linchpin
of subject formation. Of course, one can rightly argue that the actualization
of such extension has historically been reserved for those subjects bearing
white skin, making Serres’s sense of mobility somewhat ahistorical as pure
concept. The problem, as Steven Connor so ably points out in his study on
the epistemology of skin in Western thought, is that the color of skin is far
from inessential to the imagination of its meaning, even in philosophical
terms. Color, he argues, is not merely an attribute of skin that can be shed
when considered unimportant, but is skin at its most fundamental level. He
starts by offering (among other things) an etymology of the word color that
shows its inescapable linguistic relationship to a notion of skin.

The word colour derives, via the Latin color, from a Sanskrit word
meaning the skin on the surface of the milk. . . . The word “chromatic”
derives from the Greek chroma, colour of the skin, complexion, style.
Chroma is related to chros, skin, skin-colour, and to the verb chori-
zien, to touch a surface or the skin, which in turn derives from an
Indo-European root gheo, meaning to abrade, or rub hard against.
Colour thus harbours the idea of something that both touches the
skin, and is also itself, according to a curious logic of contagious
replication, a kind of second skin, a layer, film or veil.13

A notion of color is essential to skin, he argues, because it draws skin back

into cultural constructions of the colors that are not necessarily inherent
in their physical properties of color, a movement that Connor refers to as
chromaticity. He gives several examples that tangibly draw in the historic-
ity of the Western imagination about skin: diseases like the “black death”
and scarlet fever, ideas about white and black skin corresponding with the
transparency or opaqueness of the soul, or the change in ideas about yellow
from a “bright and affirmative colour” in antiquity to one associated with
 Aural Skins 117

“degradation and discredit” in early modern Europe, and even later to pros-
titution.14 In drawing his argument back to Serres’s assertions, he reframes
the notion of mobile and extended skin in a way that draws color back into
the realm of sensory engagement. “Colour signifies materiality, the fall of
the ideal into embodiment. . . . [It] is accidental, not essential, and therefore
belongs to the outside of things, as the body constitutes the mere casing or
superficies of the soul.”15
Connor also shapes the history of skin by explicating linkages between
material and color, showing how the two draw from each other but are in
no way culturally coterminous. His fascinating example involves a discus-
sion of the relationship between bronze’s blended-metal cousin brass and
the color yellow. Brass, he argues, had a long reputation as a metal attempt-
ing to capture the luster and reputation of gold, yet never attaining the same
level of value or prestige. It was, for lack of a better term, “fool’s gold,” and
therefore shared with yellow a deep association with deception in the West-
ern imagination. However, brass as a material manifested a paradoxical kind
of honesty, something “superficial without disguising the fact or pretend-
ing to be anything else.”16 Brass, like gold, still had a sense of exhibitionism,
but one that was not inherent—it had to be crafted and polished. Unlike
gold, it was less likely to be metallurgically corrupted by other material.
The connotations of brass, then, exuded a kind of workmanlike power and
common elegance, as opposed to the decadence of gold. “For all its superfi-
ciality,” Connor concludes, “brass appears like a deep or fundamental kind
of superficies.” At the same time, its crafted metallic essence gives it a more
tangible association with the surface of skin than mere color, making brass
“a skin that acknowledges itself as such.”17
Connor does not specifically link bronze to the color black or bind it to
skin by cultural meanings of blackness. Nonetheless, there is a useful history
of cultural constructions between this combination of material and color.
Several intriguing instances can be found among African American cultural
practices during the early twentieth century, with ideas of skin playing a
prominent role. Much of this writing deals with racial ambiguity, grap-
pling with the cultural meanings of skin tones lying between the steadfast
racial constructions of Black and White in the United States. John Haynes
Holmes, writing in a November 1932 issue of the magazine The Crisis (offi-
cial publication of the NAACP), refers to “bronze” in discussing the fad of
beach sunbathing among white Americans, satirically wondering if they will
tan to the point of resembling African Americans in skin tone.18 Issues like
118 The Sculpted Ear

these became especially important for African American women (such as

Baker) in the performance industry, where skin tone could mean the differ-
ence between high-profile work as a singer and dancer or confinement to the
niche market of studio-based race records. Bronze, in this case, could be seen
as a marker for an idealized standard of racial beauty desired by performers
and audiences alike. One of the most tangible uses of the material for this
purpose comes from the Los Angeles–based Miss Bronze pageant, a beauty
contest established by Howard Morehead in the 1950s specifically geared
toward African American women. Maxine Leeds Craig points out that in the
pageant’s early years, the rhetorical usage of bronze referred to the lighter,
softer features that contest winners often possessed. By the height of the
civil rights movement, the concept of bronze associated with the pageant
began to hold a wider racial meaning. Since many title winners during this
era featured both lighter and darker shades of black skin, the signification
of bronze extended beyond narrow concepts of color into a broader cultural
trope of black femininity.19
In terms of sculpture, the context of associating bronze with blackness
most often manifested as the flip side of arguments ascertaining the associ-
ations of marble with whiteness. For antiquarian sculptors of marble, issues
regarding the racial composition of subjects were not of much concern.20
Many cases of racial attachment to material up through the Renaissance
were anecdotal rather than aesthetic, as with the two bronze giganti in the
bell tower of the Torre dell’Orologio in Venice who only acquired the nick-
name mori (Moor) as the metal aged and darkened in appearance.21 Concerns
of intentional racialization only began to surface in the early seventeenth
century, when European sculptors began to represent African subjects en
masse for the first time. Head busts of unnamed black Africans began to
appear in many parts of Germany and the Netherlands, crafted from materi-
als like bronze and polychrome marble that better captured the skin tone of
their subjects.22 By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the move-
ment toward the austerity of aesthetic neoclassicism brought the issue of
material and racial composition in sculpture to the fore once again. Marble
was again cast as the ideal material to capture the transcendent beauty of
the human form, all but guaranteeing the reinforcement of whiteness as
ideal skin in the Western aesthetic imagination.
In this context, writers and sculptors began to question both the need
and desirability of materials like bronze and polychrome marble to repre-
sent the color of skin, especially in the United States, where representing
 Aural Skins 119

African Americans in the arts took on a lived reality mostly absent in Europe.
Charmaine Nelson traces some of these ideas through the writings of James
Jackson Jarves, considered one of the foremost American art critics of the
antebellum period. Writing in 1855, Jarves utilized the common neoclassi-
cal argument that sculpture’s primary aesthetic function was to capture form
as a means to question whether color interfered with the ability of audi-
ences to ascertain those formal dimensions. Color, he concluded, provoked
emotional and sensorial responses that came at the expense of a desired
intellectual understanding of the sculpture. Nelson convincingly argues that
Jarves’s attitude masked a fundamentally racist impulse by appealing to the
aesthetic reasoning of “beauty and morality,” in part by his use of the term
“blackamoor” to describe the results of polychromic processes.23 Sculpture
moving away from this neoclassical ideal by representing the black body,
she notes, often did so for reasons unrelated to aesthetics. As an exam-
ple, Nelson points to the work of Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, a sculptor
working for the French government who created polychromic images of
colonial African subjects for an ethnographic gallery at the Musée d’His-
toire Naturelle in Paris. The use of a polychromic blend of porphyry, onyx,
and bronze in these works stemmed in part from the fear that the visual
precision of photography would undermine the need for sculpture in French
ethnographic museums.24 Coming to the crux of the issue, Nelson argues
that, intentionally or not, neoclassical aesthetics thoroughly erased the black
body in its adherence to the primacy of the material of white marble. “Just as
the privileged signifier the phallus is not the penis and is therefore irrevo-
cably bound to the penis, whiteness, the privileged signifier of race-color is
not wholly interchangeable with white skin but is dependent on and bound
to the racialization of whiteness. The whiteness of the marble as deployed
within the nineteenth-century neoclassical canons did not directly repre-
sent white skin color but stood in for that which could not be signified. . . .
But inasmuch as it signified that which it displaced, flesh, it privileged the
European race-color . . . significations.”25
Nelson shows that separating issues of race from aesthetic represen-
tation in mid-nineteenth-century America was impossible no matter how
many creative arguments were employed to defend the perceived classical
ideal. Even defenses geared toward material explanations for the prefer-
ence of white marble assumed a troubling ubiquity of whiteness. Nelson
mentions one such argument from Edward Hale in his 1861 travelogue
Ninety Days’ Worth of Europe. Hale writes briefly about Welsh neoclassical
120 The Sculpted Ear

sculptor John Gibson’s The Tinted Venus, an experiment in painted marble

that stirred aesthetic circles throughout Europe during the 1850s. Having
observed the coloring process up close in the workshop, Hale speaks quite
favorably of the process and the fidelity it creates. But in pushing through
a perspective that sculptors would prefer working with material as close to
skin as possible, he drops in the following phrase with telling resolution:
“We work in white because that is the nearest approach we have to the
color of the human flesh.”26 A charitable reading might grab onto the use
of the word approach and suggest that Hale was merely arguing that white
is the least difficult color on which to add another, darker shade. Yet such
recourse to whiteness as a material template cannot be separated from an
American social template that assumed the same of skin. It also brings the
question of representing the black body through statuary into sharp relief.
If the overwhelming whiteness of classical sculpture was due to aesthetic
concerns or feasibility, why (as Kirk Savage argues) were Native Amer-
ican representations in bronze and white marble common prior to 1860,
while African Americans were absent from pedestals across the conti-
nent?27 Why could the body of the noble savage be captured while that of
the captured slave could not?
What becomes clear is that the problem of representing blackness was
not just an issue for nineteenth-century American sculptors to grapple with,
but perhaps the issue. Specifically, the absence of the black body in the monu-
mental ubiquity of white marble was inseparable from the structural ubiquity
of white supremacy. The relationship between color and aesthetics was an
important component, but the roots tying in the social power of white skin
came from a much deeper place. Savage, specifically, identifies the role that
designations of race and body type in the natural sciences (and their reinforce-
ment of moral and intellectual stereotypes) played for nineteenth-century
theorists of race and identity. In these circles, the idealized masculine form of
classical sculpture became a template for the natural superiority of the white
male body. The black male body, by contrast, fell short of these standards.
Grotesque caricatures reminiscent of the minstrel show fell into the pocket
of Lessing’s Laöcoon problem, where the statue as paragon of beauty could
only be diminished in capturing the undesirable Negro form. The aesthetics
of classical sculpture and the racism of nineteenth-century natural science
thereby mutually reinforced one another. Savage employs a telling illus-
tration from Nott and Glidden’s Types of Mankind (1854), where the typical
head of the white male is identified with the Apollo Belvedere, known at
 Aural Skins 121

the time as one of the quintessential sculpted faces capturing masculine

beauty. The head of the African American male displayed below the Apollo,
with crested brow and protruding lips, hews closer to a third illustration of
a chimpanzee at the bottom. Visual references like these are both provoc-
ative and significant. They show how classical sculpture helped establish a
taxonomy of whiteness that carried profound cultural consequences. And
one of those obvious consequences was the denigration of a particular body,
“the black antithesis of classical whiteness,” through its absence in sculpted
form.28
As monuments are wont to do, the statues built from this triumphant
narrative about the white body persist. While those needling nineteenth-
century questions about whether classical sculpture could properly capture
the black body have been long forgotten, the sculpted answers continue to
dot the American landscape. Savage understood this dynamic all too well.
In response, he sculpts a haunting passage about the need to see these stat-
ues not as pieces of material but as representative of ideologies that must
be remembered and confronted.

The irony is that now, in the late twentieth century, we must work
so hard to recover that voice [of the statue] once thought to be eter-
nal. If many monuments from the past seem mute to us, they do
still have stories to tell. But those stories are not necessarily what
the monuments were intended to tell us. To make the monuments
speak again we must question the often bland surface they show
the world. We must investigate who were the people represented
in and by monumental space, and how they competed to construct
a history in the language of sculpture and in the spotlight of the
public sphere.29

If these words seemed prescient when Savage first published his book in 1999,
they have grown only more so in light of a tumultuous 2017 for public statu-
ary in America. This was the year that his warning became clear and present.
Debates raged in town squares and on Twitter regarding how to grapple with
a contentious subset of statuary born from the nineteenth-century efficacy
of white marble: the Confederate war memorial. A simmering disagree-
ment as to whether statues of figures like Robert E. Lee and Pierre Gustave
Toutant Beauregard represented the legacy of white supremacy or the heri-
tage of fighting men publicly erupted at the prospect of government entities
122 The Sculpted Ear

removing those statues from their long-inhabited pedestals. Municipalities

employed a host of strategies to address the social discord their actions were
causing. In New Orleans, mayor Mitch Landrieu crafted an impassioned
speech against the Lost Cause mythology perpetuated by the statues being
mothballed. In Memphis, the city council enacted a quiet discharge of the
public land housing another statue (one of notorious native son Nathan
Bedford Forrest) to work around state law preventing them from acting—
an action against which the Tennessee state legislature later retaliated. And
in Charlottesville, the high-water mark (to use a turn of phrase popularized
in Civil War historiography) was set on an afternoon in August, as orga-
nized groups of white supremacists marched to prevent another series of
removals and left the body of deceased counterprotester Heather Heyer in
their wake. One could say that the contentious social history marking white
marble rarely appeared in the sloganeering, rhetoric, or commentary of those
either supporting or against removal. Or that many of the monuments like
the vanished Lee in New Orleans and the deposed Forrest in Memphis were
made of bronze, and would therefore seem distant from any argument about
a pervasive material whiteness. These perspectives assume that color func-
tions as part of the sculptural apparatus and nothing more, as Hale once
assumed. They underestimate the ways in which the physical demarcations
of race born of Enlightenment science used statues as justification for racial
and moral hierarchies, as Nott and Glidden once demonstrated. Most of all,
they assume that the ethos of white marble representing whiteness could
somehow be separate from the more mundane practice of using bronze to
memorialize white bodies.
The veracity of the debate surrounding Confederate statuary puts these
ideas to rest. When looking at the form of the deposed Forrest in photo-
graphs, every bit the bronze horseman in his own right, the ruddy hue of
the statue does little to mask his identity or history as that most violent
purveyor of white supremacist ideals. Not to mention the troubles that
followed University of Iowa classics professor Sarah Bond, who pointed out
the historical connections between marble and whiteness in an innocuous
online publication two months prior to Charlottesville and was subjected to
copious amounts of right-wing harassment.30 All of this suggests that Eugene
Achike, the brutal Catholic patriarch from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
novel Purple Hibiscus, was somewhat mistaken. White people do in fact care
about “mighty statues.”31
•••••••
 Aural Skins 123

The aesthetic modernism of the early twentieth century must have seemed,
if not an antidote, then at least a world apart from these contentious issues
of race and embodiment in the public sculpture of the American past that
would explode with such fervor in the American future. After all, those
concerns emerged from a distinctly American politics surrounding repre-
sentations of the anthropocentric body. Across the Atlantic, the shifting
emphasis toward formal abstraction and non-Western sources of inspiration
in sculpture looked to stand in stark contrast to the racial weight of white
marble. Picasso’s gaze toward African sculpture prior to the First World
War was merely the most famous example of this practice in France. Paris
would do its utmost to not portend a future that gave us Charlottesville.
But the hermeneutics of racial representation and their ideological potency
could never be excised in their entirety, in Europe no less than in the United
States. If anything, modernism’s quasi-reckoning with the racialized veneer
of white marble only illuminated the possibility of its opposite, where the
material of bronze could serve as a representational schema capturing the
black body. Baker, more than anyone else in the first half of the twentieth
century, transformed this schema from the pedestal and the ethnographic
museum into the realm of performance. As an American in Paris, her very
presence challenged the legacy of marbled whiteness as white supremacy,
becoming a model for how making bronze the quintessential material skin
of blackness could be realized and culturally productive. She was that rare
monument, born of sculpted politics on two sides of an ocean, that could
actually speak for herself.
Speaking with form, though (as we have heard on many occasions thus
far), does not guarantee control of that which vocality perpetuates. When
sound finds its way into this material aesthetic of bronze, it carries with it
something powerful and easily corrupted. Following this thread, modern-
ism was also the source of a prescient and underdeveloped literary trope
where the materiality of bronze statues could become a sonorous envelope
of power. Since bronze was a materially blended metal and thus considered
more resonant than marble, some writers began to create stories in which the
ideological use of the sculpted image was reinforced by the affect of mate-
rial resonance, influencing those outside of immediate social or political
power. A prime example is the essay “Ariel,” written by Uruguayan essayist
José Enrique Rodó in 1900. The piece is a political allegory that draws on
Shakespeare’s The Tempest to critique the alluring encroachment of American
capitalism into Latin America at the turn of the century. The central character
124 The Sculpted Ear

is a teacher nicknamed Prospero (after the aged and temperamental central

character in the play) by his students, due to his long-winded lectures on
morality and power and his tendency to speak while sitting next to a bronze
statue of the nymph Ariel in his study. Roberto González Echevarria notes
that Prospero constantly defers the authority of his voice to the image of
the statue while lecturing, in essence asking the students not to associate
his voice with his own body. In doing so, Echevarria argues, the sculpture
becomes a resonant housing for the authority of the lecturer, reinforcing the
rhetorical power of language with the affective power of vibration. “Turned
into a bronze statue,” he notes, “the voice of the master begins to take on
an ever more menacing shape; it is heavy, wounding, inscribed . . . the soft
voice that cures also wounds.”32 The material of the statue is far from inert
material. Instead, it functions much like an amulet, preserving and ampli-
fying the power of the voice not through the presence of physical sound,
but the affective memory of that sound.
This confluence of voice, material, and possession demonstrated in
Rodó’s “Ariel” intersects with the broader issue of bronze representing the
black body in a fascinating mid-century short story by Ann Petry titled
“Mother Africa,” originally published in the 1971 collection Miss Muriel and
Other Stories. Petry was a prolific African American postwar author, raised
by upwardly mobile middle-class parents in the overwhelmingly white
community of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her upbringing is thought to
have influenced many of her works, which often deal with the estrange-
ment of individuals from larger communities due to social differences and
the problematic influence of white American values and cultural attachments
in African American communities.33 “Mother Africa” is intriguing because
of the way that it layers references to many of the issues discussed so far
within the context of one story, and thus it can be read in many distinct
ways. Most see the story as an allegory for the complicated nature of Afri-
can American social transcendence with modernity, a trope common to
much African American literature written after the Second World War. But
on another level, it reads more like a gothic tale of desire and possession,
spawning interiorized questions about control and fascination regarding an
object of desire in the form of a work of art. In this sense, the story seems
as resonant with Dorian Gray as with James Baldwin.
The plot of “Mother Africa” focuses on the character of Emanuel Turner
(called “Man” throughout the story), a junk collector in Harlem whose anach-
ronistic disposition makes him an odd yet endearing staple of his modern
 Aural Skins 125

urban community. His world is built out of assemblages, an environment that

reflects on his person in the form of tattered clothing, disjunctive language,
and a bluesy, improvised sales call that he sings while walking through the
neighborhood. One day, Man receives a discarded bronze statue from a
wealthy white woman, an object much more polished and formally coher-
ent than his usual haul of junk. He identifies the statue as an object of
ideal beauty—a black African woman—that he begins to anthropomorphize
and pay attention to obsessively. He places it in his backyard as if part of
a shrine. Possession of the statue slowly begins to influence his behavior,
and he shaves his beard and changes into more elegant clothes to the point
where he is unrecognizable. When the neighbors begin to deface her with
clothing every night, he dutifully cleans off her body. Man’s dedication to
Mother Africa estranges him from the community, but his sense of fasci-
nation remains unabated. Then, during a moment when cleaning the statue
yet again, he looks into her face for the first time and realizes that she is
not the African beauty he thought. Rather, she has the features of a white
woman. Thoroughly horrified, Man becomes instantly disenchanted with
his Mother Africa. He returns to his old ways, and the story ends with him
calling the local metalworks to inquire about selling the statue for scrap
metal.
Petry’s intention in writing “Mother Africa” is not entirely clear. As one
of her more obscure stories, it has generated a limited scope of critique
compared to her other work.34 But there are several threads here worth
considering. The first, most obvious, is that Man’s attraction to the statue
is clearly based on his conflation of the material bronze and epidermal
blackness. The implication of this assumption, however, is not entirely
transparent. Petry reinforces the classical primacy of form over material in
sculpture, since the twist of whiteness is based solely on the statue’s facial
features. Or, to put it another way: would Man have been enchanted had
Mother Africa been constructed of white marble with features more befit-
ting his idealized black woman? Likely not. This suggests a way of reading
the story that assumes the interpretation of bronze as black skin to be yet
another trick of Western aesthetics intended to disrupt the community ties
of the black subject. Roberts sees this primarily as a violation of the tradi-
tion of signifyin(g) that carries the identity of the statue into the realm of
“the oppressors’ discourse.”35
Were the commentary on sculpted blackness the only element that
“Mother Africa” brought to the table, it would be interesting enough. However,
126 The Sculpted Ear

the story also draws in, like Rodó, the power of sound as a mechanism that
exhibits both transformation and control. Vocality is ever-present in the
narrative of “Mother Africa,” most notably in the jingle that Man sings when
going about his business in the neighborhood. But vocality also marks the
stages of Man’s transformation throughout the narrative, as he becomes
more entranced with the idealized physical beauty of the statue itself. This
is apparent from the moment of first contact.

Thus for the first time he saw the metal woman in the moonlight.
He stared at her, moving toward her slowly like someone who was
sleepwalking. His bare feet were deep in the soft grass, cool in the
soft grass. He reached out his hand, tentatively, and touched her. She
did not feel like metal at all. Cool, yes. But she seemed to respond,
to come alive, to move under the touch of his hand, to leap with life.
He felt like singing. But he had no song, never had heard of
any song, suited for such a moment, no melody that could possibly
match the feeling of tenderness that suddenly assailed him at the
thought that this big dark woman was his. He had Mother Africa
right here in his yard.36

Petry does not use the word “skin” directly in crafting Man as a black
Pygmalion, but it lies in the subtext of his sense of enchantment, where
his tactile hand affects the statue as if it were made of organic material.
Capturing this sensation linguistically proves difficult, but even the mech-
anism of song provides him no reservoir from which to draw. The sublime
beauty of the statue’s skin leaves him as silent as the statue appears (and
is expected) to be.
As the narrative continues, Man’s own vocal sensibilities—the basis of
his prior self—start to change. The influence of Mother Africa provides him
with a more polished, lyrical vocality to draw on. This new sound is but one
part of his broader transformation from roughly hewn junkman to a modern
black subject, cleanly shaven and clothed in the intellectual trappings of a
suit.

He began to whistle. He whistled a tune that he made up, on the

spur of the moment. He whistled it over and over, thinking that it
matched the metal woman, was suited to her. It was a young tune,
it had a lilt and a lift to it.
 Aural Skins 127

Under the spell of this whistled tune, he walked over and looked
at himself in the long, cloudy mirror that hung on the door of his
bedroom. He did not know why, but he had expected to find in his
own reflection something of the beauty of the tune, something of
the beauty of the metal woman. Instead—well, he loathed what he
saw. There was nothing in his dirty, ragged, unkempt appearance to
suggest that he could create beauty, certainly nothing to suggest that
he would ever be able to recognize beauty in anything. He looked
like a creature born solely for the creation of ugliness.
He suddenly yearned to be clean.37

Armed with a new look and a new song, Man reengages with the commu-
nity that only knew him as a solitary junk dealer. But the transformation
that Man undergoes is so vast that he becomes completely unrecognizable.
His voice becomes the only tangible link to his former self, but it sounds
displaced and unconvincing coming from a different body. “Children, who
the day before had leaned against him, their bodies warm, and pressed close
as they watched him mend their broken toys, now stared at him distrust-
fully, as though suddenly confronted by a stranger who had not yet declared
whether he was friend or foe. What was more disconcerting, many of the
sensitive little ones recognized his voice, and stared up at his face, his mouth,
in an awful unwinking appraisal. He suspected that they thought he had
swallowed Ole Bottles and, as a result, was now speaking with Ole Bottles’
voice.”38 Man’s displacement is only rectified through a return to his vocal
trace, the work song he would sing while walking through the neighbor-
hood streets. As a narrative arc, it becomes a tangible signification that traces
his attempt to reconstitute himself with the community he abandoned to
pursue his desire for the statue.
Mother Africa’s statuesque form, like that of Rodó’s Ariel, is all a ruse.
But while Ariel uses its hard material to amplify the authoritative voice of
another, Mother Africa takes a more direct route. She, in essence, becomes
the sculptor: creating and shaping Man so thoroughly that he becomes a
vessel for her own voice that she cannot express herself. Man begins to
speak with the polish that she would herself if possible. And he is keen to
do so as long as he thinks she is Mother Africa, which gets to the heart of
his real transgression throughout the arc of the story. The problem is not
that he mistakenly allows himself to be seduced by the trickery of white
cultural forms. Rather, it is that he so readily allowed an absent voice of
128 The Sculpted Ear

power to transform his own voice, ceding his own subjectivity and allowing
the statue to speak through his voice. The implication here is that the statue
uses the assumption of its silence as a resonant weapon: unable to mani-
fest its own voice through the reality of its material, it seduces and tricks
another by giving him that which he desires most. Man most desired an
African queen, and thus the material of bronze could easily become a black
body in his imagination.
Reading “Mother Africa” in this way has profound implications for
reading Josephine Baker’s own sculptural disposition. One can argue that
for much of her career she was the bronze statue from “Mother Africa”—
seductive as a symbol of both black primitivism and black modernity, and
utilizing a sense of racial ambiguity to her advantage. The latter point
contains intriguing implications, for Mother Africa’s underscored oscillation
between blackness and whiteness mirrors Baker’s own ambivalence toward
such markers throughout her career. For one, Baker complained about not
getting roles on different occasions because she was considered either too
light or too dark skinned.39 She spoke of instances where she would cover
her face in white powder, to look lighter for an audition, or sing songs like
the innocuously titled “I’d Like to Be White.” By contrast, she would openly
recount tales of racist humiliations suffered throughout her career, especially
while performing in the United States, and market a line of dark-colored
women’s stockings advertised as “Bakerskin.”40 Race was in some ways a
tactical element that Baker would employ, reflective of a humanist (rather
than political) grounding in her civil rights awareness. She was not overtly
political like Nina Simone or Paul Robeson, an advantage that her sculpted
ambiguity provided.
However, Baker also carried Mother Africa’s disadvantageous silence,
something that has proven tougher to navigate than her racial disposition.
One of the most substantial and underappreciated aspects of Baker’s trans-
formation into sculpture in discourses about her performing milieu has
been the historical suppression of her singing voice. The quality of Baker’s
voice was subject to considerable debate during her career and was rarely
mentioned in conjunction with descriptions of her body. Early in her career,
Baker attempted to emulate the style of established New York singers such
as Ethel Waters, but she could not quite match their volume or presence,
especially in larger concert halls. Language describing her voice as “thin” or
“dwarf-like” was commonly used in reviews of these concerts.41 The most
 Aural Skins 129

charitable descriptions of Baker’s voice during her prime were every bit
as grounded in exoticism as those describing her dancing. One particular
review of a Columbia Records release claimed that her voice was simul-
taneously “capturing here the sound of a saxophone numb with emotion,
there the plucking with vibrato of a Hawaiian guitar, later the manner of
an insistent ukulele.”42 Tellingly, no favorable comparisons to the violin or
to Maria Callas, historical drivers of a transcendent jouissance, were to be
found. Instead, her singing voice is grounded as the emission of an exotic
object, her body as musical instrument.
Cheng mounts an impassioned and effective defense of Baker’s voice
on purely pragmatic terms, commenting on her remarkable range in both
pitch and style. The “queer” quality that especially American audiences found
distasteful, she argues, stemmed from two realities. The first was the diverse
field of genres and environments in which she had to perform throughout
her career (musical theatre, vaudeville, opera, film, music studios, radio),
each requiring a different kind of vocal performativity. In this sense, she
was no different from a host of performers working in the music industry
during that time. The second, more existential reason was that her voice
did not manifest the gravelly “diva-blues” authenticity of a Bessie Smith or
an Ethel Waters.43 Even though her voice was considered unconventional,
Cheng shows that it did have a sonorous impact on some who chose to listen,
most notably the quintessential French modernist architect Le Corbusier.
He wrote about Baker in his lecture series Précisions, which detailed a trip
to Buenos Aires in 1919 where he saw her perform for the first time. The
quixotic description that Le Corbusier writes is, as Cheng admits, “discom-
bobulating,” but weaves a thread of intimate attachment through Baker’s
voice that it was not often afforded. He writes of the maternal affection of
her voice, though not an affection borne from the typical sonorous envelope.
Rather, it is defined by a “sharpness” that moves him to imagine himself
within his own “second skin,” in part sculpted by Baker’s vocal timbre into
a desired “transcendental homelessness.” In turn, he transforms her voice
with writing from thin veil into a sleek, sculpted surface in its own right.
Or, as Cheng puts it, “she makes a diva out of him; he makes an architect
out of her.”44
Though Le Corbusier clearly provides a means to reincorporate Baker’s
voice into her sculptural milieu, he was one of the few who desired to hear
her supposedly shrill vocality in such intimate terms. In fact, her voice
130 The Sculpted Ear

could be considered a contributing factor in the longing to capture Baker’s

body solely as a sculptural object. Others may certainly have shared in the
French architect’s sense of reinvention in the rough sonorous envelope.
Most, however, would consider this transformation another version of Man
being reinvented by Mother Africa—the relationship between affect and
image becoming dissonant and unwieldy. In this reading, Baker’s silence
is necessitated not because as a statue her voice is aesthetically misplaced,
but because possessing a voice (even in exile) would make her too danger-
ous an object of affection. If thought about within the social conventions of
the time, the possibility of accepting that a black woman could have such
a deeply modern seductive effect on a white man would hardly have had
widespread acceptance during the interwar years. And the voice has always
been trickier to rein in than the body, precisely because it uses the physi-
cally ephemeral to its advantage, appearing in places and forms unexpected.
Baker being made into a statue, in one sense, is not only a mechanism to
invent and reinvent her body, but also a means to control the grain of her
voice.
The question becomes how Baker, even posthumously, can respond to
this process in a way that brings her oft-denigrated singing voice back into
the fold. She does so, like Mother Africa, by becoming a sculptor and finding
a way of transplanting her voice into the body of another. The proposition
of this process, as we have seen, is laden with violence and subconscious
transformation. Baker, though, found another way to become a sculptor, and
this is what makes the Jorama so important. Instead of inscribing her voice
into another corporeal entity through the allure of form (Mother Africa), or
with a resonant amulet (Ariel), she simply casts it within another version of
her own body. And just to make sure, that voice is inscribed with a different
material than bronze, one carrying a less problematic history with either the
raced body or the presence of sound. That material—wax—becomes some-
thing of a “third skin” for Baker, using material and form to embed a sonic
memory within the imaginations of those who may forget her soundings in
the act of gazing upon her. In other words, she preserves her vocality without
using physical sound at all, but by using a medium historically associated
with the preservation of physical sound. Timbre and shrillness no longer
an issue, Baker’s voice is freed of its critical discourse and becomes the very
essence of an absent presence.
•••••••
 Aural Skins 131

Wax, in many ways, is the ideal material for this sculptural integration of
sound and skin. Derived from organic material, it maintains a closer material
proximity to skin than either marble or bronze. When its casting is finished,
wax gives the textural illusion of skin and can easily be painted or chromed
to enhance that illusion visually. This power of illusion is heightened by
the idea that the material was shaped by direct contact with the body that
it presents. Wax can also easily incorporate ancillary materials like clothing,
which contribute to its presentation as a continuation of the living body. In
short, it is the material able to come closest to preserving a person as they
appeared in life, making wax what Roberta Panzanelli calls the “ultimate
simulacrum of flesh.”45 As expected, most of its sculptural uses relied on this
visual proximity to flesh. Versions of ceremonial death masks of import-
ant individuals dated back to Roman Egypt, and were common through the
Middle Ages in Europe.46 By the early eighteenth century, precise represen-
tations of human organs for anatomical displays were developed to replace
cadavers. Full-bodied wax effigies of figures such as the English monarch
Charles II were precursors of the waxworks of celebrities pioneered by Marie
Tussaud and other showmen, some of which incorporated the hair and cloth-
ing of their subjects.47 This history seemingly vindicates Aristotle’s famous
metaphor comparing the fidelity of a wax impression to its subject to the
integration of body and soul.48
Yet this same proximity to flesh is also responsible for wax sculptures
having more of a ceremonial and commercial life than an aesthetic one.
For one, the fidelity of wax carries the anxiety of substitution or replace-
ment. Various debates over the composition of Vladimir Lenin’s body in his
Moscow mausoleum, or Hollywood movies like House of Wax (1953, remade
in 2005), seed the fear that human skin can be permanently encased within
a skin-like material from which the subject will be incapable of emerg-
ing.49 In aesthetic terms, wax has often been considered too close to the
living body for a viewer to attain the necessary critical distance for proper
aesthetic judgment, an objection notably associated with Kant.50 Moreover,
as Georges Didi-Huberman notes, the modular quality of wax as “aesthet-
ically viscous” accounts for as much of its problematic history in Western
sculptural aesthetics as its fidelity to skin.51 Put another way, this recourse
to viscosity frames another way in which the material of wax mirrors skin:
ephemerality. As a material, wax’s malleability means that it lacks the hard
permanence of marble or bronze. It can more easily be substantially altered
by environmental factors like heat and weather, famously demonstrated
132 The Sculpted Ear

by Descartes when he ruminates about the state of wax put into a fire and
melted.52 The most compelling case against the aesthetic life of wax, though,
is in its role as a transient material in the service of other sculptural processes.
The most notable example is the “lost wax” (cire perdu) method of bronze
casting, a cross-cultural process dating back several millennia in which the
molten bronze dissolves a wax template in order to take its place.53 For all
of its varied cultural presence, it is perhaps telling that wax has often found
its most tangible aesthetic role in the history of sculpture as a placeholder
that is melted away for a more permanent material.
The qualities that foreclose wax’s aesthetic life—fidelity to skin, ephem-
erality, utility—are precisely the attributes that frame its deep conceptual
relationship to sound. This relationship was perhaps most direct during
the late nineteenth century, when technologies of sonic and bodily preser-
vation interacted in the same public spaces. In the 1880s and early 1890s,
wax cylinders became the standard technology in early sound recording
devices. Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C.,
developed a wax cylinder–based phonograph that was patented in 1886,
based on the inscription process that Thomas Edison had experimented
with on tinfoil during the late-1870s. Their “graphophone” was released for
public consumption under the Volta Graphophone Company that same year.
Though the wax cylinder recorded with greater fidelity than any technol-
ogy produced to that point, it was exceedingly fragile and thus ill suited for
mass production. Only remaining popular for recording until Emile Berlin-
er’s more durable shellac gramophone disc was developed in the mid-1890s,
the value of wax’s legacy in recording was mixed throughout the twentieth
century. While the word itself gained cachet among small groups of record
collectors, most wax cylinders were deemed only as valuable as the material
inscribed upon them.54 Once their texts were inscribed onto a more perma-
nent medium, the wax objects themselves were often discarded as obsolete
and valueless.55
For a short period, though, this popularity of the wax cylinder in record-
ing coincided with the spread of waxworks from urban traveling shows to
permanent museum spaces after 1860, modeled after the popular Madame
Tussaud museum in London. These wax museums were perhaps the primary
site through which people could engage with detailed representations of the
famous before the development of the motion picture theatre. Perhaps notic-
ing the resonance between sound reproduction and body reproduction, some
 Aural Skins 133

wax museums began to experiment with incorporating recording devices into

displays. For example, during the early 1890s several Scandinavian panoptika
began to feature recordings of local celebrities playing next to their sculpted
forms. Patrons could even rent out salons at the museum where groups
could listen to these assemblages of sculpted body and recorded sound as
part of private social gatherings. This turned the late nineteenth-century
wax museum, as Mark Sandberg argues, into a “media nexus” where patrons
not only expected to engage with various forms of recording technologies,
but also gave wax figures “the chance to borrow qualities by implication
from the surrounding devices.”56 Sandberg is speaking more generally about
sound reproduction devices, and his perspective arguably persists into the
present day where recorded sound effects, voices, and music are a staple of
the tourist experience at any contemporary wax museum. But there seems
to be a special resonance for that brief period when wax bodies could corre-
spond with their own voices carved into the same material—voice imprinted
onto the warm, intimate material of skin once again.
Was Baker aware of this historical resonance between wax and sound
when she commissioned the wax figurines for the Jorama at the Château
des Milandes? Did she somehow understand the dynamics of the sculpted
ear, even if not through the window of that term? We’ll likely never know
the answer to those questions. Nor can we know if she cast herself in wax,
particularly as the aforementioned figure that depicts her at the height of
her powers, to escape the legacy of her own embodied history sculpted in
bronze for many who saw her perform. If anything becomes clearer, it is that
the sculptural life of Josephine Baker cannot be simply framed as an inter-
section between primitivism and modernism at the site of the black female
body. She brings together an entire discourse unto herself about the relation-
ship between skin, material, and form that challenges any simplistic notions
about her career and legacy. Baker casting herself in wax may have been
one way to rectify the chasm between the way she viewed herself and the
way others viewed her. It represents a move, one elucidated and expounded
upon in so many different contexts by Fred Moten, to embed an irreduc-
ible sonic presence into the varied visual and embodied objectifications of
blackness, from within and without.57 We should keep this legacy in mind
when engaging with other sculptural manifestations of Baker in the world.
For the centennial celebration of her birth in 2006, a French sculptor named
Chouski was commissioned to make a statue of the singer to be placed on
134 The Sculpted Ear

the grounds of Milandes. The finished product featured Baker in the bronze
skin associated with her prime, but not in the repose of her 1925 premiere
with La Revue Nègre. Rather, an older Baker, simply clad, is embracing a
young Aiko, one of her Rainbow Children. Reclaiming the woman with the
bronze skin, not as an object of desire, but in a moment where she appears
at her most resonantly human.
Chapter 6

Now You Have to Go, Comrade

Plovdiv’s Stariya Grad (“old city”) is a central neighborhood built into three
prominent hills (called Nebet Tepe, Taksim Tepe, and Dzambaz Tepe) over-
looking vast stretches of the city in south-central Bulgaria. As one would
expect from any locale tagged with such a moniker, the area carries a diverse
and cosmopolitan history dating back prior to antiquity. The hills show
evidence of settlement from as early as 4000 BCE. They later housed the
Thracian city that became known as Philippopolis (named after Philip II of
Macedonia), which stood as one of the northernmost reaches from Hellenic
Greece into present-day Bulgaria. When the Romans conquered the region of
Thrace in the first century BCE, they renamed the existing town Trimontium
(“Three Hills”). During the period of Ottoman Muslim rule, what became
the Stariya Grad served as the city’s Christian quarter, housing the merchant
class that made Plovdiv the most important city in nineteenth-century
Bulgaria through the overland trade route between Salonika (Thessalon-
iki) and Constantinople (Istanbul).1 Wealth stemming from this economic
web filtered into the quarter, helping build the ornate houses in the Bulgar-
ian revival style for which the neighborhood is renowned. Yet the opulence of
Stariya Grad masked deeper systemic problems inherent in the late Ottoman
city. This attitude was articulated by Liuben Karavelov, a writer and ardent
Bulgarian nationalist, who wrote in 1868 that Plovdiv seemed “magnifi-
cent and picturesque” from afar but upon closer inspection was filled with
136 The Sculpted Ear

“half-demolished houses, muddy streets, stinking morasses, hopeless filth,

lazy and mangy dogs and sleepy human physiognomies.”2
This double identity of pictorial and squalid, Bulgarian and Ottoman,
modern and aged—of which Stariya Grad was part—was slowly transformed
after the Liberation of 1878 and the rapid shift toward Europeanized moder-
nity that it shepherded. But while the red Mediterranean tile roofs and
cobblestone roads in other parts of the city gave way to the bland gray
concrete of modern city streets and Communist apartment buildings, Stariya
Grad kept much of its nineteenth-century character. In recent years, many
of the buildings that once housed wealthy merchants have been refurbished
and incorporated into the burgeoning tourist economy, presenting a piece
of old Plovdiv in the middle of the city. The colorful Baroque mansion
built by merchant Argir Hristov Kuyumdzhioglu in 1847 has been home to
the Plovdiv Regional Ethnographic Museum since the late 1930s. On the
opposite side of Stariya Grad, a more sober Baroque structure built on top
of a Macedonian fortification wall belonged to Revivalist book publisher
Hristo Danov, and it has an exhibition belonging to the Regional Historical
Museum. The confluence of modernity and antiquity also manifests with
the Akademiya za muzikalno i tantsovo izkustvo (Academy for Musical and
Dance Arts, or AMTI), which inhabits a mix of Revivalist and modern build-
ings near the much older remains of the Antichniyat teatur (The Ancient
Theater), a Roman-era open-air stadium unearthed in 1923.3 Their close
proximity shows the patchwork history of Stariya Grad that one encoun-
ters within the sphere of a few hundred square feet.
Between the AMTI grounds and the Ancient Theater is an object that
tells a quieter, more austere piece of Bulgaria’s history. Next to a small
outcropping of trees sits a life-size bronze statue of a smiling gentleman
with a thin moustache, sitting on a perch and holding a violin to his knee.
The man captured in bronze is Aleksandar Nikolov, a popular musician and
humorist during the 1950s known colloquially by the name Sasho Sladura
(often translated to “Alex the Sweetheart”). He is not well known outside
of Bulgaria, yet holds a certain fascination for Bulgarians who came of age
during the early Communist era and its Stalinist veneer. Sladura was one
of the finest musicians to come out of Plovdiv during the first half of the
twentieth century, becoming a featured soloist at the Hotel Bulgaria when
it was one of the liveliest spots for Western-style dance music in Sofia.4
He was equally known for his deft sense of humor, as a gambler, and as a
legendary charmer (the source of his nickname). After the Second World
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 137

War, at a time when outspokenness was potentially dangerous, Sladura

often dispensed humorous criticism of the regime, veiled with wit. He had
an incomparable knack for deflecting the worst ire from members of the
Bulgarian Communist Party (hereafter BCP) through his personal warmth,
considerable charm, and the cultivation of advantageous political allies. His
arrest, imprisonment, and mysterious death in 1961 marked him as one of
the most famous victims of Communist Party terror in Bulgaria. No less a
figure than Georgi Markov, the dissident writer and victim of a ricin-filled
pellet delivered via umbrella, codified the importance of Sladura’s death for
a certain generation of Bulgarians. To grasp the reach of that era’s political
terror, one “need only mention the fate of the well-known jazz violin-
ist, Sasho Sladura (the charmer),” Markov wrote in his memoir The Truth
That Killed, “who paid with his life to remain in the nation’s memory as an
unequalled raconteur.”5
The statue was commissioned by Georgi Lazarov, a physician, philan-
thropist, and classmate of Nikolov who emigrated to the United States
in 1971. From his home in Baltimore, Lazarov donated money in the late
1990s to commission several statues around Plovdiv capturing artists and
personalities local to Plovdiv, including artist Zlatyu Boyadzhiev and street
philosopher Milyo Ludiya.6 Local sculptor Danko Dankov was charged with
designing and casting all of the statues, and the one of Sladura was unveiled
with a small ceremony in September 2002. Unlike those of Boyadzhiev
and Ludiya, the visage of Sladura sits atop a stone that has a small plaque
attached to its base. It reads:

v pamet na Sasho Sladura 1916–1961 i deitsite na kulturata zaginali

ot komunisticheskiya rezhim 1944–1989

(in memory of Sasho Sladura and the culture makers who had
perished under the Communist regime)

This inscription, both provocative and direct, was not without controversy.
Protests were voiced by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), the political
successor to the BCP, who claimed that the inscription was unfairly biased
toward the former Communist government.7 These types of critiques have
been in the minority. Most who know something of the man represented by
the statue accept the martyrdom that the inscription articulates. His body,
physically mortared into the streets of Stariya Grad, stands as a reminder
138 The Sculpted Ear

of the worst excesses of state power under Communist rule toward cosmo-
politanism and bourgeois artistry.
The importance of Sladura’s statue can thus be understood in a number
of ways: as a bodily allegory of the erosion of interwar bourgeois subjectiv-
ity in Bulgaria within Communist everyday life between 1944 and 1962; as
a preservation of the bourgeois urban subject that was specifically targeted
during the early Communist period; as a source for new relationships with
images of the dead, made possible during the comparatively boundless era
of post-Communism. The relationship between loss and cultural memory
looms large in all of these ideas. Statues have proven ideal objects to perform
such work, reinvigorating the bodies of the dead and placing them on display
to ensure that they—and what they represent—are not totally forgotten. They
become arbiters of expressions that Marilyn Ivy associates with the psycho-
analytic concept of nachträglichkeit (deferred action), a common term found
in the works of Freud and Lacan as a means to articulate how subjects inter-
pret and revise past events to invest them with significance. Ivy’s own take
on nachträglichkeit connects it to the phantasmic nature of loss, where phan-
tasm “is understood as an epistemological object whose presence or absence
cannot be definitively located. . . . [T]hat loss can never be known simply as
loss.”8 The objectification of loss in the way Ivy describes carries with it the
implication that it is something that can eventually be recovered through
the recourse to its newfound object status, like molding putty into a recog-
nizable shape. One can imagine how the statue of Sasho Sladura—itself a
molded shape—functions as an object of nachträglichkeit. The inscription
alone invests it with such significance. So, too, does the decision by the sculp-
tor Dankov to show Sladura as he would have appeared in life, instead of a
more abstract presentation involving disembodied heads that he intended.
Placing the statue within the confines of Stariya Grad fulfills this need as
well, mirroring the similar work of restoration done to the houses and build-
ings that echo the intersection between Bulgaria’s imagined and actual past.
Silence, ever present in the milieu of statuary, is one potential compo-
nent to this assemblage of nachträglichkeit that escapes obvious notice but
becomes worthy of consideration in the context of Sladura’s life. The concept
of silence, as the phenomenological state created by the perceived lack of
sound associated with a particular body, has taken on many different guises
within classical conceptualizations of sculpture. In addition to being a self-
evident aesthetic construct, silence was also key to constructing the space
of contemplation thought necessary for proper subjective engagement with
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 139

the art object. It has been, to adopt a phrase from Lacan, a present absence.
Sound, by contrast, takes on the Janus face of the absent presence, more often
a vanished than a never-was. But silence can be more than just a negation of
sonic presence. It can also serve as a referential marker to that which has gone
unheard or been silenced in some way. In this vein, philosopher Don Ihde
thought about silence as a “horizon of sound” that creates a border between
silence and the sound that it references. At this seam between silence and
sound lies an object or concept linking the two together. Ihde, for example,
thought that movement served as this bordering.9 John Cage, who began to
consider the musical impact of silence as early as the 1940s, championed the
temporal principle of duration.10 Others have put forward potential borders
laden with varying degrees of abstraction and touching on everything from
philosophy to music copyright, each taking its own potent and mobile mean-
ing depending on the source and permanence of the silencing.11
Statues, too, can become one of these horizons on the cusp between sound
and silence. More specifically, statues are potent objects in the transformation
of silence from an ontological absence of sound into an epistemological field
detailing the spaces and cultures through which a lack of sounding becomes
meaningful. Because the statue has maintained such close proximity to the
phenomenological ideal of silence, it becomes an object that captures the
allegorical ethos of silencing in a powerful way. And the statue of Sasho
Sladura provides a potent example of how these horizons can overlap, inter-
weave, and fuse together within the purview of a single object. In Sladura’s
case, there are the personal silences: the dearth of recordings of his musi-
cal output, the tactical self-censorship he employed in his humor, and the
obscured details of his death at the hands of the state. These, in turn, speak
to a broader series of collective silences: the repression of the prewar bour-
geois intelligentsia within a postwar Stalinist-inspired cultural program, and
the censorship and scrutiny toward Western popular music, jazz, and those
that wrote and performed it. These silences clearly stand on the threshold of
the soundings with which they are related. I would take this idea one step
further, arguing that one could say that these silences become soundings unto
themselves—a negation of a negation. Sladura’s statue, in being perceived to
make no physical sound, broadcasts the story of his sonic essence as power-
fully as any technological medium of transmission ever could. In life, he
made sounds that are now lost. In death, his body and persona reference
those lost sounds, intimately reinvigorating them for those who remember
and imagine him. These sounding silences, funneled through the material
140 The Sculpted Ear

guise of the statue, themselves anchor a complex aestheticization of death

and the body that has become an integral part of post-Communist life in
Bulgaria. It represents nothing less than an alchemy of imagination, roman-
ticism, and myth building that is resonant with those same ideals preserving
the neighborhood in which the Sladura statue permanently resides.
But why this statue, and this person, within this book? There are certainly
other, more renowned figures from less obscure places and eras through
which to conduct a foray into the sounding silences of statues. Choosing
Nikolov as my example reflects a deep attachment to his legacy on my part.
I have written several pieces on the history of jazz in Bulgaria.12 Nikolov was
one of the most fascinating figures I encountered while conducting research
for those works. He remains virtually unknown outside of Bulgaria, and
the memory of his persona and exploits slowly vanishes with each pass-
ing year. Bulgarian film director Nikola Korabov wrote a script for a Sasho
Sladura biopic and tried for years to stir up funding and interest. Korabov
was ultimately unsuccessful, and his death in 2016 consigned this project to a
permanent purgatory. A novel revolving around Sladura’s exploits published
in the 1990s by reclusive writer Dimitar Korudzhiev will be referenced later
in this chapter. The statue constitutes the most tangible (and arguably the
only) ontological trace of Nikolov’s life, career, and legacy. I first became
aware of him through the statue, and thinking about the implications of his
solitary bronze memorial subsequently became the genesis for my concep-
tualization of this entire book. As such, I owe a scholarly responsibility to
Nikolov, one that embeds me within the broader sphere of memory and loss
that defines nachträglichkeit, and the subtle cultural politics that slips over
the dull sheen of bronze.
•••••••

Aleksandar Georgiev Nikolov, the man who would become Sasho Sladura,
was born between 1916 and 1918 (depending on the source) in the town of
Pleven, not far from the stretch of the Danube River that constitutes Bulgar-
ia’s northern border. His father, Georgi, was an engineer from Prilep who
helped design Borisova Gradina (Boris’s Gardens), the large central park in
the center of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia that was expanded as part of the
modernizing, European-inspired reforms enacted by Tsar Ferdinand during
the 1880s. Georgi later helped design the Kailuka Park in Pleven and Tsar
Simeonova Gradina (Simeon’s Gardens) in Plovdiv, accounting for the young
Aleksandar’s presence in those locales. His mother, Katerina Enders, was
the daughter of a Swedish ship captain and a Czech pianist whose father
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 141

managed the Renaissance castle in the town of Mêlnìk. She and Georgi had
met when he was studying in Prague to become a park designer. Because of
this multicultural background, Nikolov was able to speak fluently in four
languages at an early age. His father’s lucrative career in park design and
management also afforded him the kind of education available to Bulgar-
ians from affluent backgrounds. As a child in the wake of the First World
War, he studied at the recently opened Italiansko uchilishte “Vittorio Alfi-
eri” (Vittorio Alfieri Italian School), which was directed by Angelo Giuseppe
Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII) during his time as Apostolic Visitor
to Bulgaria. His teenage years were spent at the laudable Frenskiyat muzhki
kolezh “Sv. Avgustin” (St. Augustin French College), a Catholic boys school
in Plovdiv that was founded in 1884 and later shut down by the Communist
government. These institutions, and his home life in Plovdiv, left Nikolov
somewhat isolated from the political tumult that had defined Bulgaria since
its humiliating defeat while allied with the Central Powers. This era saw the
Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) government of Aleksandar
Stamboliyski overthrown by coup d’état in 1923 at the hands of the military
and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). There
was also the 1925 bombing of the Sveta Nedelya church in Sofia, an act that
drove the Communist party out of the public sphere and underground for
nearly two decades.13 Then there emerged a series of repressive right-wing
governments in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in part a response to the
perceived threat of political violence from IMRO, and another military coup
in 1934, followed by an edict establishing direct rule by Tsar Boris III the
next year. By the time the Tsar assumed power, it was common for Bulgari-
ans with wealth to continue their education abroad in other parts of Europe.
Nikolov, through connections on his mother’s side of the family, arranged
to continue his studies in violin at the prestigious Prague Conservatory. In
the course of his education, Nikolov became a well-regarded violinist, wrote
poetry, and honed his comedic skills through conversations with classmates
and friends.
He returned to Bulgaria in 1940, on the heels of the German occupa-
tion of Czechoslovakia and the westward blitzkrieg into Belgium and France.
The country that he came back to was one torn between its relationships to
the major powers, weighing the economic dependence and historical ties to
Germany against the more opaque territorial promises of the British and the
Soviets. After a dispute with the Romanians over the region of Dobrudzha
was settled in Bulgaria’s favor with German help, the pro-German side won
142 The Sculpted Ear

out and the tenuous policy of neutrality was abandoned. Bulgaria joined the
Tripartite Pact in 1941 and fought for the Axis cause until 1944.14 During
the war, Nikolov won an audition to play in the elite Tsarskata filkhar-
moniya (Tsar’s Philharmonic) in Sofia under the direction of Aleksandar
Popov. Nikolov quickly gained a reputation as one of the finest violinists in
the ensemble, impressing the equally virtuosic Popov—himself considered
the best classical violinist in Bulgaria and a former student of the famous
Czech pedagogue Otakar Ševčík. After the orchestra was dissolved in the
Communist takeover in 1944, Nikolov found work with various dance bands
performing at the Hotel Bulgaria, a Sofia institution that American journal-
ist John Reed once called the “one hotel where literally everybody goes.”15
Located on a stretch of Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard that had constituted the
cultural heart of Sofia since the late nineteenth century, the Hotel Bulgaria
and its attached restaurant was one of the few remaining locales in Sofia
where Western dance music was performed in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Nikolov’s most frequent collaboration was as a soloist with the band
of Asen Ovcharov, conductor of the most popular Western-style orchestra in
Sofia dating back to the mid-1930s. The Hotel Bulgaria would be Nikolov’s
musical home for much of the next decade, where he began to cultivate the
moniker and reputation of Sasho Sladura. It was there that he established
his proclivity for female company—so many women, it was said, that he
forgot their names and referred to them all simply as sladka (sweetheart).
It was there that he encountered Russian violin virtuoso Leonid Kogan,
who told Nikolov that the same talent Kogan had cultivated through prac-
tice was divinely bestowed upon his Bulgarian counterpart. It was there that
he entered into a joke competition with Arkady Raikin during the Russian
entertainer’s 1958 tour of the Eastern Bloc, quipping with such veracity that
Raikin doubled over with laughter.16 And it seems fitting that his reputa-
tion—bourgeois raconteur to the core—was built within the walls that carried
the withering remains of Bulgaria’s prewar elite into the Communist age.
Nikolov’s postwar career was cultivated in an environment marked by
changes in ideas about Western popular music and jazz within the cultural
discourse of the newly empowered BCP. Bulgarian writer and jazz critic
Vladimir Gadzhev, author of the only long-form monograph to date on
the history of jazz in Bulgaria, writes that after the Communists came to
power in 1944, “the concept of jazz did not disappear from the public vocab-
ulary, but was perceived as a conscious reaction against imposing mandatory
normative and systematic leveling of emotional experiences.”17 In reality, this
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 143

relationship between state and citizen suggested by Gadzhev’s statement

was far more complicated from the perspectives of the musicians working
during that time. The association of jazz within parts of the BCP with unbri-
dled personal expression, irrational and “primitive” behavior, and bourgeois
decadence meant that measures were taken to keep an eye on its produc-
tion and consumption by Bulgarian citizens. Jazz became one of the primary
targets of the Komitet za nauka, izkustvo i kultura (Committee for Science,
Art and Culture), which had been formed under the Dimitrov Constitution
to root out bourgeois influence in Bulgarian cultural life and was headed
by future BCP general secretary Valko Chervenkov from 1947 to 1949.18
However, the Committee’s ideological fervor was never quite matched by
clear definitions of acceptability, and conflicting interpretations on accept-
ability led to instances of legal trouble for unsuspecting Bulgarian citizens.
Part of the reason for this lack of homogeneity was that despite the best
efforts of the BCP to problematize the bourgeois lifestyle, the reality was
that even the most stringent application of Stalinist paradigms in every-
day life failed to exorcise objects and ideas of Western origin. The primary
cause of such failure was the lack of clear ideological definition of what
constituted “bourgeois” and how the objects of such designation were to
be consumed ethically. For all of the historical conceptualization of Stalin-
ism as a monolithic political and social construction, there was a surprising
amount of leeway with regard to individual interactions with government
agencies. Vera Dunham and Alexei Yurchak have both written extensively
about the paradoxes regarding the value of Western objects in Stalinist-era
Soviet literature and youth culture, respectively.19 This leeway extended to
certain kinds of social nonconformity in everyday life under Communism
as well. Markov, for example, noted in his memoir that undereducated BCP
ideologues who led reading groups of works by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin at
a metallurgy factory he worked at in the early 1950s were openly mocked
and ignored by audiences of former university students, without significant
punishment from administrators.20
Despite its vilification in certain quarters of the party, music considered
to be jazz was subject to similar ideological slippage. Many professional
and amateur Western-style dance bands were still active during the early to
mid-1950s in Sofia, Plovdiv, and at the burgeoning Black Sea resorts.21 These
ensembles survived primarily by working in state-run restaurants and casi-
nos, playing everything from tangos, foxtrots, rags, Bulgarian gradni pesni
(urban songs), and (in some cases) the swing popularized by Depression-era
144 The Sculpted Ear

American bands. This repertoire had, unsurprisingly, changed little from

that which had been played in the years before 1944. Bringing in recordings,
arrangements, and transcriptions from outside of Bulgaria was difficult, and
constant scrutiny of repertoire by the BCP necessitated altering the names
of artists or songs titles to disguise their Western origin. Dimitar Sime-
onov, a young saxophonist during the 1950s, captures this atmosphere of
jazz performance during most of the decade when he describes the typi-
cal night for his band during a residency at the Hotel Bulgaria during the
decade:

The repertoire required to be known back then [by bands] included

classical and modern music. The restaurant had a grand piano, and
[the band] Dzhaz na Optimistite (Jazz of the Optimists) played every
night from seven to eleven. The first two hours were for symphonic
and chamber music, the next two for dancing. We played every-
thing. We had problems with the state because we had invented a
composer named “Roze.” We played [George] Gershwin, [Louis]
Armstrong—everything. And as they asked us what we played, we
responded “Summertime, by Roze” or “Rhapsody in Blue, by Roze”
again. “What is it?” they asked. “Rusnak” (Russian), we replied.22

By the mid-1950s, older musicians whose careers started before the BCP
came to power were becoming less present in bands like Jazz of the Opti-
mists. Their association with Bulgaria’s bourgeois past and extensive
education and performance experience outside of the country made them
prime targets for the intense scrutiny and limited employment opportuni-
ties.23 While public censure and venue closures were common after 1949,
musicians associated with the pre-1944 Tsarist bourgeoisie also became
tempting targets for more severe disciplinary measures meted out by the
young Communist government.
Their highest-profile target was the popular bandleader and frequent
Nikolov collaborator Asen Ovcharov. At the height of the 1949 purges,
Ovcharov received an invitation for his band to tour the United States, a
significant honor in that his was the first Bulgarian jazz group to receive such
an offer. The tour was allegedly brokered by some colleagues from Great Brit-
ain with whom Ovcharov had exchanged recordings and sheet music during
the brief Allied occupation of Bulgaria near the end of the war. The invita-
tion aroused the wrong kind of attention. Around the time when he would
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 145

have been starting the arduous process of acquiring visas and permissions for
the band to travel, authorities arrested Ovcharov and officially charged him
with crimes against public taste for “jazzing” the proletarian hymn “Interna-
tionale.” Such arrangements of people’s songs was a practice that, perhaps
ironically, had been common among Soviet composers a decade earlier as a
means of creating popular music amenable to the aesthetic sensibilities of
Stalinist ideology. The underlying philosophy behind utilizing aspects of
jazz in Communist mass songs stemmed from the ideas of German left-wing
composer Hans Eisler, who frequently visited the Soviet Union during the
1930s and had many Soviet contacts. Composer Isak Dunaevskii was one of
the leading proponents of such writing, contributing to many different films
and revues in Moscow. In fact, mass songs were seen as a potential Commu-
nist competitor for mainstreamed American jazz repertoire.24 Also notable
are practices during the Second World War, when music stylistically closer
to jazz was more acceptable as long as it contained lyrics lampooning Fascist
personalities and themes. American standards such as “Honeysuckle Rose”
also appeared during this time with lyrics reinterpreted to support various
Red Army causes.25 In Ovcharov’s case, the charge of violating public taste
was most likely a convenient excuse to make an example of his perceived
collaboration with foreigners, which was interpreted at that time as anti-
Soviet espionage. Both Ovcharov and his young wife were swiftly convicted
and sent to the kontslager (concentration camp) in Tutrukan, where they
stayed for a short period before being transferred to the notorious camp at
Belene. Upon his release in 1952, he was arrested again and sentenced to
six years in prison, which he again served at Belene. Barred from return-
ing to Sofia after his release in 1957, Ovcharov instead settled in Plovdiv.
There he spent the rest of his life teaching while battling poor health stem-
ming from his time in prison. Although his career as a major bandleader was
finished, he did a few arrangements for Orkestar Sofia (a state-run pop and
jazz ensemble led by former colleague Dimitar Ganev) and taught accor-
dion at a small music school until his death in 1967.
For a while, Nikolov was seemingly immune to the censure plaguing
his colleagues and friends, maintaining an enviable portfolio of work during
this period. After Ovcharov’s second arrest in 1952, Nikolov continued at the
Hotel Bulgaria and eventually became the leader of Jazz of the Optimists,
an eclectic ten-piece ensemble featuring Nikolov on violin and vocals, the
aforementioned Simeonov on saxophone, and other musicians playing trum-
pet, trombone, flute, cello, and bass. Nikolov’s experiences studying music
146 The Sculpted Ear

in Prague had made him adept at playing all of the dance styles popular
among the hotel’s patrons (tango, French chanson), and he was able to sing
fluently in French. Simeonov recalls that even the group’s name came from
one of Nikolov’s many jokes—upon seeing the ensemble for the first time,
he quipped that the group “must be optimists” if they thought they would
be able to get any work.26 Though the group’s Western orientation guaran-
teed limited opportunities to record, a 1954 Balkanton 45 RPM disc of the
composition “Samoti” (Loneliness), credited to Mexican film composer Anto-
nio Díaz Conde, shows that the band’s sound was similar to other Bulgarian
jazz orchestras at that time, resembling the rich, symphonic style of the Paul
Whiteman Orchestra, popular in the United States and Europe in the 1920s
but long passé in those places by the 1950s. Such an anachronistic sound
was not accidental. The music shows none of the technical virtuosity and
advanced harmonization of American figures like Charlie Parker, popular
across the Atlantic and in Europe during the same period. It lacks even the
level of boundary-pushing musicality associated with names of a generation
prior—Duke Ellington, Count Basie, even Benny Goodman. Access to these
figures, either through recordings or opportunities to hear live performances,
was basically nonexistent in early Communist Bulgaria. What few record-
ings did surface were smuggled in mainly through merchant vessels docking
at the Black Sea port of Varna, and no American jazz groups were known to
have played in Bulgaria for a period of almost fifty years.27 While Nikolov
could not be considered a trendsetting musician, his abilities kept him in
the limelight of the small popular music scene that existed in 1950s Sofia.
As his reputation as a bandleader grew, Nikolov began to engage in other
opportunities contemporaneous to his residency at the Hotel Bulgaria. Start-
ing in November 1952 he led an orchestra accompanying a variety show in
Plovdiv called Estrada za khumor i satira (The Humor and Satire Show) that
was developed by the editor of the newspaper Starshel (Hornet). The show
featured sketches by some of the best satirical writers of the time. Despite
the show’s success, it was closed by order of the BCP Central Committee in
May 1953.28 The closure, in retrospect, was a harbinger of things to come.
By the mid-1950s, Nikolov’s veiled criticisms in the guise of jokes tran-
scended his career as a musician, making him an iconic figure among young
Bulgarians balancing their desire for Western culture with the nervous
panopticon perpetuated by the Communist government. Many of these
young listeners self-identified by the gendered designations of zozi (for
women) or svingeri (for men), or collectively by the Soviet designation of
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 147

stilyagi, all of which roughly translate to “swingers.”29 Stilyagi consumed

the available media and popular culture of the West with great enthusiasm,
and state newspapers and journals pontificated on the problems caused by
these idle, bored youth smoking and loitering, as well as musicians under-
mining their communities by playing various kinds of “musical barbarity.”30
Nikolov’s cool demeanor was an ideal model for their behavior. His attitude
was popularly referred to as Frenski fines (French refinement), a phrase that
can be traced to his thoroughly bourgeois reputation and cosmopolitan back-
ground, highlighted by his ability to sing French chansons in their original
language.31 As important as his status among the country’s disenfranchised
youth was, Nikolov’s uncanny ability to subtly ingratiate himself through-
out various levels of Communist Bulgarian society became his greatest
strength. He managed to maintain a great deal of popularity among many
of the Communist elite in spite of his jokes aimed at the power of the BCP.
Among the frequent patrons of the restaurant at the Hotel Bulgaria were
high-ranking BCP officials enjoying the leisure time allowed by their social
privilege to drink, smoke, and listen to Bulgaria’s finest Western-style dance
band. Chervenkov, despite his role in the 1949 purges of bourgeois influ-
ence in Bulgarian institutions, was allegedly quite fond of Nikolov despite
being the punch line to many of his jokes. This affection was demonstrated
by accounts that the first secretary often had Nikolov stay after official gath-
erings to drink and entertain late partygoers into the night.32
The height of Nikolov’s success coincided with the first vestiges of
Bulgarian de-Stalinization, when Chervenkov gave up his post as general
secretary of the BCP at the Sixth Congress in 1954 to serve exclusively as
prime minister.33 Various orchestras took advantage of this cultural thaw by
broadening potential performance opportunities both inside and outside of
Bulgaria. Nikolov’s Jazz of the Optimists took advantage of relaxed travel
restrictions and conducted an international tour in 1955, performing in
Romania, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Finland. They became the
first major Bulgarian jazz group to tour outside of the bloc since before
the Second World War, setting the stage for lucrative tours by a group
featuring saxophonist Edi Kazasyan and vocalist Lea Ivanova starting in
1957. Popular female vocalists like Ivanova and Liana Antonova began to
establish international careers as concert singers, while a younger group
highlighted by Snezhka Dobreva (as Gina Dobra) and Akhinora Kamanova
(as Nora Nova) found their way into the foreign film industry in Austria and
Germany, respectively.34 Other groups used the opportunity to incorporate
148 The Sculpted Ear

a broader range of repertoire past the ears of BCP censors at home. Dzhaz
na Mladite (Jazz of the Young), another orchestra active in Sofia during
the 1950s, relied on trumpeter Ivailo Peichev to transcribe and arrange
pieces from Czech composers influenced by Western popular music. The
band also frequently renamed pieces with Bulgarian titles and would occa-
sionally change the surnames of American composers to sound Spanish
or Latin American. Even during a time of relative calm, acts of subterfuge
remained a way of life.
The 1956 autumn uprising in Hungary that was brutally crushed by the
Soviets struck a blow to this period of thaw, and by the next year the BCP
regressed to the less tolerant policies of years past.35 Nikolov was subject
to considerably more harassment from the authorities than before. It is not
entirely clear why he was so quickly singled out for punishment after the
cultural thaw subsided, especially considering how well Nikolov had weath-
ered the purges earlier in the decade. As with all puzzles, there are several
pieces to consider. With Chervenkov out of power after 1956, Nikolov lost
a sympathetic presence in the upper echelons of the government, or at least
someone susceptible to his considerable charms. The new general secretary,
Todor Zhivkov, would take a more active interest in shaping the structure
and enforcement of cultural policy. Gone was the Stalinst cult of person-
ality favored by Chervenkov, which was subject to easy manipulation via
flattery. Instead, Zhivkov quietly—and over some time—adopted a system
that rewarded intellectuals and artists for staying within boundaries set
by the party, while subjecting those who did not to constant surveillance
and punishment. Nikolov, an elder statesman within a small body of trans-
gressive youth, was the kind of aesthete in a position to openly flaunt such
measures, raising his profile as a target. The most tangible difference, though,
was the appointment of Mircho Spasov as Deputy Minister of the Interior,
which included control of Darzhaven Sigurnost (State Security, or DS). As
a Communist hardliner, a longtime collaborator of Zhivkov’s, and one will-
ing to use violence and murder to achieve his ends, Spasov represented
a dangerous and unpredictable element in the enforcement of Zhivkov’s
cultural mandate after 1956. Allegedly, Spasov had Nikolov on a 1959 list of
over a dozen “decadent elements” that he wanted to target for eradication.36
And he had the tools to accomplish this goal, with boots on the ground in
the form of DS, spies throughout the restaurants and cafés in major cities,
and a mandate to reopen the kontslagera closed during the thaw and make
them even more brutal and punitive than before.
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 149

More famous, and thus a bigger prize than he had been earlier in the
decade, Nikolov was a tempting target for the Communists. And the hammer
dropped almost immediately. He was arrested in 1957 on the charge of ideo-
logical subversion and spreading vicious jokes and imprisoned at Belene
for one year. The term did little to silence Nikolov or even slow him down.
Perhaps he knew that it was too late to change even if he wanted, as long as
Zhivkov and Spasov were in charge. This interpretation squares with a haunt-
ing tale recounted by friend and fellow musician Dimitar Ganev, regarding
a trip with Nikolov to the mountain retreat of Vitosha (a peak that domi-
nates the horizon south of Sofia) just prior to the iconic violinist’s death.

We were on an excursion to Vitosha—Sasho Sladura, my wife, and

I. It was Sunday. We picked mushrooms, ate lunch, and talked. And
at one point my wife said, “Hey Sasho, you are such a talented man,
why don’t you stop with these jokes? You were already in Belene
once. Quit giving people a reason to talk about you.” And Sasho says,
“No! Stop! No more!” . . . [Later,] I go with my wife [to the restau-
rant Bulgaria], we sit down at a table and wait for Sasho to appear
in the orchestra. It turns out the band starts playing—no Sasho. I
ask a colleague “Where is Sasho?” “He’s not here,” he says. And so,
Sasho Sladura disappeared.37

The events that surround Nikolov’s last arrest in 1961—the one that surprised
Ganev and his wife—remain shrouded in mystery. They have become the
source of a great deal of innuendo and speculation that has been exacerbated
by the ease of such discourse in contemporary media. Such is the case with
the most widely accepted account of the fateful moment. On the evening of
September 15, Nikolov was gathering with people near the Sveta Nedelya
in Sofia, site of the Communist-led bombing in 1925. Nikolov was allegedly
joking with the gathered crowd, referring to the Communist Party House
as a “burned out circus.” Business as usual for the raconteur Sasho Sladura.
According to a witness, the comments drew the attention of a nearby police
officer, who informed Nikolov that he risked arrest if he continued. Mere
minutes after this encounter with the police, a black sedan arrived. Several men
escorted Nikolov into the back seat, and he was never seen in public again.38
While it is difficult to ascertain if the incident at Sveta Nedelya really
happened in the way just described and was in fact the final straw condemning
Nikolov to his ultimate fate, the way this story is told almost certainly fuels a
150 The Sculpted Ear

mythical quality that has developed surrounding the event of his death. The
collective imagining that there may have been a single act of defiance leading
to his incarceration feeds the myth apparatus surrounding his posthumous
subjective recovery. Existing documentation confirms that Nikolov was one
of thirty classified as “political prisoners” sent to the kontslager at Lovech that
year, the stated reason in his case recorded as vitsovete (jokes).39 Nothing in
the available archival literature lists the specific circumstances, particular jokes,
or any tangible actions on Nikolov’s part that could account for his Septem-
ber 1961 arrest. The identity of who ultimately gave the order to send Nikolov
to the kontslager will also likely remain a mystery, though suppositions have
perpetuated in the popular imagination since the early 1960s.40 Spasov, the
mastermind and administrator of the Lovech camp, has long been a popular
choice due to the alleged “eradication list.” Others have speculated the order
personally came from Zhivkov. Longtime BCP diplomat Bogomil Gerasimov
suspected that it was Central Committee member Pencho Kubadinski who gave
the order for Nikolov’s arrest on the charge of telling anti-party jokes. Geram-
isov, who knew Kubadinski personally and was also a great fan of Nikolov’s,
wryly wrote that “if [the arrest order] was true, [Kubadinski] would have to
ask for forgiveness from the entire Bulgarian people.”41
Speculation as to what circumstance may have been responsible for
Nikolov’s ultimate fate was long subject of rumor as well. Emanuil Doinov,
a harmonica virtuoso and close friend, stated in an interview that after a
concert in 1961, he and Nikolov found themselves at a banquet attended by
Zhivkov and a number of high-ranking BCP members. Well after midnight,
no doubt after quite a bit of food and alcohol, Zhivkov apparently asked
Nikolov, “Hey Sasho, when are you going?” to which he wittily replied, “We
are [going] after a bit, but when will you go, comrade Zhivkov?”42 Saxo-
phonist Emanuil Manolov offers the same story, only with Chervenkov
replacing Zhivkov as the official in question. Another story holds that while
filming a movie at the Zlatni Piasutsi (Golden Sands) resort on the Black
Sea in 1960, he spent an evening drinking beer with Borislav Cherven-
kov, brother of the former general secretary. As they began to discuss the
meetings between Soviet Premier Khrushchev and President Eisenhower
(presumably over the Powers U-2 spy plane incident), Nikolov supposedly
asked, “Bore [Borislav], now that the Americans are coming, where will you
hide bai Vulko?” Borislav’s allegedly joking response was “As I bash you,
you’ll explode and resemble a victim of Hiroshima!” Another holds that
one evening a policeman in Varna asked Nikolov what he would do when
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 151

a boat full of frantsuzoiki (Frenchmen) left port, Nikolov responded that he

did not know, but that the Frenchmen had invited him to play a matinee on
deck before departing.43
The air of mystery and speculation also extends to Nikolov’s last eleven
days within the barbed-wire fences of the Lovech camp where he died. This
was by far the worst of the Bulgarian camps, cruelly nicknamed “Slanche
Bryag” (Sunny Beach) by officials after a popular tourist spot on the Black
Sea between the coastal cities of Varna and Burgas. It was one of the most
brutal and most similar to the infamous Stalinist gulags in Siberia. Of the
1,501 prisoners kept at Lovech between September 1959 and March 1962,
148 died of various causes.44 Nikolov was not alone in this fate. Although
varying accounts have surfaced from prisoners and guards over the years,
one of the few versions translated into English is from Nikolas Dafinov, a
prisoner at the time Nikolov was first brought to the camp. His account
unfolds as follows:

After being given some new rags, the new arrival was assigned to
flatten the ground of the esplande with a heavy roller. . . . Some of the
older Sofians identified the man as Sasha “Dearheart,” the famous
violinist who played at the restaurant in the Bulgaria Hotel. Sasha
Nikolov (his real name) had brought along his violin: clearly, he
didn’t know where he was being sent. At the evening inspection,
some fifteen torturers had a field day. One after the other, they
hammered away at the musician as if they were in a relay race.
They were absolutely beside themselves. What was the explana-
tion? What had this man done?
We were herded back to the barracks. Those who knew Sasha
helped him into bed. Astonishingly, he managed to smile. At a
certain point, he leaned up against a pole and asked to be given his
violin. He played a bit, enough to remind us of the outside world.
Enough to bring tears to our eyes. He then fell asleep, or perhaps
lost consciousness—I cannot say.
At breakfast the following morning, it was whispered that the
musician was “in the sack.” It seemed he had carried his fate with
him in the form of an envelope sealed with red wax.45

Dafinov’s account mirrors a notorious legend that Nikolov was forced by

guards to say one hundred jokes about Chervenkov while they took turns
152 The Sculpted Ear

beating him. Yet it also conflicts with other testimonials from prisoners that
began to surface after 1989. One, given by a former inmate listed only as
“P. L.” claimed that Nikolov had allowed a rock trolley to run over his arm
to avoid work, later succumbing to the wound’s infection.46 Others claimed
that he was lashed to a rock in the Lovech quarry and died from exposure.
In this version, his mother supposedly received a telegram stating that he
had died of a heart attack a week after his death. Most radical was the idea
that Nikolov never died at all: that he was secretly exiled and lived under an
assumed identity at an undisclosed location elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc.
Whether he was buried in an undisclosed location, or secretly sent
notes wrapped in chocolate candies to his mother while in hiding, the kont-
slager became as much an instrument associated with Nikolov as his trusty
violin.47 In much of the writing about Nikolov from after 1989 there was
little separation between him and the institution responsible for his death.
And to some, this inability to extricate Nikolov and others from their time
in the kontslager—forever thought of as prisoners first—was the greatest
tragedy of all. Writer Doncho Tsonchev emphasizes this viewpoint in a
vignette written about singer Lea Ivanova, who also spent time at the infa-
mous Belene camp.48 “Already I am sick mentioning this ‘Belene, Belene,’
but how do you write something about Lea [Ivanova], or about my brother,
or about Svetla Daskalova, for example, without mentioning the gulags?”
asks Tsonchev.49 “As if you write about Sasho Sladura (who played until
four [o’clock] in the morning on the street in front of the bar, before we split
up) and not speak about Lovech and the clubs that killed him.”50 Indeed,
this attitude threading together a sounded life with the silence of death
pervades many of the subsequent memories of his musician colleagues as
well. Several of these testimonials have been recorded in the book Zlat-
nata Reshetka (The Golden Grate) and speak to the inexorable gravity that
the manner of Nikolov’s death casts over his entire career. For Emanuil
Manolov, who called Nikolov a man with “a painful sense of freedom,” this
takes the ironic use of a term often grafted by the Communists onto the
music that Nikolov played. “For him [telling jokes] was natural,” Manolov
reminisced, “and I think that at home our market’s most scarce product is
guilt. It’s just amazing how such a man can be destroyed by primitivism”
(emphasis mine). Lyudmil Georgiev remembered Nikolov as a man who
always used humor against the excesses of state power, even when it was
the Germans or the Tsar himself.51 One can see the living death pervad-
ing these accounts expanded throughout his life in Dimitar Korudzhiev’s
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 153

1995 novel Predi da se umre: Fantaziya za Sasho Sladura (Before Death: A

Fantasy about Sasho Sladura), where even the title takes his demise as a
conceptual benchmark. A biographical fiction, the book takes the form of
a series of disambiguated scenes imagined to take place during Nikolov’s
life, encounters with various important figures during the 1940s and 1950s.
In many of these encounters, the specter of death’s proximity layers over
the vivid background. It begins with Sasho meeting Tsar Boris III—a man
who would himself die under mysterious circumstances in 1944—at the
royal palace in Sofia sometime early in the war. Later, he visits the impris-
oned vocalist Lea Ivanova at a women’s camp near the town of Nozharevo,
a powerfully intimate encounter between two of wartime Bulgaria’s most
popular musicians through the links of a fence. The most apropos scene,
however, is the one at the end of the book dealing with Nikolov’s own
demise. Arrested and transported to Lovech, he finds himself in a room
facing the prison official tasked with processing the entertainer into the
camp and Shaho, its most brutal and infamous guard. Here, the identities
of musician, comedian, and prisoner carried by Nikolov throughout his
life meld together in a sequence defined by cold cruelty.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked, silently forceful, and glanced at

the two agents.
It was the most delicious of his mint candies. For special custom-
ers. His fist swelled little by little.
“I believe.”
“Well, pray to him then. Now only he can save you.”
The black boot kicked the case of the violin.
“Will you earn something similar?”
“I am not a slut, mister major. I want a dignified end.”
“And will you not tell us a joke?”
Later [the Major] realized that he was called “mister.” His second
question thus remained—without an answer. The blood flowed to his
head like a river. And wine. But alone in their terrible noise, he did
not understand how the world had come together in such an odious
guise—the musician. And in the only name that he remembered:
“Shaho!”
Two strokes of the heavy rod toppled Sladura to the ground. The
gypsy was tried before the guests. Sasho raised his hands, instinc-
tively counting his fingers. The violin bent and broke. Flames lifted
154 The Sculpted Ear

before his eyes, in them burned the tsar, and the palace, and the
prince-virtuoso who had himself gone.52

Korudzhiev, as Dafinov does in his witness testimony, places the violin at the
center of Nikolov’s final living actions. Yet the two differ on how that instru-
ment, the one ultimately responsible for both the fame Nikolov accrued and
his subsequent downfall, plays into the end of his story. Dafinov indicates
that Nikolov was given the benefit of a final performance, a melancholy tune
with the ambiance of the final cigarette given to a condemned person before
a firing squad. Korduzhiev, by contrast, makes not playing a final request
a last act of defiance against the power of the state. That violin is kicked,
broken, but ultimately silent at the behest of an owner facing certain death,
remaining a loyal lieutenant of the raconteur to the very end.
The significance of the violin in both Korudzhiev’s novel and Dafinov’s
testimony cannot be understated. It becomes not only an integral object in
communicating the efficacy behind these tales but an agency-laden presence
in the unfolding narratives.53 The line between these ontologies is negligible.
Nikolov’s violin somehow manifests as both a part of his body and a body
unto itself. It sings with a carnal depth associated with the voice and splin-
ters under force as much as the bones of its partner. Separating one from
the other becomes almost impossible, a fact that is subtly reinforced by the
form of the statue that captures them. If you focus on the points of contact
where violin and human merge, telling where one body ends and the other
begins becomes noticeably difficult. On one level, such a feature comes with
the imperfect mimetic gesture that remains part of the craft of statue making.
On another level, the melding gives a tactile materiality to the relationship
between Nikolov, the sounds he made, and the clash between cultures of
art and authority that brought about his early demise. All of this makes the
embodiment of Aleksandar Nikolov a fulcrum for an obscured body of prac-
tices that otherwise would likely remain obscure. Without Sasho Sladura,
there can be no memorializing an entire musical culture within communist
Bulgaria. And without the memory of sounds lost and the want to revital-
ize them, there can be no Sasho Sladura to memorialize.
•••••••

Admittedly, all of this personal and cultural history constitutes a great deal
of weight for one statue, however idealized its subject, to carry on its own.
Can that statue really resonate all of this tragic, compelling, sounded history,
capturing the silencing of its subject and others through its own tenuous state
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 155

of silence? And not just his own violent silencing, but the violent silencing of
hundreds of intellectuals and artists penned into the same camps as Nikolov?
But if any figure could carry that weight with a warm grin of confidence, how
could it not be the great Sasho Sladura? Those who remember him have no
difficulty placing such a burden on his shoulders. For them, Sladura was a
witty sabot thrown into the gears of a Communist state looking to perma-
nently displace his way of life and those of his colleagues and friends. These
narratives construct a figure that in life had already transcended any limita-
tion death could possibly enact. Take the way the stories about him collapse
time, space, and detail into the gravity of Nikolov’s personality. Never mind
whether this joke was about Zhivkov or Chervenkov, or whether the subma-
rine was French or Russian, or whether the excursion to Vitosha took place
on a Sunday and he was arrested on a Friday. Crafty and mobile, the way
these stories unfold is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s formulation of the
relationship between myth and discourse, designed to construct “an ideo-
logical critique bearing on the language of so-called mass culture.”54 In the
context of Communist Bulgaria, the specter of mass culture folded into the
ubiquitous power of the state. The power of selective displacement through
storytelling, in the context of a regime that kept copious records of surveil-
lance and imprisonment, was to make the subject of those stories appear
in many places at once. Always everywhere in death, he constantly slips
through the fingers of those attempting to grasp him, a phantom weaving
through the streets of a Bulgaria very different from the one he departed. The
phantom of nachträglichkeit, to bring back that concept from earlier. And, as
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten rightly notes, the economies of rupture, disso-
lution, and loss that frame post-Communist experience make it an ideal
ground for this kind of subjective phantasm via myth to develop.55
The question that has preoccupied me for some time revolves around
who precisely is undergoing this displacing transcendence: the musician
Aleksandar Nikolov or the famed raconteur Sasho Sladura? Two names for
one person, an intriguing variation on the dualism of immaterial mind-
soul and material body embedded within Western thought since Plato. The
difference between the two names is far from merely semantic. For one,
the matter of dual identity encompasses the heart of the musical practices
engaged by Nikolov/Sladura and his compatriots, tactics of masking for
the sake of subterfuge. This is the lived history that the duality of Nikolov/
Sladura captures in form. But this duality also captures a power inherent in
another set of tactics, the very displacement of Sladura through narrative
156 The Sculpted Ear

that acts as a mechanism of preservation via the technique of fracture. To

conceptualize this idea more thoroughly, permit me a small diversion for
the sake of clarity. I am reminded of a variation on the vaudeville mirror
routine found in the opening credit sequence of The Patty Duke Show from
the mid-1960s. The bit, as pioneered by the Schwartz Brothers decades
prior, featured two different actors in the same clothing mirroring the move-
ments of the other in front of a paneless frame. In the context of Patty Duke,
one actress (Patty Duke) played two identical characters (the cousins Patty
and Cathy Lane). When filming the routine for television, Duke performed
in front of an actual mirror, giving the impression that one is watching a
version of the mirror routine from within the universe of the program, in
which two Dukes exist. Patty Duke and her exegetic relationship to Cathy
and Patty Lane becomes a way to think about the Nikolov/Sladura divide.
In life, Aleksandar Nikolov and Sasho Sladura shared the same body; as in
the mirror facsimile, they appear as one. In posthumous art, Nikolov and
Sladura become two people at once; beyond the cusp of the mirror, within
death’s disembodiment, Nikolov and Sladura take on different roles. One
remains dead, a victim of repression, while the other floats as a ghost through
the phantasmagoria of cultural memory. Each name points to a different
kind of cultural work being performed by what was, and in the guise of the
statue appears to remain, one body.
Some further insight can be gained by examining another case where
dual naming has turned death mobility into an ethical quandary. In his essay
“Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” anthropologist Michael Taussig recounts the frus-
trations voiced by Benjamin’s close friends Hannah Arendt and Gershom
Scholem in attempting to find the German philosopher’s burial spot in the
French border town of Port Bou, where he committed suicide in 1940 after
being denied entry into Spain. In detailing Arendt’s failure to find any trace
of the grave, and Scholem’s declaration of a fake grave based on a photo-
graph, Taussig explains that their mutual difficulty could be traced to the
fact that Benjamin was not buried under his own name but under Dr. Benja-
min Walter, an Anglicized moniker meant to mask his Jewish heritage and
gain him entry into a Catholic graveyard. Taussig further connects this dual
identity of one body to Benjamin’s own idea about the “need to become a
thing in order the break the catastrophic spell of things,” as Taussig puts it.
He then crafts this remarkable passage about how the politics of such name
bending point toward the desires of those unpacking and mobilizing death
as an object of cultural practice.
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 157

It is important to recall such ideas here because with Benjamin’s

own death strong narratives assert themselves to wrest control of
that death, narratives that have little to do with the ideas he laid
down in his life’s work or that subtly contradict it. Didn’t Benjamin
himself in his famous essay on the storyteller spend a good deal
of time propounding the thesis that it is death that gives author-
ity to the storyteller? . . . Taken a step further we might even assert
that this is what scares us about death yet tempts us as well, as if
the story can be completed yet also amputated by the absence that
is death, forever postponing the end to the story that was a life.
We want that authority for our own story, nowhere more so than
when interpreting a death and, of course, its body. A gravestone or
a monument—especially the accusation of a fake one—is just such
a story, just such an attempt.56

Taussig is hinting at what Michael Ragussis has called the “magic of naming,”
in which the utterance of identity takes on the playful power of animating
the fictional and the dead. Ragussis emphasizes the continuing occultish
charge of this magic, which remains potent even as philosophy has attempted
to extract it from the broader rational concept of the name.57 The potency
of naming persons, as opposed to naming things, lies in the willingness of
others to utilize it to uncouple the dead from their state of thingness. They
are transformed, in a sense, into aesthetic marionettes. The drive to engage
in this uncoupling, a drive Taussig finds discomforting and indicative of a
narrative fascination with death, is the same drive that Ragussis recognizes
when saying that the occult undertones of naming the person resist philo-
sophical attempts to demystify those names. In other words, using names to
escape the magic of naming is doomed to failure. Dr. Benjamin Walter, an
alias that tried to hold off the narrative impulse of the living through subter-
fuge, ultimately succumbed to the magic of the memorial object pointing
toward the body of Walter Benjamin.
The “magic of naming” alone, though, cannot answer why the name
Sasho Sladura maintains such unique and transgressive power in a way that
Aleksandar Nikolov does not. Something else is needed. As it happens, the
magical fluidity inherent in naming connects to another kind of magic that
has long permeated the relationship between language and being: allegory,
a subject that interested Walter Benjamin himself long before his interment
in his border resting place. In his well-known work on Baroque drama from
158 The Sculpted Ear

the 1920s, Benjamin traced the subsuming of allegory (a form that was a
dominant representational frame in Baroque aesthetics of seventeenth- and
early eighteenth-century Europe) to the dominance of the symbol (which
had risen to prominence in the early nineteenth century through the works
of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Romantics), becoming a cornerstone of
early discourse on European nationalism and citizenship. Bainard Cowan,
who wrote extensively on Benjamin’s theory of allegory, traced this percep-
tion of the privileged status of the symbolic to Schopenhauer’s stance that
allegory represented concepts, whereas the symbol represented the idea.58
Specifically, the symbol presented a field of metaphysical and conceptual
coherence that constituted an ideal state of object and being. Allegory, on
the other hand, comprised spurious heterogeneous connections of object
to world with no basis in a deeper truth or homogeneous unity. Benjamin
argued the element providing the symbol with its veneer of desirable unity
was in fact an “artificial isolation of the nostalgic impulse” inherent within
allegory.59 The unity of truth promised by the symbol, then, becomes a
false promise since the truth of existence lies in its fragmentation, and the
human experience of that fragment in creating objects that reflect that expe-
rience. In denying fragmentation, “the symbol denies history; . . . the symbol
masks the imperfections of the real” and perpetuates a mystification that it is
somehow beyond both time and space, encapsulating meaning in its purest
form.60 Allegory makes none of these false promises. It is, as Cowan sums
up Benjamin’s position, “experience par excellence: it discloses the truth of
the world far more than the fleeting glimpses of wholeness attained in the
Romantic symbol.”61
All of this conceptual movement through naming and allegory brings
me back to Aleksandar Nikolov/Sasho Sladura, and the question regard-
ing the exact identity captured by his statue. And here, I return to the idea I
planted at the beginning of this chapter, that silence always borders on the
sounds that it seemingly and perpetually negates. Statues have a reputation
as objects presenting the illusion of ontological and embodied coherence.
Silence contributes to that fantasy in many respects, reinforcing the idea
that in the guise of the statue, nothing more needs to be said beyond what
the statue communicates through its form. When one encounters the statue
of Sasho Sladura, the eye sees one statue representing one person, the clean
and elegant schema of the symbol. Silence also becomes something to be
seen, as much material in its presence as the bronze casting of the body.
Knowing the history behind Sasho Sladura’s life and career, as well as his
 Now You Have to Go, Comrade 159

posthumous identity as cultural phantasm, such homogeneity feels strangely

incomplete. Silence begins to take on a perverse quality, as a curtain meant
to hide something important from view. But where the eye fails to ascer-
tain this something, the ear hears this silence and can begin to understand
the masking it undertakes. As an organ of inquiry, it ascertains that silence
becomes an allegorical entity pointing toward those sounds, physically lost
but remembered, from which silence can never fully escape. Nostalgic sounds
begin taking back ground in the imagination, pushing the mediating border
and subsuming silence into the sonic fold. It is as if, to borrow the rhythm
of a famous quote from the poet Sylvia Plath: silence becomes a sound, like
anything else. The bifurcated naming of Aleksandar Nikolov/Sasho Sladura,
then, delineates a becoming for two statues sharing the same body: one
symbolic, the other allegorical. The symbolic statue is seen as the statue
of Aleksandar Nikolov, its silence memorializing the empty space of loss
idealizing the body. This is the statue thought about through the eye. The
allegorical statue is heard as the statue of Sasho Sladura, its silence carrying
the history and possibility of sounded acts obscured but fractiously remem-
bered. This is the statue that is thought about through the ear. The power
behind the “magic of naming” becomes wholly manifest here. Unlike Alek-
sandar Nikolov, the name Sasho Sladura becomes as much incantation as
identification, his statue pointing to his constant flight even as it keeps the
form of his embodied other self anchored into place.
A critique of the fantasy inherent in this kind of allegorizing the dead—of
the deployment of nachträglichkeit—like that outlined by Taussig with regard
to Benjamin’s grave no doubt comes into play here. But there are important
differences to consider given the contexts. Walter Benjamin could ultimately
speak for himself, and did, through copious amounts of writing on both
allegory and death. Sasho Sladura, and others like him, did not have such
a luxury. Masking and subterfuge, whether by song titles or names, were
a way of life for bourgeois remnants in Communist-era Bulgaria. No one
was exactly as they appeared. I was once told an old Bulgarian joke about
an undercover agent of the Communist state canvassing a coffee house for
subversive behavior. A young man sitting at an adjoining table was criti-
cizing the government a little too loudly, so the agent approached him. You
must come with me, the agent told him. The young man stared back, replying
No, you must come with me. Turns out they were both agents, neither doing
a convincing job of emulating the manner and demeanor of their intended
targets, only attracting the attention of each other.
160 The Sculpted Ear

I think of this joke when considering the seeming irony of someone like
Sasho Sladura, and the sounding culture he represents, deploying a veil of
silence in a sleepy, tree-shaded corner of Plovdiv’s historic and tourist-laden
Stariya Grad. One looks at his calm, almost winking smile, his suit, his violin,
and the feeling of trickery comes into the air, as if appearing in the form of
a statue, years after the demise of the Communist regime, was somehow
Sladura’s last, and most resonant, joke. That his statue (the preferred form
of memorializing of the very Communist icons he prodded during his life-
time) was on some level a ruse, a sleight of hand drawing the attention of
the eye to the body, the symbolic, and the silence of the object. Meanwhile,
Sasho Sladura weaves an allegorical path through the public imagination,
having a last laugh at the apparatuses of state that tormented him during
his final years. They are the ones, Comrade, who must go this time.
Chapter 7

Museums of Resonance

We have been left with the possibility that the silent statue may not be as
silent as once assumed. But getting to that point pushes the milieu of the
event into those most abstract planes of the sculpted ear, one in which navi-
gation by the self becomes increasingly difficult without a certain level of
cultural intimacy. Only a very specific and discerning ear can hear some-
thing like the statue of Sasho Sladura as I have presented it. I admit that
some may find the mentality required to access this kind of sounding statue
a bridge too far, mediating away any notion of an actual object in favor of
something existing exclusively within the purview of the virtual. Such a
move may be worth it, considering that the politics of silence most often
manifests as a dark turn upon the ethos of marginality. That a diffuse exten-
sion of the event can redeem and recast silence in the way I have shown
can only be regarded as positive. Yet one may wonder if there remains any
recourse to pull this necessary revitalization of silence back into the realm
of actual things. Are these events, however potent they can become, doomed
to remain trapped within the seeds of discourse and the realm of virtuality?
Can there be any actual place for these events to emerge from the shadows
and folds that obscure them from everyday notice?
An esoteric 1966 article called “The Music of Sculpture” offers an intrigu-
ing rejoinder to these questions. Both the full breadth of this piece and its
author’s identity will be addressed later in this chapter. For now, I want to
highlight the opening paragraph, which features a short vignette about a
162 The Sculpted Ear

trip to the museum. Innocuous enough, at first glance. One can quickly tell
its origin in the age of counterculture, though, when the author tasks the
reader, as prerequisite to their museum experience, with getting stoned.

Imagine that some Sunday afternoon you go to the Museum of Art

to enjoy a quiet hour in the gallery of sculpture. Imagine that you
walk through the garden court of the museum on your way to the
gallery and there you pass by an exotic plant which has just been
imported from a jungle in Haiti. Imagine that as you breathe the
fragrance from its flowers your sense of hearing is given an extraor-
dinarily heightened sensitivity. You are suddenly aware of strange
music in the air all around you. . . . [T]he effect of the fragrance of
the voodoo plant has so heightened your perception that you can
hear tones far above those normally detected by the human ear—
tones above the range audible to animals, tones far beyond the
range perceived by insects. You are now aware that in these very
highest, normally inaudible registers all the marble statues possess
their own characteristic harmony, while all the bronze statues have
their own unique set of harmonic intervals.1

This passage takes the concept of the event upon which this entire book is
constructed and turns its enactment on its head. It suggests a type of event
that is less of a happening at the level of the subject than an ontological
constant that the mediated subject steps into through sensory transcendence.
There is no need to descend into the realm of the abstract or allegorical to
find a sonic thread to weave into the presence of the statue. On the contrary,
the statues of this imagined museum are never silent in that most material
of senses, whether we are aware of it or not.
This quirky museum vignette offers a deceptively anecdotal means to
address a fervent and troubling intellectual trope that has come en vogue
in recent scholarship in sound studies. There is a way of thinking about
the concept of silence that holds that there is no such thing as an actual
silence at the level of physical laws. Such an idea has been central to writ-
ing about the ontology of sound for years, in the guise of vibration creating
perpetual soundings beyond the scope of the human ear. This presence of
perpetual vibration carries a deep philosophical legacy, grounded in the ecol-
ogy of speeds articulated by Spinoza, the “actual occasions” of Whitehead,
 Museums of Resonance 163

and mixed with a healthy dose of Deleuze’s concept of the “virtual”—those

forces of differance operating behind the scenes that drive the appearance
of material difference in the phenomenal world.2 The argument often mani-
fests as such: if vibration is physically endemic to every material thing, then
not only are all objects perpetually sounding (even if that sound cannot be
heard because of physiological lack), but the entire concept of subject and
object as discrete entities in space comes into question. Resonance (or disso-
nance) between nonanthropocentric bodies prior to the advent of perception
or signification becomes the most essential site of engagement, and thus a
needed avenue of inquiry.
On the surface, the recourse to vibrational ontology does appear to be a
nifty diversion of the longstanding aesthetic issues regarding statuary. This,
in effect, focuses attention on what statues are prior to becoming the stat-
ues we see, making any sonic presence part of the inherent materiality of
those statues—a feature resonant in some ways with the philosophy behind
sound art and the writings on sculpture by Heidegger mentioned earlier.
However, as the links to sound art imply, casting vibration as somehow
beyond the purview of meaning, even when the ear cannot engage with the
“sound” in question, creates a whole series of issues. For one, the argument
can be made that the effect of inaudible vibrations upon different parts of
the body still constitutes a form of hearing, which is one of the fundamen-
tal aesthetic and experiential mechanisms of the modern sound installation.
We have encountered this idea already in the writings of Holger Schulze
and Brandon LaBelle back in chapter 1. Moreover, the idea that affect always
precedes and envelops cognition and the formation of meaning perpetuates
a problematic division between mind and body in the act of sensation, an
objection brought to bear by Brian Kane in his broader critique of what he
calls the “ontological turn” in the field of sound studies.3 The chapters of this
book point toward a similar conclusion, albeit lacking the forthright density
that Kane offers. I find it hard to imagine in the quivering wake of pneuma
and “Mother Africa” that there can be physical vibration beyond the reach
of all signification or meaning.
The museum of resonance, while charming to entertain, also shows a
path for vibration to maintain an ontological consistency born of science that
coexists with the construction of meaning born of art. It does this by tapping
into a history of vibrational science in Western thought richer in connec-
tions to the magical and the ontotheological than its physical reduction
164 The Sculpted Ear

might suggest. At the same time, the museum reflects a particular desire of
its creator to bring these elements together in ways that the broader hear-
ing public could meaningfully appreciate. A museum here is not a metaphor
for an abstract space of the mind; it is the possibility of an actual museum
in which the event between sound and statuary can be cultivated for the
purpose of social engagement. And countenancing its possibility presents
nothing less than a way for the sounding statue to step out of the shadows
and into the public sphere.
•••••••

As the catalyst through which sound is created, vibration has been central
to conceptualizations of sonic ontology in the physical sciences ever since
Aristotle declared sound to be the result of the movement of air. Yet it was
not until the mid- to late nineteenth century that vibration (and by proxy,
sound) would ascend to the level of medium by becoming the site of a last
gasp for theories of pneumaticism in the confines of Western modernity. In
her compelling book Senses of Vibration, Shelly Trower notes that this was a
fertile period for theorizing the relationship between vibration and cosmol-
ogy through both scientific and religious inquiry. While physicists developed
new and more complex ideas and technologies to elucidate the extrasensory
status of matter, spiritualists took those ideas as evidence that perpetual
vibration could manifest as a kind of eternal life for the body in the form of
transcendent energy. Among the most widely influential of these emerg-
ing models was a wave theory of light, which was demonstrated by English
physicist Thomas Young in 1801 and gained traction throughout the century.
Light, in the form of a wave as opposed to the particle-base of Newtonian
physics, was thought to travel through a medium (aether) the same way
sound traveled through the air, both leaving trace vibrations in their wake.
The result, as Trower explains, was a period in which the perceived motion
of sonic transmission became a tangible description for the operations of
the rest of the physical (and metaphysical) universe.

Sound, then, . . . became a model for energy in general, which

physicists described as vibratory, imperceptible and infinite. The
concept of one kind of universal energy—conserved and converted,
transmitted and transformed, but with an underlying vibratory
consistency, led to analyses of phenomena as quantitatively, rather
than qualitatively different. . . . The identification of waves in space
led to analysis of their movement in time, as physicists and other
 Museums of Resonance 165

scientifically informed theorists differentiated between the various

forms of energy by quantifying numbers of vibrations in a specific
period. In the context of energy with its capacity to take on multi-
ple forms, it was frequently implied that light is sound; sound is
light—only light vibrates at a greater speed than sound. By the end
of the century a continuum or scale of electromagnetic radiation
would define the underlying unity of qualities ranging from infra-
red and ultra-violet to X-rays and radio waves, all the way up to—at
least according to some spiritualists—the frequencies of life itself,
extending beyond death into a vibratory afterlife.4

This kind of thinking is the ultimate Newtonian legacy: a desire to draw

together physics and metaphysics into a steady-state theorization subject
to the predictable axioms of physical laws. But the metaphorical conjuga-
tion with sound was, in retrospect, a temptation of fate. For as the universe
took on more of a sonic character as a means to join together experimen-
tal and speculative cosmologies, it also began to mirror the ephemeral and,
dare I say, acousmatic attributes that the perception of sound held at its core.
Indeed, the ubiquitous modeling spawned through a tenuous linkage
between the vibration of waveforms and the analogy of sound began to radi-
cally alter by the end of the nineteenth century. For one, the medium through
which light was thought to vibrate—aether—had fallen out of cosmological
favor with the Michelson and Morley experiments mentioned in chapter 2.
Then, Einstein’s 1905 concept of the photon put a particle-based explanation
for light back on the table, complicating the picture even further. Yet the trope
of vibration continued aetherless into the advent of quantum theory in the
early twentieth century, driven precisely by the physical quandary provoked
by the light-based photon (later extended to sound by Igor Tamm with
the phonon).5 In the ensuing debates over the quantum principle of wave-
particle dualism (the idea that molecules could manifest the properties of
both waves and particles simultaneously as opposed to one or the other as
in classical physics), the metaphor of sound found an oblique wedge in the
door of modern physical thought. French physicist Louis de Broglie, in his
1924 doctoral thesis, conceived of an idea that all matter could exhibit wave-
particle dualism, based on his observation of wave-like behavior in electrons
that would merit him a Nobel Prize in 1929. A notable series of critiques on
this idea held that these wave properties could only manifest as a theoret-
ical construct based on the fact that they were unobservable.6 By contrast,
166 The Sculpted Ear

de Broglie argued that waveforms were physically present in relation to the

particles themselves. The waveform manifested as the path of projection of
a particle, synched together through a concept that de Broglie called “phase
coincidence,” which he describes in detail here: “I tried to imagine a real phys-
ical wave which transported minute and localized objects through space in
the course of time. . . . It was based on the difference between the relativis-
tic transformations of the frequencies of a wave and of a clock. Assuming
that a particle possesses an internal vibration, which causes it to resemble
a little clock, I supposed that this clock moved in its wave in such a manner
that its internal vibration remained always in phase with the vibration of the
wave.”7 This concept, known as the pilot-wave theory, was highly contro-
versial upon its introduction in the mid-1920s and remained so even when
elaborated and reintroduced by David Bohm in the 1950s, becoming what is
now called the de Broglie–Bohm Theory. Regardless, it is important for the
way in which it has kept a place for vibration within cosmological concepts,
thus providing tangible recourse to the metaphor of a sounding universe
that was central to the philosophy of science during the nineteenth century.
Or, as Stephon Alexander argues, with de Broglie’s ideas “the Pythagorean
theory of the harmony of the spheres was realized, but on a microscopic,
not macroscopic, level.”8
I mention de Broglie’s pilot-wave theory in detail because of its influ-
ence on the ideas of Donald Hatch Andrews, author of the aforementioned
vignette about the museum of resonance and a fascinating if slightly obscure
individual who emphasized the trope of atomic sound in profoundly unique
ways. Born in Connecticut in 1898 and a graduate of Yale, Andrews became
a professor in chemistry at Johns Hopkins in 1923 and served as department
chair from 1947 until 1963. His main avenue of research during his career
was in the thermal resonance of particles at temperatures nearing absolute
zero, which sourced a lifelong interest in the concept of atomic vibration.
Not long after Bohm revitalized the dormant pilot-wave theory, de Broglie’s
ideas reemerged into the scientific mainstream for a short time. This coin-
cided with a period of pedagogical focus in Andrews’s career, as he began
the process of restructuring the curriculum of the undergraduate chemis-
try program at Johns Hopkins. Bereft of intense research responsibilities
during this time, Andrews began to consider how this world of subatomic
vibration could manifest in divergent fields of philosophical ontology and
aesthetics. Following de Broglie and others, Andrews postulated that the
 Museums of Resonance 167

patterns of waves at the atomic level constituted a “vast and mysterious

ocean” of harmony, leading him to the provocative rhetorical conclusion
that the universe is “constructed not of matter but of music.”9 These ideas
about the “music of the universe” routed the physical construction of matter
into allegorical concepts of melody, harmony, and counterpoint, reflect-
ing a desire to bring together scientific rigor and aesthetic thought into an
ethical framework on the nature of life and existence itself. Such an ethi-
cal bent was predicated upon the specter of manifesting atomic power in
the early years of the Cold War and Andrews’s mounting concern about the
destructive potential of this power should it be misused.10 Thus community
engagement in various forms became a staple of this ethical turn. He gave
lectures at college campuses throughout the Eastern seaboard and appeared
on local television programs in the Baltimore area. Topics ranged from rather
mundane discussions about the legacy of acoustic experiments in vibration
by Chladni and Helmholtz to more creative ones like formulating chords
based on the vibrations of chemical bonds and playing them on a piano. In
the context of these lectures, Andrews used statues as his object of choice
to demonstrate the principles of vibration in three dimensions, progress-
ing in complexity from the rudimentary examples of the one-dimensional
string and the two-dimensional metal plate. His choice reflected, in part, the
deep sense of humanism embodied within this project. If anthropocentric
statues vibrated with a unique molecular signature based on form, then for
Andrews the human body carried the same potential homogeneity through
diversity.
By the mid-1960s, Andrews was spending his retirement in Miami,
teaching part-time at Florida Atlantic and working on his magnum opus on
the musicality of atomic vibration that would be released as The Symphony
of Life later that year. In this capacity, Andrews published his first piece
directly addressing his theories of resonant statuary: the aforementioned
and striking “The Music of Sculpture,” released in the November/Decem-
ber 1966 issue of the journal Main Currents in Modern Thought. The bulk of
the article details a visit Andrews made to the Baltimore Museum of Art in
order to catalogue types of resonant sounds he could coax and record from
the statues housed there. This, as one could imagine, took some convinc-
ing on the part of a skeptical museum staff. Armed with a rubber hammer,
a microphone, and tape recorder, Andrews proceeded to gently strike vari-
ous types of statues to record the spectrum of sounds that emanated from
168 The Sculpted Ear

their material. He subsequently fed his recordings through a then state-of-

the-art harmonic analyzer at Johns Hopkins, a device designed to graph
the frequency range of sounds from the human heart. The graphs were
then compiled and organized based on attributes ranging from scientifically
objective qualities (like size and material) to subjective and rather prob-
lematical ones (like the “gender” and “ethnicity” of the figure represented
by the statue). His conclusions—that statues of similar shape but differ-
ent size would resonate with the same harmonic series, and that material
affects higher overtones while size affects the lower ones—seem sensible
outcomes given the dynamics and scope of the original experiment and the
knowledge of acoustical science in general at the time.
But Andrews did not stop with the mere physical conclusions. In later
work, he expands upon the Baltimore gallery experiment to argue, in an
oblique fashion, for consideration of statues as their own subjective entities
based on the footprint of atomic vibrational markers. In Symphony of Life,
Andrews argues that even though statues of exact shape and differing size
resonate with a related series of overtones, each statue maintains its own
unique sonic identity on the atomic level. He comes to regard these unique
bodies of sound as voices, and the sound moving through the hollow reso-
nance chamber within the bodies of certain statues constituting an atomistic
act of singing. The voices of statues, Andrews opined, would open numerous
future possibilities in the field of music, as the resonance of the universe
could become a new source for ideas about harmonic theory and structure.

If this is true, there will be new worlds of harmony for composers

to explore for many centuries to come, because the possibilities of
scales constructed from the overtones of various geometric forms
is unlimited. Not only can these neo-composers compose in the
scales of the cube, the parallelepiped, the tetrahedron, the doedeca-
hedron, the sphere, the oblate spheroid, and so on; they can also
set up scales constructed from the overtones of the Venus de Milo,
the David of Donatello, the Moses of Michelangelo, the Thinker of
Rodin, or for a more modern tonality, a Thing by Epstein. For each
statue has its own set of overtones which can serve as the basis for
its own unique scale, and provide its own unique harmony. And if
a million years hence, composers have exhausted all the possible
patterns of harmony from all conceivable statues, they can start
composing in the fourth dimension.11
 Museums of Resonance 169

I cannot help reading Andrews’s theories of the inherent musicality of statu-

ary and not think of him as a kindred spirit to Italian futurist Luigi Russolo,
who proposed a similar framework for the musicality of urban noise in the
early twentieth century.12 And in a sense, Andrews and Russolo share the
same failure in how their ideas did not manifest with the potential their
creators saw in them. Russolo thought that a music based on the cacophony
of modernity would better reflect the quality of life endured by the working
inhabitants of the city, a philosophy underpinned by a surprising fascination
with spiritualism and the occult.13 Likewise, Andrews presents a remarkable
theory where sounding statues become the linchpin of a scientific human-
ism, one that brings the parallel developments of vibrational cosmology in
physics and spiritualism from the nineteenth century into the modernist
orbit. Neither could effectively bring these ideas into practice during their
own lifetimes. While the intonarumori (noise intoners) that Russolo built
never found widespread application in musical compositions after the First
World War, the sounding statues Andrews dreamed about suffered from a
more fundamental problem. For one, his interpretation of de Broglie may
have been based on a common misconception about the French physicist’s
early theories: that electrons were made entirely of different types of waves
instead of being particles driven by a wave through sympathetic resonance
between them. This mistake, if true, is understandable given that Andrews
was a chemist, not a physicist. Yet even if Andrews correctly interpreted the
pilot-wave theory for his own use, the vibratory resonance between parti-
cle and wave in question remains a theoretical construct and, to this day, an
idea remaining on the fringe of mainstream quantum physics. “There was
a time when you couldn’t even talk about [the de Broglie–Bohm theory]
because it was heretical,” remarked physicist Sheldon Goldstein in 2016. “It
probably still is the kiss of death for a physics career . . . , but maybe that’s
changing.”14 Given the perpetual maybe inherent in quantum mechanics, the
caveat Andrews embedded in his text—“if this [theory] is true”—looms over
his entire enterprise like a damp blanket.
Although Andrews’s dream of a sounding statue (as with so many others)
fell short of becoming a reality, his idea of a museum from the vignette
in “The Music of Sculpture” in which a bridge between sound and stat-
uary is built through some extrasensory mediation held more promise.
Aside from the odd essentialism inherent in his “voodoo plant” from Haiti,
Andrews provides a surprisingly nuanced idea about the mediation neces-
sary to bridge the gap between the physiology of hearing and the sounds
170 The Sculpted Ear

existing outside of that capability. The magical flower of transcendent hear-

ing may not exist, but it certainly signifies some future technological device
more advanced than anything in Andrews’s day that could supplement the
capabilities of the ear. Once that bridge of hearing is crossed through a neces-
sary intervention, either chemical or technological, the entire experience
of anthropocentric statuary in space fundamentally changes. Each object
carries a sonic identity that can be ascertained on its own merits, in line with
Andrews’s theories about harmonic resonance. Just as important, though,
is the collective panoply of sound that would blend together into a chorus
within the enclosed space of the museum. In addition to their attributes in
isolation, the resonant statues would also contribute to a more productive
and engaging resonant whole, reflecting the ethos of humanism underpin-
ning Andrews’s entire career in public science. The Andrews museum, in
essence, becomes his version of the Platonic cave: a philosophical construct
and ethical allegory, in addition to a hearing of a potential future. Like so
many other figures mentioned in this book, Andrews tried to reason a way
to hear that which would otherwise go unheard, a noble attempt even if the
work did not manifest as he intended.
All failures aside, Andrews’s imagining of a public engagement with
sounding statuary remains a substantial legacy, one that is starting to mani-
fest through technological interventions beyond his wildest dreams. The
magnetic tape recorder and harmonic analyzer of yesterday transform into
the all-encompassing smartphones of the digital age, and the possibilities of
creating interactions between statues and people transform as well. Into this
breach steps Statue Stories Chicago, a project started in 2015 to bring sound
and voice to thirty public sculptures (both traditional statues and modern,
nonmimetic art) located throughout the burgeoning midwestern metrop-
olis. The effort is a privately funded collaboration between the Richard H.
Driehaus Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropic organization centered
on arts and culture, and Sing London, an arts collective that has previously
put together exhibitions of “talking statues” in several cities throughout the
United Kingdom. As with the projects in places like London and Dublin,
the Chicago iteration brought in celebrity actors of local origin to provide
the voices from some of the statues (Nicolaus Copernicus near the Adler
Planetarium is voiced by Johnny Galecki, while Miró’s The Sun, The Moon,
and One Star in Brunswick Plaza is voiced by Shonda Rhimes). Others were
scripted and voiced by working Chicago-based actors associated with insti-
tutions like Second City and the Steppenwolf Theatre. Once the recordings
 Museums of Resonance 171

were mixed and edited, large placards were placed in the vicinity of partic-
ipating statues, grafted with a QR code symbol that a person scans with a
smartphone to initiate a call. The listener then has freedom of movement
while listening to the recorded dialogue, occupying the space around the
statue while engaging aurally with the veneer of a personal message. The
novelty is not lost upon those creating the voices. “Usually, contemplation
of a statue is a one-way affair,” remarks actor Gabriel Byrne, with reference
to his narrative embodying a statue of James Joyce in Dublin. “In this case,
the interaction provides a new kind of dialogue which almost seems to make
the statue come alive.”15
On the surface, there seems little difference between the staging of
recorded sound in Statue Stories Chicago and countless other iterations like
the singing Elvis in Seattle. But not even the iPhone works as the avatar
of disenchantment one might expect. Embedded within the margins of
the public engagement constituting the primary mission of Statue Stories
Chicago are the very quirky moments of hearing that have intertwined with
statuary since antiquity. For some, this means acknowledging a long-held
fantasy of hearing that becomes ontologically significant for the first time,
as actor John C. Reilly betrays in a quote given for the SSC webpage on the
Lincoln statue. “As a native Chicagoan I was really honored to give voice to
the statue of Lincoln, a statue I’ve spent many hours staring up at, imag-
ining what he had to say,” Reilly admits.16 For others, there is the playful
simulacrum of conversation shaped by the scripting of the calls themselves.
Instead of opening with a typical prerecorded narrative about the statue, as
one might expect from a museum audio tour, many of the recordings begin
by mimicking the speech acts and rhythm of a typical phone call. At the
Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park, colloquially called “The Bean”
due to the resemblance of its shape, David Schwimmer politely asks in the
guise of the object if you can hear him, before telling you to look into the
reflective surface of his curved body and see another you. (Among other
pithy gems told by Schwimmer’s Bean: “Rumor has it my name is ‘The Bean,’
which, frankly, I find a bit reductive”). Another statue, one of comedian Bob
Newhart at Navy Pier, presses the illusion even further by cleverly taking
into account the space where it resides. Upon scanning the QR code, the call
begins with Newhart (who scripted his own dialogue) giving instructions to
the listener in the iconic, quiet stutter that made him famous: “Ah-ah, yeah.
Here. (pause) No, no-no, o-over here. (pause, then slightly exasperated sigh) No,
here.” Understanding the profound subtlety inherent in this dialogue requires
172 The Sculpted Ear

some more information about the position (and disposition) of the statue.
The Bob Newhart at Navy Pier consists of two separate objects: Newhart
himself, sitting cross-legged in a chair, and an adjoining couch to the left
intended to allow patrons to sit and imagine conversation. The placard with
the QR code stands to the left of the couch, meaning that anyone scanning
the code will be facing away from the sculpture when doing so. The start
of Newhart’s narrative acknowledges this position of bodies in space, and
attempts to dictate movement and direction to the listener. At this point,
the double entendre of the word here/hear starts to emerge. The first itera-
tion draws attention to the voice transmitted through the phone (as in, “I’m
here”). The second communicates the gap in locality between listener and
statue (“I’m located over here, to your right”). The third, though, seems to
carry both meanings simultaneously, as if beckoning a skeptical hearer to
bear attention of eye and ear toward the statue, who is in fact speaking to
them. How utterly ironic for Newhart to create a phone call with such depth
and detail, considering that his fame rested upon scripting imaginary phone
conversations with historical figures living and dead for his stand-up act.
The Newhart statue certainly plays with the medium of technological
intervention that drives the Statue Stories Chicago project in a humorous and
unique way. But I contend that it is significant and magical beyond even the
self-aware performance that Newhart himself gives it. To demonstrate why,
I first want to reference an apocryphal story recounted by Greek historian
Dio Chrysostom in the first century CE about a statue of a Roman philos-
opher named Favorinus of Arelate located in the Greek city of Corinth. In
order to prevent the Corinthians from tearing the statue down, Favorinus
employed the unique strategy of using his own voice to speak in the guise
of the statue, arguing that even though he—the living Favorinus—was a
Roman, the Favorinus statue was just Greek enough to justify its preserva-
tion.17 Such a situation, grafting one’s voice upon one’s own statue, may not
have been a unique occurrence prior to the mechanical reproduction of sound.
But like the sound thought to emerge from the Colossus of Memnon, these
instances would also be impossible to trace as anything other than an anec-
dotal echo. Newhart voicing Newhart changes that calculus with an assist
from recorded and reproduced sound. In essence, the performance provides
a modern spin on one of the deepest metaphysical issues in the history of
sounding statues: someone intentionally giving their voice over to their own
physical representation. Collapsing the gap between signifier and signified,
 Museums of Resonance 173

the long-held fear of what a sounding statue could be becomes manifest at

last.
Bob Newhart’s statue in particular, and the participants in Statue Stories
Chicago as a whole, demonstrates once more how positivism, like aesthetics,
fails to offer a tangible escape from the performative gravity of sonic magic.
One needs only to recognize the behavioral mystery of quantum mechanics
that stymied Andrews to draw that conclusion, even prior to the techno-
performativity of a statue calling a smartphone. Indeed, many of the reac-
tions I have observed with regard to the Chicago project border on an odd
disjunction in line with reactions to the singing Elvis in Seattle, rather than
the incisive rational judgment an everyday intimacy with modern communi-
cation technologies might suggest. In 2017, Chicago local television station
ABC 7 sent a reporter to Millennium Park to record a story about the Statue
Stories Chicago project. One of the interview subjects, a young tourist, had
the following to say about Schwimmer’s Cloud Gate dialogue: (laughing) “I
was a little confused, um, he just kept saying to, like, come closer to The Bean,
and to look at it, and there’s another me somewhere.” In the middle of her
statement, the woman shimmies her shoulders and looks around, as if unsure
where exactly this promised “other her” might appear. She seems to share
Don Giovanni’s latent skepticism and mild amusement at a statue telling a
living person what to do. But for all of the implicit deferral and rationaliza-
tion suggested by reactions like these, they also index the very moments
of hearing that a public performance of sounding statuary has the potential
to draw out. And this, more than anything else, carries the most important
lesson of the entire book. As I have argued throughout, any history of sound-
ing statuary cannot rest upon the ontology of sound itself. It must emerge
from intellectual and social maneuvers that individuals and groups make
to try and grapple with what a sounding statue means. And this inevitably
happens out in the world, away from the narrow subject- and object-
centered framework that underpins the classical ideal of aesthetic judgment:
if not the museum Andrews envisioned in which statues resonate with their
material voices, then perhaps others, like Statue Stories Chicago, in which
statues resonate with cultural voices, an aurality bequeathing a resonant
panoply all the same.
For now, while you can, let Bob Newhart (in the guise of a statue that
is itself a guise of psychologist Bob Hartley, the character Newhart played
on The Bob Newhart Show) tell you to have a seat on the bronze couch
174 The Sculpted Ear

beside him and dispense of your worries and troubles. Be warned, though,
as Newhart himself will tell you—“bronze is not as comfortable as it looks.”
Perhaps the couch is stiff and uninviting, but it will not prevent you from
hearing his button-down sound with all the comfort and intimacy that
Andrews could have imagined for his own museum of resonance.
Conclusion
I Now Present Sergei Rachmaninoff

Throughout this book, I have presented a myriad of ways through which the
event between sound and statuary can be conceptualized. They are events
whose very possibility has been feared (Laocoön) and that have entranced
and laid bare cultural anxieties (Tipu’s Tiger). They are events predicated
upon realizing the sounds made by the solidity of material (The Commen-
datore) and exhibiting those sounds inferred by its softness (Josephine
Baker). They are events where silence is never silent (Sasho Sladura), where
sound can only be heard when mediated (Donald Hatch Andrews), and
where mediation can become the crux of a public emergence (Statue Stories
Chicago). They are events telling us that to close the ear to the sounding
statue, whether for the sake of aesthetic fidelity or rational determinism,
misses out on a rich history of conceptual hearing. The sculpted ear casts
itself as the crucible of subjectivity upon which this mode of hearing is
enacted. It becomes a means to articulate the kind of engagement neces-
sary to dialogue with an event requiring both the mimetic facility of the
statue and the dynamic ephemerality of the sonic. By hinging together two
sensory paradigms divided by aesthetic fences and walls of épistémê, the
sculpted ear is nothing less than the mechanism through which the sound-
ing statue becomes possible.
176 The Sculpted Ear

One book cannot possibly cover all of the plausible permutations that
can make up the sculpted ear. This is another reason why event metaphysics
provides a more dynamic framing in ways that an object-centered ontol-
ogy does not. For any concept of the object is inherently enclosed by its
own physical threshold and those properties that give a sense for how it
constitutes itself. Such is the trap of statue thinking. With an event, the
possibilities are limitless. It is this sense of the unlimited possibility in the
sounding statue that I hope the reader takes away from this book. Andrews,
the scientist with the weird dream, was the one who came closest to touch-
ing this sense of possibility. Every statue, for him, carried a sounded life just
beyond the limit of our listening powers, waiting for us on another plane
of the real. But he also knew that something more than mere technologi-
cal devices would be necessary to get there. One also needed a spark of the
old magic, the kind that modernity would rather keep locked away among
the dusty tomes of forgotten cosmologies. Pneuma was one way of articu-
lating that magic, and even though the material pneuma may not exist, the
broader sense of magic that invigorated it remains. The magic of the event
was the missing link, the last ingredient that I crept ever closer toward over
the course of the nearly six years that I worked on this project. I knew that a
statue could exist; I also knew that a sound could exist; only when I allowed
myself to consider a piece of the magical did I finally find a means of bring-
ing them together.
All told, I can think of no better way to conclude than by yet again putting
my money where my mouth is, by offering another experience regarding an
event between sound and statuary—my own sculpted ear—lest you think I
was somehow immune to the magic of these encounters. If Homer Simpson
was the unacknowledged kernel of the idea, and Sasho Sladura the seed of
that idea planted, this particular event was the one that opened my imagina-
tion to the germinating possibilities that a sculpted ear could entail. Unlike
Elvis, who left his domicile via malfeasance, this character reentered the
building with which he was associated because of the nostalgia and desire
of a community. The statue marking the physical trace of that apparatus of
memory was not itself sounding. Rather, the place of the statue within a
related sounded performance left an indelible mark upon me, spawning a
similar flight of fancy and thought that populated the wake of discovering
the singing Elvis. In this instance, my thoughts revolved around a particu-
lar question: if a statue preserves the body in a particular moment, can it also
carry the sounds associated with that moment into the present? To put this
 Conclusion 177

another way, if singing Elvis taught me to think about the sounds statues
make, this forthcoming tale taught me to think about hearing the sounds
that surround and permeate them.
The root of the encounter begins with a rather ordinary piano recital
that took place long before I was even born. On February 17, 1943, Russian
pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff arrived in Knoxville to perform
at the Alumni Gymnasium on the campus of the University of Tennes-
see. He was not scheduled to stop in the city during this particular tour,
but decided to make the journey from Louisville to make up for an autumn
1942 performance that had to be cancelled. Before an audience of almost
three thousand, Rachmaninoff played a program of Bach, Liszt, Schumann,
Wagner, and Chopin’s “Funeral March” before encoring with his own “Prelude
in C# Minor,” a crowd favorite and concert staple. Jack Neely, a longtime
Knoxville journalist who interviewed several attendees of the concert for
a 1984 article in the local lifestyle magazine CityTimes, recalled his neigh-
bor and local pianist Evelyn Miller stating that the Knoxville performance
was the finest of the many that she had heard from Rachmaninoff.1 Some
noticed that the sixty-nine-year-old virtuoso seemed unusually frail and
thin, but his powerful performance seemed to put to rest any lingering
concerns about his health. What those in attendance did not know was that
the Knoxville concert would be Rachmaninoff’s last. The pianist took the
train to his next concert stop in Atlanta before abruptly deciding to cancel
his remaining performances and return to his home in Los Angeles. Termi-
nally ill with cancer, Rachmaninoff died on March 29 due to complications
from pleurisy, just shy of his seventieth birthday and a little less than two
months after he and his wife Natalie became naturalized American citizens.
Sixty years later, Rachmaninoff rose from the grave and returned to
Knoxville, or at least his image did. This rather ordinary brand of necromancy
was courtesy of Russian sculptor Viktor Bokarov, a self-declared Rachmani-
noff devotee who created an eleven-foot plaster cast of the pianist with
the stipulation that it be erected somewhere in the city of his last concert.
The plaster mold was sent to Jack Mullen in Kingston, New York, who cast
and assembled the bronze pieces of the statue for his unveiling in Knox-
ville in July 2003. Rachmaninoff, in his new guise, stands in a small grove
near the amphitheater in World’s Fair Park, just off the corner of Eleventh
Street and Cumberland Avenue, less than a mile from the building where
the last concert took place. His bronzed form is gaunt and frail, much like
he appeared during his terminal 1943 visit. Dressed in his concert tuxedo,
178 The Sculpted Ear

he bows his head slightly while holding on to the front of a pedestal cast
to resemble the keys of a piano. On the opposite side is an inscription with
a portion of the plainchant notation and text of the “Dies Irae,” the well-
known portion of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass that had been quoted
by Rachmaninoff in several of his compositions.2 The irony is that while
the statue itself is carved with one of the most tangible signifiers of death
in Western music, the same statue has become an integral part of the revi-
talization of the park site in recent years, after decades of disrepair left the
area void of the modernist charm that it carried during the 1982 World’s Fair
and ripe for talented popular culture satirists. (No, contrary to the Simpsons
episode, they do not keep wigs in the Sunsphere. Everyone asks.)
For ten years, the statue of Rachmaninoff stood quietly in its small grotto,
piquing the interest of curious tourists and the few devoted fans making
a pilgrimage to the site of his last concert. But in 2012, the reanimation of
body and place that started with the statue began anew, with greater acuity.
For the upcoming seventieth anniversary of the final concert, a partnership
between the School of Music at the University of Tennessee and the Evelyn
Miller Young Pianist Series, a Knoxville area charitable organization that
had brought concert pianists to Knoxville since 1980 and was named after
the music enthusiast with whom Neely spoke in 1984, developed a concert
of their own. Billed under the title Rachmaninoff Remembered (a double
entendre of mind and body, to be sure), the concert would take place in
the James Cox Auditorium on February 17, 2013—the renovated site of the
Alumni Gymnasium where Rachmaninoff played, on the anniversary of his
final concert. Playing the part of Rachmaninoff that night would be Russian
pianist Evgeny Brakhman, a devotee and interpreter of Rachmaninoff’s work
who taught at the Nizhny Novgorod State Glinka Conservatoire, located in
Rachmaninoff’s hometown. The attention to historical resonance was itself
a performance and a harbinger of the concert to come.
Rachmaninoff’s statue hovered with surreptitious presence over the
proceedings, taking on a greater body of meaning as the concert drew closer.
The statue appeared in the posters and cards used to promote the event, in
lieu of more traditional photographs of the pianist. While the actual statue
carried a deep and ruddy bronze hue, the illustration on the poster gleamed
with a soft gold, as if to polish his still repose for the coming spectacle. I
recall the brief radio promotions, where on-air personalities for university-
run WOUT appended each announcement of the upcoming concert with an
invitation to visit the statue itself as if part of the concert experience. The
 Conclusion 179

statue was even included as part of the concert itself. As if the spectacle of
reinvigorating the time and space of the final concert in the present were
not quite enough, standing in close proximity to the piano on the stage of
the Cox Auditorium was a cardboard facsimile of Rachmaninoff’s statue.
Though reduced in size from his gargantuan eleven-foot height in World’s
Fair Park, it was still large enough to catch the eye from the back of the
cavernous hall. The reproduced statue image remained on stage through-
out the entire concert, arched over in a slight bow as his actual statue. In
the park, the bow reads as a culmination, capturing the last bow he would
ever give in life in the wake of his final concert. On stage, the bow gave
the impression that he was looking across the stage and over Brakhman’s
shoulder as the young pianist played the compositions that the living Rach-
maninoff wrote for his own performance career: Variations on a Theme of
Corelli, Op. 42; a few of the Études-Tableaux, Op. 33 and Op. 39, the latter
of which Rachmaninoff played on the same stage in 1943; Sonata No. 2, Op.
36. Alan Sherrod, a local music critic who wrote a review of the concert for
the now-defunct weekly paper Metro Pulse, indicated the feeling that what
occurred during the concert somehow transcended the understated perfor-
mativity of the typical piano recital. “Brakhman’s grasp of Rachmaninoff
was so conversational and complete that I felt I was hearing a poet read-
ing his own poetry. Clearly, the pianist had long ago accepted the gravity of
the event and the gravity of his responsibility, and had become one with it.
And, with this acceptance came a performance that emerged from his musi-
cal soul and flowed out over the audience almost magically. Magic, or not,
something rare and special existed in Cox Auditorium on Sunday evening,
and obviously, many in the audience felt it.”3
I contend that the sense of magic Sherrod identified with the perfor-
mance permeated these proceedings long before Brakhman ever stepped
foot on the stage. Once, I came across a story claiming that in a fit of super-
stition, Vladimir Horowitz refused to ever perform in Knoxville for fear
that the city had somehow cursed his mentor and caused Rachmaninoff’s
death.4 For me, there is a self-evident connection between the presence of
the statue, the historical weight of the music being played, and the recourse
to magic at the point where critical rationality fails to account for what
happened. Rachmaninoff’s statue—even in reproduction—tipped the balance
into what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (drawing on Taussig) has called
“mimetic excess,” where “subjects, objects, and events become performers
in a spectacle, and the act of mimesis rises to importance as a local ‘way’ . . .
180 The Sculpted Ear

[articulating] moments of occupying an always already occupied place.”5 And

the concert was nothing if not an exercise in mimetic spectacle. The statue
became the bridge between recital and ritual, between Brakhman’s perfor-
mance and Rachmanioff’s possession of that performance in the abstract,
between sculpted image and music presence. The event even came with its
own incantation, in the form of Brakhman’s introduction to the stage. I now
present Sergei Rachmaninoff, the acousmatic speaker intoned, culminating
the magical work of bringing image, body, space, and sound together into
an act of performance. At that moment, in the space of the auditorium, the
temporal boundaries between the 1943 concert and its 2013 reincarnation
become fluid, into what Henri Bergson would have recognized as a mani-
festation of his famous concept of durée.
The statue of Sergei Rachmaninoff is no idle object in these proceedings.
On the contrary, it is the very object without which this kind of Bergso-
nian blur would fail to manifest. This is the power that statuary continues
to evoke, a power against which modernity, science, and aesthetics are inad-
equate barriers and sound is a ubiquitous attribute. There remains, I fear,
a reluctance to admit this kind of hearing happens, as if doing so allows a
disruptive rush of magic into the tidy chamber of modern life. Yet such hear-
ing awaits, one that cornered the individuals and groups throughout this
book with a quiet fury and remains the same fury that waits for us if we are
so inclined to countenance it. We ignore these events between sound and
statuary—in this context, in those that appeared in the preceding pages, and
in the unwritten future—to our detriment and at our peril.
Notes

Introduction 4. Gross, Dream of a Moving Statue,

17–19.
1. The video for this evening maga-
5. Verdery, Political Lives, 5.
zine piece, titled “The Singing Elvis Statue
6. Boehrer, Animal Characters, 115–16.
Mystery,” has been removed from the KING5
7. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 24.
website as of 2019.
8. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Under-
2. The entry on “event” in the Stanford
standing, 33.
Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an invaluable
9. Hegel, Hegel, on the Arts, 87.
resource in tracing these numerous philo-
10. Guyer, “Beauty, Freedom, and Moral-
sophical threads that I lack the time or scope
ity,” 149.
to address in this book. See Casati and Varzi,
11. Herder, Sculpture, 80–81.
“Events.”
12. Spivey, “Bionic Statues,” 443–47.
3. See Robinson, “Deleuze, Whitehead,
13. Quoted in Potts, Sculptural Imagination,
and Creativity,” 207–30.
1.
4. Deleuze, Fold, 77–80.
14. Gay, Modernism, 168–71.
5. Badiou, Being and Event, 429.
15. French exoticism and Italian futurism,
6. McCormack, “Colossus of Memnon and
both of which were rooted in practices devel-
Phonography,” 177–87.
oped prior to the war, are two of the more
7. Sterne, Audible Past, 2.
renowned examples where artists looked
8. Adorno, “Curves of the Needle,”
outside the confines of classical aesthet-
271–76. Examples of this body of thought
ics. One of less repute was a neo-medieval
regarding the perceived aesthetic lack of the
movement among French sculptors in the
Colossus can also be found in Mason, Colos-
1920s, where both the aesthetic and the
sal, 37, and Hegel, “Complete Symbolism,”
crafting (including use of the painstaking
358.
taille direct method of chiseling into stone)
9. Sterne, Audible Past, 14–19.
drew from local sources dating back to the
10. Rancière, Aisthesis, x–xi.
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. See
11. On this point regarding race and listen-
Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 28–36.
ing in the context of American history, see
16. Richard Serra, for example, critiqued
Stoever, Sonic Color Line, 13–18, and Smith,
the sculptural process of metal casting with
Smell of Battle, 9–38.
Gutter Corner Splash (1969), where he threw
12. Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence,
molten metal into the crease of a room where
13.
the wall and floor met and pried out the
13. Ziarek, Language After Heidegger, 178.
finished product into long, jagged strips once
14. Szendy, “Auditory Re-Turn,” 25.
the metal cooled.
17. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded
Chapter 1 Field,” 43.
18. Quoted in Mitchell, Heidegger Among
1. Gross, Dream of a Moving Statue, 6.
the Sculptors, 69.
2. See Baudelaire, “Philosophy of Toys,”
19. Ibid.
11–21.
20. Gascia Ouzounian gives a prominent
3. Magnus’s automaton apparently
example of Tom Marioni’s Sound Sculpture
worked as a door guard and asked questions
As (1970), where the artist fashioned a struc-
to ascertain whether or not a potential guest
ture that created sequences of tones triggered
would be admitted. Voskuhl, Androids in the
by urinating into a bathtub. Martha Brech
Enlightenment, 28.
offers Gary Hill’s Cut Pipe (1992), a piece
182 Notes to Pages 25–45

that featured two pipe ends covered with meant to express the virtuous tolerance of
membranes projected onto screens, where pain or to present a spectacle of suffering as
visitors could both hear and see their hands an expression of justice, see Spivey, Endur-
manipulating the surfaces. See Ouzounian, ing Creation, 34–36. For a discussion as to
“Sound Art,” 4, and Brech, “New Technology,” whether the Laocoön was even considered
215. unique as a virtuosic work of classical sculp-
21. LaBelle, Background Noise, 180. ture, see Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 2–6.
22. Kahn, “Arts,” 2. 3. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 141.
23. Licht, “Sound Art,” 7. 4. Lessing was no doubt influential on
24. Kane, “Musicophobia,” 16–18. the relationship between beauty and sculp-
25. Chattopadhyay, “Beyond Matter.” ture that peppered the aesthetic philosophy
26. Serres, Statues, 14–15. of figures in the orbit of German Ideal-
27. Serres and Latour, Conversations, ism such as Kant and Hegel. See Prager,
138–42. See also the translator’s note on p. Aesthetic Vision, 17–33, and Roulier, Kantian
205 for a helpful background for parsing the Virtue, 103–6. For a discussion on the legacy
discussion about the Serres book. of Lessing’s essay on the work of modern-
28. Malabou explores the implications of ist figures such as Irving Babbitt, Clement
plasticity in several of her texts, but a useful Greenberg, and Theodor Adorno, see
summary of these perspectives can be found Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 10–16.
in Bhandar and Goldberg-Hiller, “Introduc- 5. Though Lessing’s motives for making
tion,” 1–34. this argument have been questioned in
29. Schulze, Sonic Persona, 75–76. subsequent interpretations, it was unmis-
30. Brian Kane’s 2015 article critiquing the takably influential among those seeking to
ontological turn in works by Steve Good- preserve distinction between various artis-
man, Greg Hainge, and Christoph Cox is tic practices. Some have questioned whether
essential reading on this subject. See Kane, or not Lessing had actually seen the Laoc-
“Sound Studies,” 2–21. oön personally, prior to writing his essay, or
31. Schulze, Sonic Persona, 76. simply presaged a broader distaste for modes
32. Lynch, “Ontography,” 444–62. For an of ekphrasis in the aesthetics of German
application of Lynch’s arguments to the onto- Idealism. See Ernst, “Not Seeing,” 118.
logical turn in the field of sound studies, see 6. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 155. Lessing’s
Kane, “Sound Studies,” 16. disdain for ekphrases and music may also
33. Classen, “Fingerprints,” 3. have contributed to the overwhelming sense
34. King, How to See New York, 37. of silence inherent in the Laocoön.
35. The exploding eagle took most of the 7. Brilliant, My Laocoön, 56–57. Fun fact:
supporting marble spire down with it. Lesson Sadoleto was part of the sixteenth-century
learned; the organization responsible for the excavation of the statue and wrote a highly
monument replaced the eagle with a less regarded poem about it.
conductive Union soldier made of marble 8. See Winckelmann, History.
when the top was reconstructed in 1906. 9. Lessing, Laocoön, 7.
36. Kim-Cohen, Blink of an Ear. 10. Ibid.
11. There is ample reason to think that
Winckelmann was alluding to Pygmalion in
Chapter 2
this passage, since it was a reference he often
1. Pliny, Natural History 39.4.37, ed. Rack- utilized in his writings about sculpture. See
ham, 29. Hertel, Pygmalion in Bavaria, 45–50.
2. There are several areas of controversy 12. Agamben, Stanzas, 90.
that continue to follow the sculpture, includ- 13. Ibid.
ing its precise date of origin, whether or not 14. Ibid., 94.
it was commissioned by the Emperor Titus, 15. Hack, God in Greek Philosophy, 45–46.
and whether the marble was a reproduction 16. Benso, “Breathing of the Air,” 15–16.
of a bronze original as Pliny implied. For a 17. Draasima, Metaphors of Memory, 25.
reference questioning whether the statue was 18. Aristotle, Life-Bearing Spirit, 176–77.
Notes to Pages 45–56 183

19. Ibid., 7. 47. Weber quoted in Koshul, Postmodern

20. Aristotle, On the Soul, 66. The Greek Significance, 14.
work semantikós as used in this context has 48. Dyson, Sounding New Media, 20–26.
also been translated as “a sound with mean- 49. A fascinating and informative reading
ing.” See, for example, Riethmüller, “Vox of the implications of Delphic pneuma comes
Alias Phoné,” 83. from Economakis, “Chasma gês,” 22–43. The
21. Wells, Secret Wound, 84. reference to Victorian women is found in
22. Bloom, Voice in Motion, 82. Losseff, “Voice, Breath, Soul,” 9–10.
23. Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 168. 50. Pneuma was key to the Neoplatonic
Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield give idea of telestike, a practice thought to animate
the useful analogy of sound emanating from images or summon a divine presence into
a vibrating drumhead. Toulmin and Good- an inanimate vessel. Although the types of
field, Architecture of Matter, 96–97. images used could include paintings and
24. Johnston, “Fiat Lux,” 18. other works of art, statues represented the
25. Quoted in Grosz, Incorporeal, 24. most dramatic and lifelike of subjects. Sonic
26. Plutarch, Morals, 171–72. emissions were one of many manifestations
27. Staden, “Anatomy and Physiology,” 45. taken as evidence of pneumatic influence.
28. Lokke, “Active Principle,” 62. Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher Iambli-
29. McDermott, Liminal Bodies, 61. chus wrote in the late third century CE about
30. Chrystal, In Bed with the Romans, a summoning practice where a noncorpo-
76–77. real spirit would move through body of the
31. Wells, Secret Wound, 84. hollow statue, sounding like a “whistling
32. Caverero, More Than One Voice, 20. arrow.” The statue served as the material
33. Bloom, Voice in Motion, 80–81. link between people and their divine object
34. Quoted in Heffernan, Phoenix at the of worship. While the pneumatic connec-
Fountain, 77. tion through the statue allowed for mortal
35. Layher, Queenship and Voice, 29–52. grasp of a transcendent power, pneuma also
36. Walter, “Corrupt Air,” 15, and Our Old facilitated the interaction of divine entities
Monsters, 63–64. through a material amenable to their pres-
37. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, ence. One can get a sense of how telistike
102. could be dismissed as mere idolatry, espe-
38. Neither Campanella nor Hobbes used cially from proponents of Enlightenment
the term pneuma specifically. Leijenhorst, rationality who were critical toward Neopla-
Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 68–70. tonism’s connections to older religious
39. This preface, Peter Barker notes, shows traditions from Egypt and Mesopotamia. See
signs of having been influenced by Cice- Berchman, “Rationality and Ritual,” 241, and
ro’s concept of pneuma in De natura deorum Uzadinys, “Animation of Statues,” 118–19.
(On the nature of gods), an important text 51. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 17.
grounded in various tenets of Stoic, Epicu- 52. While most of the earliest Greek
rean, and Skeptic thought. Barker, “Stoic epigrams were attached to monumen-
Contributions,” 143. tal stele lacking anthropomorphic form,
40. Cohen, Rise of Modern Science, 230. those attached to statues reinforced a latent
41. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment, egocentrism transcending their object forms.
127. “Mantiklos has dedicated me to the far-hit-
42. Smith, Acoustic World, 101. ter of the silver bow as part of the tithe,”
43. Bacon, Philosophical Works, 3:522. states a well-known Delphic figurine from
44. Ibid., 195–206. the seventh century BCE, “and you, Phoibos,
45. Bloom, Voice in Motion, 83. give pleasing compensation.” The presen-
46. For more of an overview on the histori- tation, argues Egbert Baker, folds in the
cal relationship between anatomy, resonance, physical voices of reader, writer, and object
and modernity in Western thought, see into a single performative act. Baker, “Archaic
Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 9–28. Epigram,” 198.
53. Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, 199–200.
184 Notes to Pages 57–67

54. Gross, Dream of a Moving Statue, 141. eighteenth-century capital of Mysore

55. Steiner, Images in Mind, 27–28. (Seringapatam) and the more correct translit-
56. Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 197. eration (Sri Rangapattana) depending on the
57. Warwick, “Making Statues Speak,” context.
30–32. 2. De Almeida and Gilpin, Indian Renais-
58. Christian, “Poetry and ‘Spirited’ Ancient sance, 35.
Sculpture,” 109. 3. Ibid., 38.
59. Ibid., 109–10. 4. In The Tiger of Mysore: A Story of the
60. Gross, Dream of a Moving Statue, War with Tippoo Saib (1896), popular adoles-
92–94. cent adventure novelist G. A. Henty writes
61. Ibid., 95. of Tipu’s “abominable cruelty” left to flower
62. Schenker, Bronze Horseman, 276. because various governor-generals of India
63. Alexandre Benois captured the fore- did not crush him early enough, leaving him
boding atmosphere of this moment in a to cultivate a joy for torture, bloodshed, and
brilliant 1903 illustration, where the shad- forcing “English captives” to train his army
owed bronze horse rears in triumph with in European drill and tactics. Henty, “Tiger of
Peter while the pursued Evgenii desperately Mysore,” 173–74.
stumbles to stay out of reach. 5. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, 177–80.
64. Jakobson, Pushkin, 31–32. 6. Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, 13.
65. One of the most well-known myths of 7. Ibid., 17.
divine animation via breath—the golem— 8. Brittlebank, “Sakti and Barakat,” 260.
articulates this concern of potential misuse. 9. The British Library eagerly incorpo-
Rabbi Loew’s golem was created by a figure rated about three hundred of these texts after
carrying cultural legitimacy, brought to life his death, though many were lost to looting
by divine incantation to protect the Jews of and burning in the first days after the siege.
Prague from the blood libel. By contrast, a Among those preserved were Tipu’s personal
female golem allegedly created through the copy of the Koran, his dream journal, and
same process by Andalusian poet Solomon some of his personal papers that were later
ibn Gabirol was rejected as an abomination translated by William Kirkpatrick and
by the community, because Solomon created published as Tipu Sultan’s personal memoir.
her to function as his personal servant. 10. Husain, trans., “Diplomatic Vision,” 29.
Schwartz, Tree of Souls, 278–85. The objects were meticulously organized
66. Quoting Robert Reid: “Pushkin elabo- and catalogued in way that impressed even
rates this semiotics [of lifelikeness] in such European observers. One British account
a way that it is impossible to conclude that estimated the total amount of Tipu’s posses-
Evgenii in the Bronze Horseman is somehow sions at around “five hundred camels load,”
an aesthetically correct viewer of the statue. which speaks to the awe the sheer amount
Pushkin adds a preliminary metaphoric and diversity of his belongings provoked.
semiotic in which Evgenii (and Don Juan) Narrative sketches, 100.
address their statues as though they were 11. His awareness of international affairs
alive; it is this provocative communication apparently extended all the way to the West-
which animates their statues; or by corollary ern hemisphere, where he saw the American
one may conclude that Pushkin verbalizes Declaration of Independence as a model for
the aesthetic criterion of ekphrasis—to be Indian resistance against the British. “What
life-like is to understand words.” Reid, “Intro- is thrilling,” Tipu wrote about the Ameri-
duction,” 9. can Revolution, “is that the ancient Indian
67. Métraux, Sculptors and Physicians, concept of kingship should come to be trans-
43–45. formed into deeds far away . . . , spelling
disaster for a colonising, imperial power.”
Kausar, Secret Correspondence, 306.
Chapter 3
12. Tipu understood that closing the tech-
1. I will be switching back and forth nological gap with the East India Company
between the British spelling of the would be the only means by which Mysore
Notes to Pages 67–71 185

could remain politically solvent in the long arrangement of the buttons makes it virtu-
term. As such, he shaped his army using ally impossible to play an octave with
the best available tactics and weaponry one hand, and the close proximity of keys
from Western sources. Roy, War, Culture, limits the technical precision a performer
and Society, 77. Mysorean rockets featured can employ. The entire assembly is so
a cylinder of soft hammered iron lashed to nonidiomatic that Willis (who performed
a stalk of bamboo for stability. The metal the restoration of the tiger in the 1950s)
structure allowed more gunpowder to be suggested that the keyboard design was
packed in the body, allowing for greater intended for a performer of limited musi-
range and accuracy than any rocket devel- cal skill to rake the knuckles up and down
oped by Europeans to that point. Accounts the keys rather than play discrete pitches.
of Tipu’s rockets appear in several accounts Ord-Hume, “Tipu’s Tiger,” 73–75.
of the Anglo-Mysorean wars, some of which 23. Ibid., 75. More interestingly,
compliment their effectiveness in combat. Ord-Hume argues that there is evidence that
They were cited as blowing up a munitions the entire mechanism underwent a complete
pile at the Battle of Pollilur in September redesign at some unknown juncture. He
1780, a stunning victory for Mysore that notes, for example, that the crank handle
Tipu commemorated with a massive mural and crankshaft were quite similar in design
in his palace. Their effect was apparently to those elements found in a London-based
impressive enough for the British army to barrel organ from that era. The fact that
investigate acquiring the technology and these mechanisms would have been diffi-
incorporating it into artillery units during cult for Tipu to obtain (and do not fit with
the heart of the Napoleonic Wars. Nara- trends in French or Dutch organ design from
simha, “Rockets in Mysore,” 5–9. the same period) suggests that these parts
13. Lafont, “Mémoires of Lieutenant-Colo- were added during a periodic restoration
nel Russel,” 99. in London. He also recorded the myriad
14. Colley, Captives, 298. of differences in construction and function
15. Ibid., 316. between his observations and the 1835 Penny
16. Scott, Complete Works, 7:198. Magazine description. The most important
17. Tipu worked tirelessly to cultivate a disparity he noted was that the organ bellows
strong military relationship with France, were likely not originally controlled by the
seeking not only weapons and training but a crank but were instead independently manip-
fully formed alliance to check British expan- ulated by a wire emerging through a hole in
sion in India. He went so far as to send the top of the tiger’s head. Use of a wire to
diplomatic envoys in 1788, disappointed control air inflation meant that there was no
when they returned with a porcelain tea set way to blow up the chest bellows and move
from Louis XVI instead of a treaty. sound through the pipes simultaneously.
18. Chakraborty, “‘That disgrace,’” 58. 24. Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, 40–41.
19. Interestingly, an account written by a 25. The first is that the documentation was
Scottish officer named Innes Munro in the destroyed following the sack of Seringapa-
early 1780s favorably compares Tipu’s father tam, which is certainly possible given that
Haidar Ali to Frederick the Great. Colley, portions of Tipu’s vast records and personal
Captives, 298. correspondence did not survive. The second
20. Malhotra, Making British Indian is that the tiger was merely one of his many
Fictions, 33. unique possessions and did not carry any
21. “Tippoo’s Tiger,” 319–20. sort of profound significance in and of itself.
22. By the standard of instrumental design, Susan Stronge alludes to this possibility by
the entire apparatus is woefully inefficient. positing that the tiger may have been built
Since the operation of the organ bellows to entertain not its patron but his two young
relies on the crank, the only way to reason- sons after their repatriation from British
ably play the instrument is to turn the custody in 1794. Ibid., 41.
handle with the left hand while playing the 26. Platt, “East India House,” 64.
keyboard with the right. The sequential
186 Notes to Pages 71–76

27. “Tippoo’s Tiger,” 320. The Hunter illus- the fingers would open and close the holes
tration clearly showed that the soldier was on the flute, directing air expelled from a
painted with a tunic adorned with flow- system of bellows built within the body.
ers and had a thin mustache, which may be Even more novel, the sculpture could play
the source of the speculation that the man one of fourteen (some accounts say eleven)
was originally intended to be a Dutch trader. preprogrammed pieces on the flute, indepen-
Later representations showed the man to dent of direct human control. As expected,
have a clean-shaven face and a solid red tunic the Flûteur took the French public by storm.
with yellow cuffs on his sleeves. Paul Metzner notes an account in the liter-
28. Narrative sketches, 98. ary magazine Mercure de France reporting
29. Forbes, Oriental Memoirs, 185. that the figure “performs like a master,” and
30. De Almeida and Gilpin, Indian Renais- that every musical aspect “is executed in
sance, 40–44. good taste.” Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtu-
31. Mishra, Gothic Sublime, 20. oso, 163. Vaucanson’s commercial success
32. Havell, Indian Sculpture and Painting, with Flûteur and its sequel Tambourinarie (a
25. French shepherd playing a drum with one
33. Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 178–79. hand and a flute with the other) influenced a
34. Ibid., 181. myriad of other complicated sonic automata.
35. The scream and arm movement are Most notable of these later creations is 1773’s
both controlled by a reciprocating wire Musicienne, built by clockmaker Henri-Louis
attached to a small bellows in the hollow Jaquet-Droz in an attempt to cash in on the
chest of the human. As with the organ, the automata craze in eighteenth-century France.
reciprocator works air from the bellows Jaquet-Droz and his father, Pierre, were two
through a pitched pipe attached to an open- of the most famous makers of decorative
ing in the mouth. The depression of the clocks in Europe at that time, and Musicienne
bellows also pushes a spring trigger that represented an attempt to utilize this skill
activates a hinge assembly in the arm, peri- in another challenging mechanical medium.
odically forcing the appendage upward and Built as a nondescript preteen girl at an
back down again. The growl is controlled organ, the automaton could play contrapun-
by an independent mechanism located on tally with both hands, glance between the
the same shaft as the reciprocators. A worm keyboard and spectators with her eyes, and
gear rotates a series of four paddles that even bend her body slightly in rhythm with
strike a trigger, slowly inflating a small the music. Moreover, the girl was painted
bellows located in the head of the tiger. Once and dressed in actual clothing to resemble a
the bellows is filled with air, a lead weight living human as precisely as crafting tech-
depresses it and sends the air through a nique allowed during that era.
pipe and out of the tiger’s mouth. The device 40. Ord-Hume notes that at the height
continues to operate for as long as the crank of the barrel organ’s popularity in Britain
is turned. When working properly, the wail between 1760 and 1840, over 130 individu-
pipe will constantly sound, while the growl als and companies (mostly in London) were
pipe will sound every seven to ten seconds. producing them. “Barrel Organ,” 328.
36. See Solla Price, “Automata,” 9–23, and 41. “Stopless Organ,” 52. A response from
Bedini, “Role of Automata,” 24–42. a man named Samuel Reay published in the
37. Faulkner, “Musical Automata,” 7. February 1900 issue (no. 2) questioned the
38. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136. veracity of the original account. He claimed
39. The two other automatons developed to have heard versions of the same story in
by Vaucanson in 1737 resolutely demon- his youth, and proceeded to demonstrate
strate the potential of this sonic life. The why a typical barrel organ of that period
Flûteur was a wooden representation of would be incapable of playing forty songs as
a human-faun playing a transverse flute, the author had claimed.
copied from a well-known marble statue by 42. “Inconveniences of Barrel Organ,” 333.
French sculptor Antoine Coysevox. Upon 43. Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, 171.
activation, the mechanical musculature of 44. Alpert, London 1849, 162.
Notes to Pages 76–90 187

45. Wills, Mesmerists, Monsters, and 58. Goswami, Colonial India in Children’s
Machines, 30–33. Literature, 67.
46. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 43. 59. Keats, Complete Poems, 2:347–48.
Carlyle’s disdain was hardly a minority opin- 60. De Almeida and Gilpin, Indian Renais-
ion in London. The popular British weekly sance, 38.
magazine Punch ran a satirical roundtable 61. Camden, “Elizabethan Chiromancy,” 7.
in a 1903 issue, featuring luminaries such 62. “Subtyll and Crafty Devices,” 295–96.
as novelist Max Pemberton and Lord Byron, 63. Chiero, Palmistry for All, 4.
where one participant objected to their pres- 64. Plumly, “This Mortal Body,” 181.
ence solely on the monopoly of the craft by
“undesirable aliens.” “Should Organ Grinders
Chapter 4
Be Expelled?,” 350.
47. Evans, “Introduction,” 25–26. 1. Schmid, “Claus Guth’s Forest-Bound
48. Goto-Jones, Conjuring Asia, 156. ‘Don Giovanni.’”
49. Karsten, “Germanic Philology,” 12. 2. Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture,
50. Desmond, India Museum, 22–24. 7–8.
51. The first modern articulation of the 3. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 123–24.
Munro hypothesis can be found in Archer, 4. Vitz, Freud’s Christian Unconscious, 119.
Tippoo’s Tiger. This father obsession is a view also perpet-
52. Quoted in Brown, Anecdotes, 191. uated in the Don Giovanni scene featured in
53. At Pollilur, an army commanded by the 1984 film Amadeus.
Haidar completely outmaneuvered Munro 5. Romanska, “Don Giovanni.”
to join with Tipu and inflict a serious defeat 6. I would be remiss if I did not mention
on another British force under William the reckoning Don Giovanni has faced
Braille. The Mysorean victory forced Munro regarding his attempted rape of Donna Anna
to retreat and abandon his supplies, and in recent years. With regard to this, I defer
the engagement was considered by Munro to Kristi Brown-Montesano and her power-
himself to be one of the worst defeats of a ful 2017 post on the AMS Musicology Now
colonial army in India. Roy, War, Culture, blog, which summarizes these issues far
and Society, 84. better than I ever could. See “Holding Don
54. Colley, Captives, 294–95. Giovanni Accountable.”
55. For one, there are no surviving contem- 7. Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla
porary accounts from British sources that o el convidado de piedra (1630) includes
equate the tiger with the death of Munro. two dinners, the latter occurring in a grave-
He was certainly not the first nor the last yard where the statue of Don Gonzalo forces
European to be mauled by a tiger in India. Don Juan to eat a plate of scorpions. “This
Moreover, Susan Stronge demonstrates two first Don is damned,” notes Ingrid Rowland,
further arguments that bring the Munro “not because he has been a cad, a rapist, or
association into question. The first is that a murderer, but specifically and exclusively
icons featuring a tiger prostrate over a because he has first insulted and then dined
human could be found in Tipu’s court prior with a citizen of the world beyond.” Rowland,
to Munro’s demise, specifically in the form of “Don Giovanni,” 2. Molière’s Dom Juan ou
a silver mount adorning one of his personal le Festin de Pierre (1665) also contained a
firearms dating to 1787. The second regards second dinner invitation from the statue,
a line of Staffordshire pottery that depicted where the spirit of a woman is the one who
Munro’s death: it strongly resembles the tries to get Juan to repent and the statue
appearance of the tiger and did not appear was merely the instrument of his ultimate
until after 1810, while the tiger was on demise. José Zorilla’s Don Juan Tenorio (1844)
display in London and already a well-known provided two living statues (one of Gonzalo,
tourist commodity. Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, 86. the other of his daughter Doña Inés), neither
56. Colley, Captives, 288–89. of which was the harbinger of ultimate doom
57. Quoted in Desmond, India Museum, 26, for the protagonist, and the dinner serves
and Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, 73. merely as an ominous warning of coming
188 Notes to Pages 90–108

events. Don Giovanni is notable in the way it Cendeda, and taught Latin, French, and Ital-
ties the earthly feast directly to dining upon ian at another seminary in Venice before his
the living soul: statue of the Commendatore expulsion for salacious behavior in 1773.
is invited to dinner; statue appears at dinner; 26. Abert, W. A. Mozart, 590.
statue invites Giovanni to his own celes- 27. Da Ponte, Memoirs, 154.
tial dinner and whisks the Don away to the 28. Chion, Voice in Cinema, 18–19. For
nether reaches of the beyond. a critical framework expanding Chion’s
8. Baker, “Odzooks!,” 68. This attitude was concept of acousmatic sound, see Kane,
not just limited to the elite urban cosmopol- Sound Unseen, 3–9.
itans that Mozart was writing for. Baker also 29. Daub, Tristan’s Shadow, 99–100.
cites a poem written from the viewpoint of 30. Osborne, Complete Operas of Mozart,
a common Englishman, who upon bump- 164.
ing into a statue of composer George Frideric 31. Zeiss, “Permeable Boundaries,” 118;
Handel promptly apologizes vocally to the Osborne, Complete Operas of Mozart, 272.
figure while exclaiming “Odzooks! A Man of 32. Gordon and Gordon, Sophistry and
Stone.” Like the Commendatore, Handel is Twentieth-Century Art, 24.
welcomed back into the social world of the 33. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 112.
living, a simultaneously mundane and horri- 34. Steinberg, Listening to Reason, 37.
fying example of material becoming man. 35. Zeiss, “Permeable Boundaries,” 132.
See also Gay, “Father’s Revenge,” 70–80. 36. Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 63–66.
9. Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment 37. Zabalo, “Don Juan (Don Giovanni),”
Semiotics, 77. 152.
10. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, 52. 38. Poizat, Angel’s Cry, 64–65.
11. Cohon, Hume’s Morality, 74, and 39. Szendy, Listen, 107.
Marciano, “Historical and Philosophical 40. Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment
Foundations,” 28. Semiotics, 72–73.
12. Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment 41. Abert, W. A. Mozart, 1104.
Semiotics, 55–56. 42. Hugo, Les Misérables, 1016.
13. Paterson, Senses of Touch, 54. 43. Williams, On Opera, 39.
14. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes,” 44. Bertolini, Playwrighting Self of Bernard
250–51. Shaw, 29.
15. Sheriff, Moved by Love, 164. 45. Shaw, Man and Superman, 96–99.
16. Vanderheyden, Function of the Dream, 46. Heller, “Mozart’s Don Giovanni in
48–50. Shaw’s Comedy,” 183.
17. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes,” 47. Roy Carlson gives a detailed list of
250. these encounters: “For Stephen, the ghosts he
18. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, 24–38. confronts are those of his past: his mother,
19. Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect, 122–23. of course, whose demand for his repentance
20. Chua, “Music as the Mouthpiece of at the end of ‘Circe’ mirrors the Commen-
Theology,” 146–53. datore’s pentiti directed at Don Giovanni,
21. Sheriff, Moved by Love, 164. The and the many statues throughout Dublin.
musical score, written by a close friend of These are described as cold and stony, even
Rousseau’s named Horace Coignet, was Grattan’s, which is bronze, not stone; this is
considered lost until rediscovered in its perhaps an error of volition. That the statue
entirety in 1995. in Mozart’s opera is l’uomo di sasso [the
22. Condillac, Philosophical Writings, 204. man of stone] recalls the Sassenach oppres-
23. Schroeder, Mozart in Revolt, 21. sion as well. The Commendatore’s cold stone
24. Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, hand sealed the fate of Don Giovanni, just
9–12. as these monuments of the Irish and Mosaic
25. Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Hebrew past seal that of the 1904 Dublin
Semiotics, 3. Da Ponte was an avid reader of denizens. Further, the French translation of
Mestasio as a child, owned a diverse semi- 1929—approved by Joyce—translates ‘stone-
nary education from his hometown of bearded’ as ‘avec une barbe de Commandeur,’
Notes to Pages 111–131 189

emphasizing the importance of this Don 24. Ibid., 63.

Giovanni element. For Bloom, it is the 25. Ibid., 68.
nymph who describes herself as stonecold 26. Hale, Ninety Days’ Worth, 150.
and pure, but she implodes before rational- 27. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 13–16.
ist Bloom. What a new reading of Mozart 28. Ibid., 12.
this makes! Don Giovanni eradicates the 29. Ibid., 8.
statue of divine retribution.” Carlson, “Don 30. Bond, “Why We Need.”
Giovanni on Eccles Street,” 391–92. 31. Adichie, Purple Hibiscus, 104.
32. Echevarria, Voice of the Masters, 26–27.
33. Like her contemporaries James Baldwin
Chapter 5
and Ralph Ellison, Petry found a particular
1. Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art niche writing about issues of alienation and
and Life, 36. the city, though Nora Ruth Roberts notes
2. Guteri, Josephine Baker and the Rain- that the lack of obvious feminist tropes in
bow Tribe, 108. her writing and characters may have limited
3. The original design of the Jorama, her popularity after the 1960s. Neverthe-
reflecting the various stages in Baker’s life, less, her first novel The Street (1946), about
was intended to mimic the progression of the a single black mother navigating postwar
Stations of the Cross. Harlem, became the first novel by an African
4. Cheng, Second Skin, 66; Guteri, Jose- American woman to sell over one million
phine Baker, 115. copies. Roberts, “Artistic Discourse,” 32.
5. Cheng, Second Skin, 4–13. 34. While Roberts argues that the story is
6. In addition to several texts already a rumination on “formal artistic discourse”
mentioned, see Baker and Chase, Josephine: as a white aesthetic and its complicated
The Hungry Heart; Schroeder and Vagner, effects on African American communities,
Josephine Baker: Entertainer; Caravantes, Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán sees it as an inter-
Many Faces of Josephine Baker. section of issues of race and gender in those
7. Lemke, Primitivist Modernism, 98–100. same communities, focused more specif-
8. For Picasso’s relationship to African ically on the silencing of black women
masks, see Richards, Masks of Difference, among the presence of white women and
292–93, and North, Dialectic of Modernism, black men. Vizcaíno-Alemán goes so far as
59–76. For an in-depth critical discussion of to compare Man’s ownership and selling
Milhaud’s piece, see Mawer, French Music of Mother Africa in the end to an analo-
and Jazz, 99–135. gous bodily possession of women evoking
9. Strozek, “Futurist Responses,” 49–50. the slave trade. Roberts, “Artistic Discourse,”
10. Cheng, Second Skin, 13. 37; Vizcaíno-Alemán, “Counter-Modernity,”
11. Serres, Five Senses, 26. 134–36.
12. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 35. Roberts, “Artistic Discourse,” 35.
Plateaus, 149–66. 36. Petry, “Mother Africa,” 149.
13. Connor, Book of Skin, 151. 37. Ibid., 150.
14. Ibid., 154–66. 38. Ibid., 159.
15. Ibid., 150. 39. Cheng, Second Skin, 133.
16. Ibid., 167. 40. Beaulieu, Writing African American
17. Ibid., 168. Women, 36–37.
18. Holmes, “Bronze and Plaster,” 345. 41. Schroeder and Vagner, Josephine Baker,
19. Craig, “Color of an Ideal Negro Beauty 51.
Queen,” 83. 42. Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 18.
20. West, “Genealogy of Modern Racism,” 43. Cheng, Second Skin, 94.
298–309. 44. Ibid., 96–98.
21. Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” 111–12. 45. Panzanelli, “Introduction,” 1.
22. Seelig, “Christoph Jamnitzer’s ‘Moor’s 46. Bloom, Waxworks, 1.
Head,’” 199–203. 47. An excellent discussion of the post-En-
23. Nelson, Color of Stone, 62. lightenment history of waxworks in France
190 Notes to Pages 131–139

and Britain can be found in Warner, Phantas- journalist James David Bourchier, Indian
magoria, 25–41. poet and philosopher Rabindrath Tagore, and
48. Aristotle, De Anima, 9. Chilean classical pianist Claudio Arrau (in
49. For an interesting and informative the book Tenev mistakenly refers to Arrau
discussion of the use of wax in the facial as a Brazilian). Tenev, Tristahiliyada Sofia,
reconstruction of Lenin, see Yurchak, “Bodies 103–7. The hotel was featured prominently
of Lenin,” 139–40. in photos and lithographs before the First
50. Guyer, “Beauty, Freedom, and Moral- World War as a landmark of Sofia’s urban
ity,” 149. landscape. When the original building began
51. Didi-Huberman, “Viscosities and to deteriorate in the late 1920s, coupled with
Survivals,” 155. competition from the nearby hotel called
52. Descartes, Meditations, 41. Slavyanska Beseda (which opened in 1935),
53. A particularly detailed description of plans for a replacement building were made
the lost wax process can be found in Savage, to go near Battenberg Square and the Tsar
Concise History of Bronzes, 20. Osvoboditel monument in central Sofia.
54. In the medium of recording, there is The newer, larger Hotel Bulgaria, designed
a history of “wax” continuing as an insider by architects Stancho Belkovski and Ivan
term among audiophiles when referring to Dancho, was opened in 1938 at its present
vinyl records. Bartmanski and Woodward, location on Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard, as
Vinyl, 70. part of a complex incorporating two existing
55. Brady, Spiral Way, 62. buildings to stretch between the boulevard
56. Sandberg, Living Pictures, 40. and the adjoining Aksakov Street. In addi-
57. See Moten, Into the Break and Black tion to the hotel, the complex was home to
and Blur. the Bulgaria Café (Kafene Bulgariya), a gath-
ering spot for writers and intellectuals, and
the Bulgaria Hall (Zala Bulgariya), the larg-
Chapter 6
est concert hall in the city.
1. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic 5. Markov, Truth That Killed, 109.
History, 145. 6. Boyadzhiev (1903–1976) was a painter
2. Karavelov, “Plovdiv,” 237–38. and native of Plovdiv whose works captured
3. The theater was originally built the landscape and heart of the city better
between 114 and 117 CE and remained intact than any other twentieth-century Bulgar-
until Attila the Hun sacked the city during ian artist. Trained at the Khudozhestvena
the fifth century. Uncovered during the akademiya (Arts Academy) in Sofia, he was
1970s, it was first opened for tourists in 1981 best known for works like Zima v Plovdiv
after further excavation supervised by archi- (Winter in Plovdiv, 1939) and Iz stariya
tect Vera Kolarova. Raicheski, Plovdivska Plovdiv (From Old Plovdiv, 1958). In addition
entsiklopediya, 10. to the paintings themselves, Boyadzhiev was
4. The original Hotel Bulgaria was built also famous for painting with a paralyzed
in 1881 and designed by Czech architect right hand, a condition he suffered from 1951
Anton Kolar, who was the modeler of many until his death. Raichevski, Plovdivska entsik-
of the most famous landmarks conceived lopediya, 25.
during the Battenberg regime, including the 7. Bikova, “Amerikanski emigranti.”
City Garden (1879) and the monument to 8. Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 22.
Vasil Levski (1895). The hotel became Sofia’s 9. Ihde, Listening and Voice, 50–51.
version of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York 10. Cage, Silence, 13.
City, and anyone of fame or repute in Sofia 11. For Derrida, it was the interiorized
at that time lodged at the Grand Hotel. In his voice; for Salomé Voegelin, the human body;
memoir, Dragan Tenev gives a list of nota- for Heidegger (as put forth by David Nowell
bles who stayed there between roughly 1918 Smith), poetry; for Philip Bohlman and
and 1937: Russian revolutionary Maxim Jeffers Engelhardt, the state of transcendence.
Litvinov Maksimovich Kamò, Ameri- Then there are the institutional devices
can journalist and author John Reed, Irish reflecting the power and presence of the
Notes to Pages 140–146 191

state that can serve of these borders. Sheila from European shows. “Modern jazz” popu-
Whiteley provides a compelling example lar since the end of the war, like American
with copyright law serving as a bound- bebop, had little impact in Bulgaria until the
ary. This institutional emphasis expands late 1950s and thus was not likely part of the
to include the myriad of other perspectives BCP’s broader conceptualization and defini-
focusing on the systemic and everyday trau- tion of “jazz” for ideological purposes. In fact,
mas of racism, sexism, political violence, and as late as 1964, a “jazz band” was defined in
religious intolerance working as mechanisms the Kratka bulgarskata entsiklopediya (Little
of silence. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, Bulgarian Encyclopedia) as a large ensemble
140; Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, of twelve to eighteen instruments, with vari-
83–84; Smith, Sounding/Silence; Bohlman ations consisting of smaller (quartet, etc.)
and Engelhardt, “Resounding Transcen- and larger (“symphonic jazz”) incarnations—
dence,” 1–25; Whiteley, “‘Sound of Silence,’” in effect reinforcing the “big band” as the
220–22. primary vehicle for jazz in Bulgaria at a time
12. See McCormack, “Bulgarian Bulge” and when the trio and quartet were more domi-
“Technologies of Dismemberment,” 99–113. nant elsewhere.
13. The bombing at Sveta Nedelya on April 18. Dellin, Bulgaria, 168.
26, 1925, remains one of the single dead- 19. See Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, and
liest acts of political violence in Bulgarian Yurchak, Everything Was Forever.
history. Conceived by the Soviet Comint- 20. Markov, Truth That Killed, 50–56.
ern as a means to assassinate Tsar Boris III 21. See Gadzhev, Dzhazut na Bulgaria,
while attending a state funeral, the explosion 137–79, for profiles of some other Bulgarians
killed 123 people and left several hundred working as bandleaders and sidemen in jazz
wounded (the tsar was not in attendance). A and theater orchestras at that time, includ-
subsequent government crackdown on dissi- ing Emil Georgiev, Stanimir Stanev, Angel
dent parties like the Agrarian Union and the Mikhailov, and Nikola Ianev.
BCP as a result of the bombing led to a long 22. Moskov, “Bulgaria e bila parviyat.”
period in which there was no open political 23. Popular prewar vocalist Asparuh “Ari”
activity under the banner of communism in Leshnikov (1898–1978) was a prime exam-
Bulgaria. Many were arrested and/or killed, ple of a musician whose Communist-era
and those who escaped fled to the protective career was ruined by prior success. As one of
custody of the Soviet Union as exiles. the finest male tenors of his time, Leshnikov
14. Dimitrov, “Bulgarian Neutrality,” had a fruitful career in interwar Germany
192–216. as a member of the Comedian Harmonists,
15. Reed, War in Eastern Europe, 311. a popular vocal sextet that broke up in 1934
16. Slavov, Zlatnata Reshetka, 11. amid pressures from the Nazis toward their
17. Gadzhev, Dzhazut na Bulgaria, 140–41. three Jewish members. With the other three,
It is important to note from the outset that Leshnikov formed another sextet named
what fell under the term jazz in Bulgaria Das Meister that continued performing in
from an ideological standpoint around 1950 Germany until 1941, but with limited success.
was far ranging and included many styles not When he returned to Bulgaria after the war,
normally considered part of the jazz canon he spent most of his remaining years working
today. The American swing popularized by manual labor jobs and singing for almost no
the bands of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, pay in pubs.
and Duke Ellington was certainly included, 24. Starr, Red and Hot, 173–74.
as was the older New Orleans–style of poly- 25. Ibid., 190.
phonic group improvisation and popular 26. Moskov, “Bulgaria e bila parviyat.”
songs produced by Tin Pan Alley. But the There was also a jazz group called Optimis-
label “jazz” could also refer to repertoire tite (the Optimists) active in Sofia during
as diverse as French chansons, sentimen- the early years of the Second World War,
tal European ballads, Argentinean tangos, made up primarily of Bulgarian Jews who
ragtime pieces for piano or brass band, and emigrated from Bulgaria soon after the end
popular theatrical and light opera songs of the war. Although Nikolov was likely
192 Notes to Pages 146–152

aware of the existence of this prior group, it historical context on the Hungarian Upris-
is unknown whether his supposed naming ing, see Barber, Seven Days of Freedom, and
of the Hotel Bulgaria house band was a Lendvai, One Day. For a timeline of perti-
subtle homage to the Optimists or simply a nent events leading up to the Soviet military
coincidence. intervention, see Békés, 1956 Hungarian
27. See Gadzhev, Dzhazut na Bulgaria, Uprising.
43–46, and 504–5. 36. Milev, “Pomnite li Sasho Sladura?”
28. Shumnaliev, Sotsroman, 196. 37. Slavov, Zlatnata Reshetka, 13.
29. Accounts of colloquial terminology 38. Bikova, “Amerikantski emigranti.”
(like stilyagi) in Communist youth culture 39. Stoiyanova and Iliev, Politicheski opasni
can be found in Yurchak, Everything Was litsa, 33–34.
Forever and Taylor, Let’s Twist Again, 71. 40. The horrors of the kontslagera and the
30. Timothy Ryback cites a 1953 issue of everyday toll taken on their inhabitants are
the Sofian newspaper Literaturen front (Liter- catalogued in a series of essays found in
ary Front) that lambastes a group of young, Todorov, Voices from the Gulag. Although the
aimless Bulgarian stilyagi led by “Petur,” a infamous Belene was closed in 1953 as part of
twenty-six-year-old Sofian, who carried a the gradual shift away from hardline Stalin-
“bored, expressionless face, languid gestures ist policies, the camp reopened several times
and downcast eyes” and “pass[ed] their time over the next couple of decades: in 1956
telling jokes, playing bridge, and discussing during the mass suppression of the intelli-
the latest care models.” Ryback, Rock Around gentsia after the Hungarian Uprising, and
the Bloc, 10. Another example is an article again in the mid-1980s as part of the forced
entitled “Vidinski neblagopoluchiya” (Vidin’s “Bulgarization” of the Turkish minority. For
Failures), written for the periodical Bulgarska a pointed critique of Todorov’s text arguing
muzika (Bulgarian Music), the official jour- that he appropriates and recontextual-
nal of the Union of Bulgarian Composers in izes the prisoner narratives to reinforce a
1953. The author catalogues a particular inci- sense of Western moral superiority toward
dent involving professional musicians in Communism, see Kaneva, “Remembering
the city of Vidin and their descent into the Communist Violence,” 44–61.
depravities offered by playing jazz. The arti- 41. Gerasimov, Diplomatsiya, 113–14.
cle is quoted in Guentcheva, “Sounds and 42. Tenev, “Sasho Sladura.”
Noise,” 228. 43. Bikova, “Amerikantski emigranti.”
31. Todorov, “Plovdiv vdiga pametnik.” 44. Daskalov, Debating the Past, 272.
32. Bikova, “Amerikantski emigranti.” 45. Todorov, Voices from the Gulag, 83–84.
33. Bell, Bulgarian Communist Party, 113. 46. Kapralov, “Zhivkov-Era Concentration
Following the lead of the Soviet Union, the Camp,” 18–19.
Congress preempted a reexamination of the 47. In June of 2011 a woman named Mariya
aesthetic tenets of socialist realism at the Palikarova, one of Sladura’s living relatives,
highest levels of the BCP. Notable examples appeared in the studio of Televiziya Plovdiv
of this “thaw” in the arts included Cherven- and stated that Sladura had not been killed
kov’s defense of the controversial Dimitar at Lovech but instead secretly exiled from
Dimov novel Tyutyun (Tobacco), a new Bulgaria. Her hypothesis was based on bits
“anti-dogmatic” approach to the evaluation of of circumstantial evidence: that the family
literature headed by the Union of Bulgarian could not publish a death certificate; that
Writers, and the restoration of the works of in 1974 a document arrived listing him as
many historically “bourgeois” writers to the “missing” instead of dead; that some myste-
Bulgarian literary canon. rious letters began arriving signed Poliyaka
34. Gadzhev, Dzhazut na Bulgaria, 151–52. (the Pole) in handwriting eerily similar
35. The Hungarian Uprising and the artis- to Sasho’s, and accompanied by chocolate
tic intelligentsia’s role in that conflict with bonbons favored by his mother. Her story, to
the Soviet Union had a profound effect on my knowledge, has not been corroborated by
the BCP’s strategy toward unionized writers, any additional evidence yet remains a potent
artists, and musicians during the 1960s. For
Notes to Pages 152–169 193

conspiracy theory for some to this day. See, vibrations of a peal of bells. See Maxwell,
for example, “Uzhasna versiya.” Scientific Papers, 2:463–64, and Chalmers,
48. Stoiyanova and Iliev, Politicheski opasni Scientist’s Atom, 249.
litsa, 100. The kontslager at Belene, located 5. Tamm coined the term phonon in 1932
near the town of Pleven in western Bulgaria, to describe a collective mode of quantum
was active for two different periods—from vibration among arrangements of molecules
1949 until 1953, and again from 1956 until in matter, drawn from the Greek word phoné
1959. due to their role in the creation of physi-
49. Daskalova (1921–2008) was a parlia- cal sound. He based this concept not only
ment secretary with the first government on Einstein’s photon but on earlier work by
after the Communist takeover in Septem- Dutch physicist Peter Debye, who conceived
ber 1944 who was arrested in 1951 and of a similar theory in 1912 with regard to
imprisoned for one year. After her release, thermodynamics.
she worked for the Bulgarian Academy of 6. Exploring the idea that these forms
Sciences until 1962 and was then Minister of could manifest simultaneously in the parti-
Justice until 1990. cles themselves, Werner Heisenberg
50. Tsonchev, Preletni dushi, 156. developed a theory that the positions of
51. Slavov, Zlatnata Reshetka, 11–13. these wave-particle entities in space could
52. Korudzhiev, Predi da se umre, 150–51. not be ascertained until they were detected,
53. For an intriguing anthropological anal- meaning that their motion could not be
ysis about the agency of musical instruments effectively measured (known as his Uncer-
within social, cultural, and political practices, tainty Principle). This theory played out
see Bates, “Social Life of Musical Instru- during attempts at detection, as the wave
ments,” 363–95. function collapsed, leaving only the parti-
54. Barthes, Mythologies, 9. cle function observable and making the
55. Segesten, Myth, Identity, and Conflict, wave a theoretical construct whose dynam-
1–2. ics could not be directly ascertained. Erwin
56. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 6. Schrödinger (he of the famous living dead
57. Ragussis, Acts of Naming, 219–22. cat), who understood these waves to be
58. Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of mathematical constructs, developed an equa-
Allegory,” 115. tion to predict how they would manifest
59. Ibid., 111–13. prior to collapse at the moment of detec-
60. Lehman, “Allegories of Rending,” 236. tion. De Broglie held that the Schrödinger
61. Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of equation not only predicted the properties of
Allegory,” 112. these waves but also constituted the actual
physical form of a wave within the molecule
that drove particle movement, even when
Chapter 7
unobserved.
1. Andrews, “Music of Sculpture,” 31–32. 7. De Broglie, Heisenberg’s Uncertainties, xii.
2. The Spinozan/Whitehead connection 8. Alexander, Jazz of Physics, 166.
is especially important to the theory of onto- 9. Andrews, Symphony of Life, 17.
logical affect put forth in Goodman, Sonic 10. This philosophical trajectory that
Warfare, 83–102. would inform Andrews’s later work was on
3. Kane, “Sound Studies,” 6–8. display in a commencement speech he deliv-
4. Trower, Senses of Vibration, 39–40. ered to the midyear graduating class of
This rhetorical recourse to sound implied by Bloomsburg State Teachers College in Penn-
multiplicities of vibration found use within sylvania on January 13, 1949. See “Mid Year
spectroscopy and thermodynamics as well. Commencement.”
Writing about the emission spectrum of 11. Andrews, Symphony of Life, 147.
gases in the 1870s, the famed Scottish phys- 12. Quoting Russolo, “Art of Noises,” 12–13:
icist James Clerk Maxwell described the
resonance emanating from molecules after We want to give pitches to these diverse
colliding as analogous to the harmonic noises, regulating them harmonically and
rhythmically. Giving pitch to noises does
194 Notes to Pages 169–180

not mean depriving them of all irregular than previously thought, see Chessa, Luigi
movements and vibrations of time and Russolo, 1–12.
intensity but rather assigning a degree 14. Ananthaswamy, “Quantum Weirdness.”
or pitch to the strongest and most prom- 15. “James Joyce: Earl Street North.”
inent of these vibrations. Noise differs Talking Statues Dublin, http://‌www‌.talking
from sound, in fact, only to the extent statuesdublin‌.ie‌/statues‌/james‌joyce.
that the vibrations that produce it are 16. “Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln Park.” Statue
confused and irregular. Every noise has a Stories Chicago, http://‌www‌.statuestories
pitch, some even a chord, which predom- chicago‌.com‌/statues‌/statue‌lincoln.
inates among the whole of its irregular 17. Whitmarsh, “‘Greece Is the World,’”
vibrations. Now, from this predominant 295.
characteristic pitch derives the practi-
cal possibility of assigning pitches to
Conclusion
the noise as a whole. That is, there may
be imparted to a given noise not only a 1. Neely, “Knoxville: Summer 1979.”
single pitch but even a variety of pitches 2. This includes the compositions
without sacrificing its character, by which Symphony No. 1, Op. 13 (1895); Symphony
I mean the timbre that distinguishes it. No. 2, Op. 27 (1906–7); Symphony No. 3,
Thus, some noises obtained through a Op. 44 (1935–36); Isle of the Dead, Op. 29
rotary motion can offer an entire chro- (1908); The Bells choral symphony, Op. 35
matic scale ascending or descending, if (1915); Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,
the speed of the motion is increased or Op. 43 (1934); and Symphonic Dances, Op. 45
decreased. (1940).
3. Sherrod, “Metro Pulse.”
See also Patch, “Art of Noise,” 303–6. 4. Cousineau, Coincidence or Destiny, 157.
13. For more on Russolo’s interest in 5. Stewart, Space on the Side of the Road,
such matters, and how the occult may have 58.
shaped his philosophy of futurism more
Bibliography

Abert, Hermann. W. A. Mozart. Translated by Instrumental Body of the Soul. Trans-
Stewart Spencer, edited by Cliff Eisen. lated by Abraham Bos and Rein
New Haven: Yale University Press, Ferwerda. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
2007. ———. On the Soul. Translated by Mark Shiff-
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibis- man. Indianapolis, IN: Focus, 2011.
cus. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Bacon, Francis. The Philosophical Works of
Books, 2012. Francis Bacon. Vol. 3. Edited by Peter
Adorno, Theodor. “The Curves of the Shaw. London: Knapton, 1733.
Needle.” In Essays on Music, translated Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by
by Susan Gillespie, 271–76. Berkeley: Oliver Feltham. New York: Contin-
University of California Press, 2002. uum Books, 2005.
Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phan- Baker, Egbert J. “Archaic Epigram and the
tasm in Western Culture. Translated Seal of Theognis.” In Dialect, Diction,
by Ronald Martinez. Minneapolis: and Style in Greek Literary and
University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Inscribed Epigram, edited by Evina
Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent: Sistakou and Antonios Rengakos,
Modernism in Music, Literature, and 195–214. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
Other Arts. Chicago: University of 2016.
Chicago Press, 2000. Baker, Jean-Claude, and Chris Chase. Jose-
Alexander, Stephon. The Jazz of Physics: The phine: The Hungry Heart. New York:
Secret Link Between Music and the Cooper Square Press, 1993.
Structure of the Universe. New York: Baker, Malcolm. “Odzooks! A Man of Stone.”
Basic Books, 2016. In Don Giovanni: Myths of Seduc-
Almeida, Hermione de, and George Gilpin. tion and Betrayal, edited by Jonathan
Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Miller, 62–69. Baltimore: Faber and
Art and the Prospect of India. Burling- Faber, 1990.
ton, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Barber, Nöel. Seven Days of Freedom: The
Alpert, Michael. London, 1849: A Victorian Hungarian Uprising, 1956. New York:
Murder Story. New York: Routledge, Stein and Day, 1974.
2014. Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past:
Ananthaswamy, Anil. “Quantum Weirdness Archaeology and Aesthetics in the
May Hide an Orderly Reality After Making of Renaissance Culture. New
All.” New Scientist, February 19, 2016. Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
https://‌www‌.newscientist‌.com Barker, Peter. “Stoic Contributions to Early
‌/article‌/2078251‌quantum‌weirdness Modern Science.” In Atoms, Pneuma,
‌may‌hide‌an‌orderly‌reality‌after‌all. and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic
Andrews, Donald Hatch. “The Music of Themes in European Thought, edited
Sculpture.” Main Currents in Modern by Margaret Osler, 135–54. New York:
Thought 23, no. 2 (1966): 31–37. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
———. The Symphony of Life. Lee’s Summit, Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by
MO: Unity Books, 1966. Annette Levers. New York: Hill and
Archer, Mildred. Tippoo’s Tiger. London: Her Wang, 1972.
Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1959. Bartmanski, Dominik, and Ian Woodward.
Aristotle. On the Life-Bearing Spirit (De spir- Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the
itu): A Discussion with Plato and Digital Age. New York: Bloomsbury,
His Predecessors on Pneuma as the 2015.
196 Bibliography

Bates, Eliot. “The Social Life of Musical ‌sladura‌v‌plovdiv‌_NjgwOzY3‌.html

Instruments.” Ethnomusicology 56, no. (site discontinued).
3 (2012): 363–95. Bloom, Gina. Voice in Motion: Staging Gender,
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Philosophy of Shaping Sound in Early Modern
Toys.” Translated by Paul Keegan. In England. Philadelphia: University of
On Dolls, edited by Kenneth Gross, Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
11–21. London: Notting Hill, 2012. Bloom, Michelle. Waxworks: A Cultural
Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann. Writing Afri- Obsession. Minneapolis: University of
can American Women. Westport, CT: Minnesota Press, 2003.
Greenwood, 2006. Boehrer, Bruce. Animal Characters: Nonhu-
Bedini, Silvio. “The Role of Automata in the man Beings in Early Modern Literature.
History of Technology.” Technology Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 24–42. vania Press, 2010.
Békés, Csaba, Malcolm Byrne, and János Bohlman, Philip, and Jeffers Engelhardt.
Rainer, eds. The 1956 Hungarian “Resounding Transcendence—an
Uprising: A History in Documents. Introduction.” In Resounding Transcen-
New York: Central European Univer- dence: Transitions in Music, Religion,
sity Press, 2002. and Ritual, edited by Philip Bolhman
Bell, John. The Bulgarian Communist Party and Jeffers Engelhardt, 1–25. New
from Blagoev to Zhivkov. Stanford, CA: York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Hoover Institution, 1986. Boittin, Jennifer Anne. Colonial Metropolis:
Benso, Silvia. “The Breathing of the Air: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperial-
Presocratic Echoes in Levinas.” In ism and Feminism in Interwar Paris.
Levinas and the Ancients, edited by Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Brian Schroeder and Silvia Benso, Press, 2010.
9–23. Bloomington: Indiana Univer- Bond, Sarah. “Why We Need to Start
sity Press, 2008. Seeing the Classical World in
Berchman, Robert. “Rationality and Ritual in Color.” Hyperallergic, June 7, 2017.
Neoplatonism.” In Neoplatonism and https://‌hyperallergic‌.com‌/383776
Indian Philosophy, edited by Paulos ‌/why‌we‌need‌to‌start‌seeing‌the‌classi
Mar Gregorios, 229–68. Albany: State cal‌world‌in‌color.
University of New York Press, 2002. Brady, Erika. A Spiral Way: How the Phono-
Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues Between graph Changed Ethnography. Jackson:
Hylas and Philonus. Chicago: Open University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Court, 1901. Brech, Martha. “New Technology—New
Bertolini, John Anthony. The Playwright- Artistic Genres: Changes in the
ing Self of Bernard Shaw. Carbondale Concept and Aesthetic of Music.” In
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Music and Technology in the Twenti-
University Press, 1991. eth Century, edited by Hans-Joachim
Bhandar, Brenna, and Jonathan Gold- Braun, 207–22. Baltimore: The Johns
berg-Hiller. “Introduction: Staging Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Encounters.” In Plastic Materialities: Brilliant, Richard. My Laocoön: Alterna-
Politics, Legality, and Metamorpho- tive Claims in the Interpretation of
sis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, Artworks. Berkeley: University of
edited by Brenna Bhandar and Jona- California Press, 2000.
than Goldberg-Hiller, 1–34. Durham: Brittlebank, Kate. “Sakti and Barakat: The
Duke University Press, 2015. Power of Tipu’s Tiger. An Examina-
Bikova, Diana. “Amerikanski emigranti tion of the Tiger Emblem of Tipu
vdigat pametnik na Sasho Sladura v Sultan of Mysore.” Modern Asian
Plovdiv.” Novinar, August 22, 2002. Studies 29, no. 2 (1995): 257–69.
http://‌novinar‌.bg‌/news‌/amerikan Broglie, Louis de. Heisenberg’s Uncertainties
ski‌emigranti‌vdigat‌pametnik‌na‌sasho and the Probabilistic Interpretation of
Wave Mechanics. Translated by Alwyn
 Bibliography 197

van der Merwe. Boston: Kluwer art‌matters‌/beyond‌matter‌object‌disori

Academic, 1990. ented‌sound‌art.
Brown, Thomas. Anecdotes of the Animal Cheng, Anne Anlin. Second Skin: Josephine
Kingdom. Glasgow: Archibald Fuller- Baker and the Modern Surface. New
ton, 1834. York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Brown-Montesano, Kristi. “Holding Don Chessa, Luciano. Luigi Russolo, Futurist:
Giovanni Accountable.” Musicology Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult.
Now, December 2017. http://‌music Berkeley: University of California
ologynow‌.ams‌net‌.org‌/2017‌/12‌/hold Press, 2012.
ing‌don‌giovanni‌accountable‌.html. Chiero. Palmistry for All: Containing New
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Information on the Study of the Hand
Middletown: Wesleyan University Never Before Published. New York:
Press, 2010. G. P. Putman, 1916.
Camden, Carroll. “Elizabethan Chiromancy.” Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Trans-
Modern Language Notes 62, no. 1 lated by Claudia Gorbman. New York:
(1947): 1–7. Columbia University Press, 1999.
Caravantes, Peggy. The Many Faces of Jose- Christian, Kathleen Wren. “Poetry and
phine Baker: Dancer, Singer, Activist, ‘Spirited’ Ancient Sculpture in Renais-
Spy. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, sance Rome.” In Aeolian Winds and
2015. the Spirit in Renaissance Architecture,
Carlson, Roy. “Don Giovanni on Eccles edited by Barbara Kenda, 103–24.
Street.” Texas Studies in Literature and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Language 51, no. 4 (2009): 383–99. Chrystal, Paul. In Bed with the Romans.
Carr, J. L. “Pygmalion and the Philosophes: Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2015.
The Animated Statue in Eigh- Chua, Daniel. “Music as the Mouthpiece
teenth-Century France.” Journal of the of Theology.” In Resonant Witness:
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, Conversations Between Music and
nos. 3/4 (1960): 239–55. Theology, edited by Jeremy Begbie
Casati, Roberto, and Achille Varzi. “Events.” and Steven Guthrie, 137–61. Grand
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,
https://‌plato‌.stanford‌.edu‌/entries 2011.
‌/events. Classen, Constance. “Fingerprints: Writing
Caverero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: About Touch.” In The Book of Touch,
Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expres- edited by Constance Classen, 1–9.
sion. Translated by Paul Kottman. New York: Berg, 2005.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, Cohen, H. Floris. The Rise of Modern Science
2005. Explained: A Comparative History.
Chakraborty, Ayusman. “‘That Disgrace in New York: Cambridge University
Human Form’: Tipu Sultan and the Press, 2015.
Politics of Representation in Three Cohon, Rachel. Hume’s Morality: Feeling
Nineteenth-Century English Novels.” and Fabrication. New York: Oxford
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary University Press, 2008.
Studies in Humanities 5, no. 1 (2013): Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire, and
55–66. the World, 1600–1850. New York:
Chalmers, Alan. The Scientist’s Atom and Anchor Books, 2004.
the Philosopher’s Stone: How Science Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de. Philosophi-
Succeeded and Philosophy Failed to cal Writings of Étienne Bonnot, Abbé
Gain Knowledge of Atoms. New York: de Condillac. Translated by Franklin
Springer, 2009. Philip and Harlan Lane. Hillsdale, NJ:
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. “Beyond Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982.
Matter: Object-Disoriented Sound Connor, Steven. The Book of Skin. Ithaca:
Art.” Seismograf, November 15, 2017. Cornell University Press, 2004.
https://‌seismograf‌.org‌/fokus‌/sound‌
198 Bibliography

Cousineau, Phil. Coincidence or Destiny? and edited by John Cottingham. New

Stories of Synchronicity That Illuminate York: Cambridge University Press,
Our Lives. York Beach, ME: Conari 2013.
Press, 1997. Desmond, Ray. The India Museum, 1801–
Cowan, Bainard. “Walter Benjamin’s Theory 1879. London: Her Majesty’s
of Allegory.” New German Critique 22 Stationary Office, 1982.
(1981): 109–22. Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Viscosities and
Craig, Maxine Leeds. “The Color of an Ideal Survivals: Art History Put to the Test
Negro Beauty Queen.” In Shades of by the Material.” In Ephemeral Bodies:
Difference: Why Skin Color Matters, Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure,
edited by Evelyn Glenn, 81–94. Stan- edited by Roberta Panzanelli, 154–69.
ford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Los Angeles: Getty Research Insti-
Da Ponte, Lorenzo. Memoirs. Translated by tute, 2008.
Elisabeth Abbot, edited by Arthur Dimitrov, Vesselin. “Bulgarian Neutrality:
Livingston. New York: New York Domestic and International Perspec-
Review of Books, 2000. tives.” In European Neutrals and
Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Non-Belligerents During the Second
Emotions in Man and Animals. Edited World War, edited by Neville Wylie,
by Francis Darwin. Vol. 23 of The 192–216. New York: Cambridge
Works of Charles Darwin, edited by University Press, 2002.
Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman. Draasima, Douwe. Metaphors of Memory:
New York: New York University A History of Ideas About the Mind.
Press, 1989. Translated by Paul Vincent. New York:
Daskalov, Rumen. Debating the Past: Modern Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Bulgarian History from Stambolov to Dunham, Vera. In Stalin’s Time: Middle Class
Zhivkov. New York: Central European Values in Soviet Fiction. Durham:
University Press, 2011. Duke University Press, 1990.
Daub, Adrian. Tristan’s Shadow: Sexuality and Dyson, Frances. Sounding New Media:
the Total Work of Art After Wagner. Immersion and Embodiment in Arts
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and Culture. Berkeley: University of
2014. California Press, 2009.
Davis, Richard. Lives of Indian Images. Echevarria, Roberto González. The Voice of
Princeton: Princeton University Press, the Masters: Writing and Authority
1997. in Modern Latin American Literature.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Austin: University of Texas Press,
Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. 1985.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Economakis, Richard. “Chasma gês: Delphic
Press, 1993. Pneuma and the Cult of Asklepios.”
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thou- In Aeolian Winds and the Spirit in
sand Plateaus: Capitalism and Renaissance Architecture, edited by
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Barbara Kenda, 22–43. New York:
Massumi. New York: Continuum Routledge, 2006.
Books, 2004. Erlmann, Veit. Reason and Resonance: A
Dellin, L. A. D. Bulgaria: East-Central Europe History of Modern Aurality. New York:
Under the Communists. New York: Zone Books, 2010.
Praeger Press, 1957. Ernst, Wolfgang. “Not Seeing the Laoc-
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans- oön: Lessing in the Archive of the
lated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Eighteenth Century.” In Regimes of
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Description: In the Archive of the Eigh-
University Press, 1997. teenth Century, edited by John Bender
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philos- and Michael Marinan, 118–34. Stan-
ophy: With Selections from the ford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Objections and Replies. Translated
 Bibliography 199

Evans, Henry Ridgely. “Introduction: The Goswami, Supriya. Colonial India in Chil-
Mysteries of Modern Magic.” In dren’s Literature. New York: Routledge,
Magic, Stage Illusions, and Scientific 2012.
Diversions, Including Trick Photogra- Goto-Jones, Chris. Conjuring Asia: Magic,
phy, edited by Albert Allis Hopkins, Orientalism, and the Making of the
1–26. New York: Munn, 1901. Modern World. New York: Cambridge
Fallon, Stephen. Milton Among the Philos- University Press, 2016.
ophers: Poetry and Materialism in Gross, Kenneth. The Dream of a Moving
Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca: Statue. Ithaca: Cornell University
Cornell University Press, 1991. Press, 1992.
Faulkner, Christopher. “Musical Autom- Grosz, Elizabeth. The Incorporeal: Ontology,
ata, La Régle du jeu, and the Cinema.” Ethics, and the Limits of Material-
South Central Review 28, no. 3 (2011): ism. New York: Columbia University
6–25. Press, 2017.
Forbes, James. Oriental Memoirs Selected Guentcheva, Rossitza. “Sounds and Noise in
and Abridged from a Series of Familiar Socialist Bulgaria.” In Ideologies and
Letters Written During Seventeen Years National Identities: The Case of Twen-
Residence in India: Including Obser- tieth-Century Southeastern Europe,
vations on Parts of Africa and South edited by John Lampe and Mark
America, and a Narrative of Occur- Mazower, 211–34. New York: Central
rences in Four India Voyages. Vol. 4. European University Press, 2004.
London: White and Cochrane, 1813. Guteri, Matthew Pratt. Josephine Baker and
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Rainbow Tribe. Cambridge, MA:
The Birth of the Prison. New York: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Pantheon Books, 1977. Guyer, Paul. “Beauty, Freedom, and Moral-
Gadzhev, Vladimir. Dzhazut na Bulgaria, ity: Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology
Bulgarite na Dzhaza. Sofia: Istok/ and the Development of His Aesthetic
Zapad, 2010. Theory.” In Essays on Kant’s Anthro-
Gay, Peter. “The Father’s Revenge.” In Don pology, edited by Brian Jacobs and
Giovanni: Myths of Seduction and Patrick Kain, 135–63. New York:
Betrayal, edited by Jonathan Miller, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
70–80. Baltimore: Faber and Faber, Hack, Roy Kenneth. God in Greek Philoso-
1990. phy to the Time of Socrates. Princeton:
———. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy; From Princeton University Press, 1931.
Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond. New Hale, Edward. Ninety Days’ Worth of Europe.
York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Boston: Walker and Wise, 1861.
Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. Hankins, Thomas. Science and the Enlight-
Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society. Trans- enment. New York: Cambridge
lated by Don Reneau. Berkeley: University Press, 1985.
University of California Press, 1995. Havell, E. B. Indian Sculpture and Painting.
Gerasimov, Bogomil. Diplomatsiya v zonata London: John Murray, 1908.
na kaktusa. Sofia: Trud, 1998. Heffernan, Carol Falvo. The Phoenix at the
Golan, Romy. Modernity and Nostalgia: Art Fountain: Images of Woman and Eter-
and Politics in France Between the nity in Lactantius’s Carmen de Ave
Wars. New Haven: Yale University Phonice and the Old English Phoe-
Press, 1995. nix. Newark: University of Delaware
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Press, 1988.
Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Complete
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Symbolism—Memnons, Isis, and
Gordon, Hayim, and Rivca Gordon. Sophistry Osiris, the Sphinx.” In Aesthetics:
and Twentieth-Century Art. Amster- Lectures on Fine Art, translated by
dam: Rodopi Press, 2002. T. M. Knox. Vol. 1, 357–61. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1975.
200 Bibliography

———. Hegel, on the Arts: Selections from Defense of Ritual.” In The Presence
G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics, or The of Light: Divine Radiance and Trans-
Philosophy of Fine Art. Translated and formative Vision, edited by Matthew
edited by Henry Paolucci. Smyrna, Kapstein, 5–24. Chicago: University of
DE: Griffon House, 2001. Chicago Press, 2004.
Heller, Agnes. “Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Joshua, Essaka. Pygmalion and Galatea: The
Shaw’s Comedy.” In The Don Giovanni History of a Narrative in English Liter-
Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an ature. New York: Ashgate, 2001.
Opera, edited by Lydia Goehr and Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. Josephine Baker in
Daniel Herwitz, 181–92. New York: Art and Life: The Icon and the Image.
Columbia University Press, 2006. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
Henty, G. A. “Excerpts from The Tiger of 2007.
Mysore.” In From the East India Kahn, Douglas. “The Arts of Sound Art and
Company to the Suez Canal, vol. 1, Music.” Iowa Review Web 8, no. 1
Archives of Empire, edited by Barbara (2006). http://‌www‌.douglaskahn‌
Harlow and Mia Carter, 173. Durham: .com‌/writings‌/douglas‌_kahn‌sound
Duke University Press, 2003. ‌_art‌.pdf.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Sculpture: Some Kane, Brian. “Musicophobia, or Sound Art
Observations on Shape and Form from and the Demands of Art Theory.”
Pygmalion’s Creative Dream. Trans- Nonsite 8, January 20, 2013.
lated by Jason Gaiger. Chicago: https://‌nonsite‌.org‌/article‌
University of Chicago Press, 2002. /musicophobia‌or‌sound‌art‌and‌the‌
Hertel, Christiane. Pygmalion in Bavaria: demands‌of‌art‌theory.
The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eigh- ———. “Sound Studies Without Auditory
teenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory. Culture: A Critique of the Ontologi-
University Park: Pennsylvania State cal Turn.” Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015):
University Press, 2011. 2–21.
Holmes, John Jaynes. “Bronze and Plaster.” ———. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound
Crisis 39, no. 11 (1932): 345. in Theory and Practice. New York:
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Translated by Oxford University Press, 2014.
Christine Donougher. New York: Kaneva, Nadia. “Remembering Communist
Penguin Books, 2015. Violence: The Bulgarian Gulag and
Husain, Iqbal, trans. “The Diplomatic Vision the Conscience of the West.” Jour-
of Tipu Sultan: Briefs for Embas- nal of Communication Inquiry 31, no. 1
sies to Turkey and France, 1785–86.” (2007): 44–61.
In State Diplomacy under Tipu Sultan: Kaplan, Paul H. D. “Italy, 1490–1700.” In
Documents and Essays, edited by Irfan The Image of the Black in Western Art.
Habib, 19–65. New Dehli: Tulika Vol. 3, From the “Age of Discovery” to
Books, 2001. the Age of Abolition, part 1, Artists of
Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: A Phenom- the Renaissance and Baroque, edited
enology of Sound. Athens: Ohio by David Bindman and Henry Louis
University Press, 1976. Gates Jr., 93–190. Cambridge: Belk-
Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing: nap Press of Harvard University,
Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: 2010.
University of Chicago Press, 1995. Kapralov, A. “Zhivkov-Era Concentration
Jakobson, Roman. Pushkin and His Sculptural Camp.” Current Digest of the Soviet
Myth. Translated by John Burbank. Press 42, no. 16 (1990): 18–19.
The Hague: Mouton, 1975. Karavelov, Liuben. “Plovdiv.” Translated by
Jasanoff, Maya. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, Wendy Bracewell. In Orientations: An
and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. Anthology of East Europe Travel Writ-
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. ing, ca. 1550–2000, edited by Wendy
Johnston, Sarah Iles. “Fiat Lux, Fiat Ritus: Bracewell, 237–38. New York: Central
Divine Light and the Late Antique European University Press, 2009.
 Bibliography 201

Karsten, Gustav. “Germanic Philology.” Jour- Layher, William. Queenship and Voice in
nal of English and Germanic Philology Medieval Northern Europe. New York:
7, no. 2 (1908): 4–21. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Kausar, Kabir, ed. Secret Correspondence of Lehman, Robert. “Allegories of Rending: Kill-
Tipu Sultan. New Dehli: Light and ing Time with Walter Benjamin.”
Life, 1980. New Literary History 39, no. 2 (2008):
Keats, John. The Complete Poems of John 233–50.
Keats. Vol. 2. New York: Random Leijenhorst, Cornelis Hendrik. The Mecha-
House, 1994. nisation of Aristotelianism: The Late
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or: A Fragment of Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’
Life. Translated by Alastair Hannay, Natural Philosophy. Boston: Brill,
edited by Victor Eremita. New York: 2002.
Penguin Books, 1992. Lemke, Seglinde. Primitivist Modernism:
Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Black Culture and the Origins of Trans-
Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. atlantic Modernism. New York: Oxford
New York: Continuum Books, 2009. University Press, 1998.
King, Moses. King’s How to See New York: Lendvai, Paul. One Day That Shook the
A Complete Trustworthy Guide Book. Communist World: The 1956 Upris-
New York: Moses King, 1914. ing and Its Legacy. Translated by Ann
Korudzhiev, Dimitar. Predi da se umre: Major. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
fantaziya za Sasho Sladura. Sofia: sity Press, 2008.
Literaturen forum, 1995. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön. Trans-
Koshul, Basit Bilal. The Postmodern Signif- lated by Robert Philmore. London:
icance of Max Weber’s Legacy: Macmillan, 1874.
Disenchanting Disenchantment. New Licht, Alan. “Sound Art: Origins, Develop-
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ment, and Ambiguities.” Organized
Kramer, Lawrence. Opera and Modern Sound 14, no. 1 (2009): 3–10.
Culture: Wagner and Strauss. Berke- Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human
ley: University of California Press, Understanding: Abridged and Edited,
2007. with an Introduction and Notes. Edited
Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded by Kenneth Winkler. Indianapolis:
Field.” October 8 (1979): 30–44. Hackett, 1996.
LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspec- Lokke, Havard. “The Active Principle in
tives on Sound Art. New York: Stoic Philosophy.” In The World as
Continuum Books, 2006. Active Power: Studies in the History
Lafont, Jean-Marie, trans. “The Mémoires of of European Reason, edited by Juhani
Lieutenant-Colonel Russel concern- Pietarinen and Valtteri Viljanen,
ing Mysore: In the Service Historique 49–70. Boston: Brill, 2009.
de l’Armée de Terre, Château de Loughridge, Deirdre. Haydn’s Sunrise,
Vincennes, Paris.” In State Diplomacy Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual
Under Tipu Sultan, edited by Irfan Culture and the Emergence of Musical
Habib, 82–107. New Dehli: Tulika, Romanticism. Chicago: University of
2001. Chicago Press, 2016.
Lampe, John, and Marvin Jackson. Balkan Losseff, Nicky. “The Voice, the Breath, and
Economic History, 1550–1950: From the Soul: Song and Poverty in Thyrza,
Imperial Borderlands to Develop- Mary Barton, Alton Locke, and A Child
ing Nations. Bloomington: Indiana of Jago.” In The Idea of Music in Victo-
University Press, 1982. rian Fiction, edited by Sophie Fuller
Lapidge, Michael. “Stoic Cosmology.” In The and Nicky Losseff, 3–26. New York:
Stoics, edited by John Rist, 161–86. Routledge, 2016.
Berkeley: University of California Lynch, Michael. “Ontography: Investigating
Press, 1978. the Production of Things, Deflating
202 Bibliography

Ontology.” Social Studies of Science 43, ‌.org‌/stream‌/alumniquarterly100bloo

no. 3 (2013): 444–62. ‌_21‌/alumniquarterly100bloo‌_21‌_dj
Malhotra, Ashok. Making British Indian vu‌.txt.
Fictions: 1772–1823. New York: Milev, Emil. “Pomnite li Sasho Sladura?”
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Plovdiv utre, October 25, 2011.
Marciano, Alain. “The Historical and Philo- http://‌www‌.plovdivutre‌.bg‌/kultura‌
sophical Foundations of New Political /25718‌pomnite‌li‌sasho‌sladura (site
Economy.” In The Elgar Companion discontinued).
to Economics and Philosophy, edited Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. Albany:
by John Davis, Alain Marciano, and State University of New York Press,
Jochen Runde, 24–41. Northampton, 1994.
MA: Edward Elgar, 2004. Mitchell, Andrew. Heidegger Among the
Markov, Georgi. The Truth That Killed. Trans- Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of
lated by Liliana Brisby. New York: Dwelling. Stanford: Stanford Univer-
Ticknor and Fields, 1984. sity Press, 2010.
Mason, Peter. The Colossal: From Ancient Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago:
Greece to Giacometti. London: Reak- University of Chicago Press, 1994.
tion Books, 2013. Moskov, Nikolai. “Bulgaria e bila parviyat
Mawer, Deborah. French Music and Jazz mol na Sofia.” 24 Chasa, May 1, 2009.
in Conversation: From Debussy to https://‌www‌.24chasa‌.bg‌/Article
Brubeck. New York: Cambridge ‌/94528.
University Press, 2014. Moten, Fred. Consent Not to Be a Single
Maxwell, James Clerk. The Scientific Papers Being: Black and Blur. Durham: Duke
of James Clerk Maxwell. Vol. 2. Edited University Press, 2017.
by W. D. Niven. Mineola, NY: Dover ———. Into the Break: The Aesthetics of the
Press, 2003. Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis:
McCormack, Ryan. “Bulgarian Bulge: Jazz, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Modernity, and Subjectivity in Narasimha, Roddam. “Rockets in Mysore
Bulgaria.” PhD diss., University of and Britain, 1750–1850.” National
Texas at Austin, 2011. Aeronautical Laboratory, Project
———. “The Colossus of Memnon and Document DU 8503, April 2, 1985.
Phonography.” Sound Studies 2, no. 2 https://‌www‌.researchgate‌.net‌
(2016): 165–87. /publication‌/37179995‌_Rockets‌_in‌
———. “Technologies of Dismemberment: _Mysore‌_and‌_Britain‌_1750‌1850‌_AD.
Orpheus, Fascination, and Bulgarian Narrative sketches of the conquest of the
Etnodzhaz.” TDR / The Drama Review Mysore, effected by the British troops
61, no. 1 (2017): 99–113. and their allies, in the Capture of Serin-
McDermott, Lydia. Liminal Bodies, Repro- gapatam, and the Death of Tippoo
ductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric: Sultaun; May 4, 1799. 2nd ed. London:
Searching the Negative Spaces in Histo- West and Hughes, 1800.
ries of Rhetoric. New York: Lexington Neely, Jack. “Knoxville: Summer 1979.”
Books, 2016. Knoxville Mercury, August 5, 2015.
Métraux, Guy. Sculptors and Physicians in http://‌www‌.knoxmercury‌.com‌/2015
Fifth-Century Greece: A Preliminary ‌/08‌/05‌/knoxville‌summer‌1979.
Study. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Nelson, Charmaine. The Color of Stone:
University Press, 1995. Sculpting the Black Female Subject in
Metzner, Paul. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Nineteenth-Century America. Minne-
Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion apolis: University of Minnesota Press,
in Paris During the Age of Revolution. 2007.
Berkeley: University of California North, Michael. The Dialectic of Modernism:
Press, 1998. Race, Language, and Twentieth-Cen-
“Mid Year Commencement.” Alumni Quar- tury Literature. New York: Oxford
terly 50, no. 1 (1949). https://‌archive University Press, 1994.
 Bibliography 203

“On the Inconveniences of Barrel Organ.” by Arthur Denner. Ithaca: Cornell

Christian Observer 5 (1834): 333. University Press, 1992.
Ord-Hume, Arthur. “Barrel Organ.” In Potts, Alex. The Sculptural Imagination: Figu-
Continuum Encyclopedia of Popu- rative, Modernist, Minimalist. New
lar Music of the World, edited by John Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Shepherd, vol. 11, 327–29. New York: Prager, Brad. Aesthetic Vision and German
Continuum Books, 2003. Romanticism: Writing Images. Roches-
———. “Tipu’s Tiger—Its History and Descrip- ter: Camden House, 2007.
tion, Part II.” Music and Automata 3, Ragussis, Michael. Acts of Naming: The
no. 10 (1987): 64–80. Family Plot in Fiction. New York:
Osborne, Charles. The Complete Operas of Oxford University Press, 1987.
Mozart: A Critical Guide. New York: Raicheski, Georgi. Plovdivska entsiklopediya.
Indigo Books, 1997. Plovdiv: Zhanet 45, 1999.
Ouzounian, Gascia. “Sound Art and Spatial Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the
Practices: Situating Sound Installation Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by
Art Since 1958.” PhD diss., University Zakir Paul. New York: Verso Books,
of California, San Diego, 2008. 2013.
Panzanelli, Roberta. “Introduction: The Body Reed, John. The War in Eastern Europe. New
in Wax, the Body of Wax.” In Ephem- York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916.
eral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Reid, Robert. “Introduction: Pushkin; Myth
Human Figure, edited by Roberta and Monument.” In Alexander Push-
Panzanelli, 1–12. Los Angeles: Getty kin: Myth and Monument, vol. 2, Two
Research Institute, 2008. Hundred Years of Pushkin, edited by
Patch, Justin. “The Art of Noise: Hearing, Robert Reid and Joe Andrew, 1–14.
Feeling, and Experiencing the Sound New York: Rodopi Books, 2003.
of Democracy.” Soundings 92, nos. 3/4 Richards, David. Masks of Difference: Cultural
(2009): 303–29. Representations in Literature, Anthro-
Paterson, Mark. The Senses of Touch: Haptics, pology, and Art. New York: Cambridge
Affects, Technologies. New York: Berg, University Press, 1994.
2007. Riethmüller, Albrecht. “From Vox alias
Pentcheva, Bissera. The Sensual Icon: Space, Phoné to Voice: A Few Terminologi-
Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium. cal Observations.” In On Voice, edited
University Park: Pennsylvania State by Walter Bernhart and Lawrence
University Press, 2010. Kramer, 77–90. New York: Rodopi
Petry, Ann. “Mother Africa.” In Miss Muriel Books, 2014.
and Other Stories, 126–62. New York: Roberts, Nora Ruth. “Artistic Discourse in
Dafina Books, 2008. Three Short Stories by Ann Petry.”
Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes. New In Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical
York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Essays, edited by Hazel Arnett Ervin
Platt, J. C. “The East India House.” In London, and Hilary Holladay, 31–48. West-
vol. 5, edited by Charles Knight, port, CT: Praeger Books, 2004.
49–64. London: Charles Knight, 1843. Robinson, Keith. “Deleuze, Whitehead, and
Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Vol. Creativity.” In The Lure of Whitehead,
10. Edited by Harold Rackham. edited by Nicholas Gaskill and A. J.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Nocek, 207–31. Minneapolis: Univer-
Press, 1989. sity of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Plumly, Stanley. “This Mortal Body.” Kenyon Romanska, Magda. “Don Giovanni: The Law
Review 29, no. 3 (2007): 164–202. of the Father.” Boston Lyric Opera
Plutarch. Morals. Edited by William Watson (blog). http://‌blog‌.blo‌.org‌/don‌gio
Goodwin. Boston: Little and Brown, vanni‌law‌of‌father.
1874. Roulier, Scott. Kantian Virtue at the Intersec-
Poizat, Michel. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the tion of Politics and Nature: The Vale of
Pleasure Principle in Opera. Translated
204 Bibliography

Soul-Making. Rochester: University of Schulze, Holger. The Sonic Persona: An

Rochester Press, 2004. Anthropology of Sound. New York:
Rowland, Ingrid. “Don Giovanni: ‘And What Bloomsbury, 2018.
Communion Hath Light with Dark- Schwartz, Howard. Tree of Souls: The Mythol-
ness?’” In The Don Giovanni Moment: ogy of Judaism. New York: Oxford
Essays on the Legacy of an Opera, University Press, 2004.
edited by Lydia Goehr and Daniel Scott, Walter. The Complete Works of Sir
Herwitz, 1–17. New York: Columbia Walter Scott; with a Biography and His
University Press, 2006. Last Additions and Illustrations. Vol. 7.
Roy, Kaushik. War, Culture, and Society in New York: Connor and Cooke, 1833.
Early Modern South Asia, 1740–1849. Seelig, Lorenz. “Christoph Jamnitzer’s
New York: Routledge, 2011. ‘Moor’s Head.’” In Black Africans in
Rumph, Stephen. Mozart and Enlightenment Renaissance Europe, edited by T. F.
Semiotics. Berkeley: University of Earle and K. J. P. Lowe, 181–212. New
California Press, 2012. York: Cambridge University Press,
Russolo, Luigi. “The Art of Noises: Futurist 2005.
Manifesto.” In Audio Culture, Revised Segesten, Anamaria Dutceac. Myth, Identity,
Edition: Readings in Modern Music, and Conflict: A Comparative Analy-
edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel sis of Romanian and Serbian Historical
Warner, 11–16. New York: Blooms- Textbooks. Lanham, MD: Lexington
bury, 2017. Press, 2011.
Ryback, Timothy. Rock Around the Bloc: Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philoso-
History of Rock Music in Eastern phy of Mingled Bodies. Translated by
Europe and the Soviet Union. New Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley.
York: Oxford University Press, 1990. New York: Continuum Books, 2008.
Sandberg, Mark. Living Pictures, Miss- ———. Statues: The Second Book of Founda-
ing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, tions. Translated by Randolph Burks.
and Modernity. Princeton: Princeton New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
University Press, 2003. Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. Conver-
Savage, George. A Concise History of Bronzes. sations on Science, Culture, and Time.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1968. Translated by Roxanne Lapidius. Ann
Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in 1995.
the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Shaw, George Bernard. Man and Superman:
Princeton University Press, 1999. A Comedy and a Philosophy. New
Schenker, Alexander. The Bronze Horseman: York: Bretano’s, 1904.
Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great. Sheriff, Mary. Moved by Love: Inspired
New Haven: Yale University Press, Artists and Deviant Women in Eigh-
2003. teenth-Century France. Chicago:
Schmid, Rebecca. “Claus Guth’s Forest-Bound University of Chicago Press, 2004.
‘Don Giovanni’ at the Staatsoper; Sherrod, Alan. “In Metro Pulse: Review of
Musikfestspiele Potsdam’s New Plea- ‘Rachmaninoff Remembered.’” Classi-
sure Garden.” Musical America (blog), cal Journal (blog), February 19, 2013.
June 29, 2012. http://‌www‌.musical https://‌classicaljournal‌.wordpress
america‌.com‌/mablogs‌/?p‌=‌5768. ‌.com‌/2013‌/02‌/19‌/in‌metro‌pulse‌re
Schroeder, David. Mozart in Revolt: Strategies view‌of‌rachmaninoff‌remembered.
of Resistance, Mischief, and Deception. “Should Organ Grinders Be Expelled?” Punch,
New Haven: Yale University Press, or The London Charivari, November
1999. 18, 1903, 350.
Schroeder, Ian, and Heather Lehr Vagner. Shumnaliev, Dimitar. Sotsroman. Sofia: Trud,
Josephine Baker: Entertainer. New 2007.
York: Infobase, 2006. Slavov, Ivan. Zlatnata Reshetka: Vitsove ot
totalitarno i posttotalitarno vreme.
 Bibliography 205

Sofia: Universitat izdadenie Svetut Alison Anderson. Chicago: University

Kliment Ohridski, 2003. of Chicago Press, 2008.
Smith, Bruce. The Acoustic World of Early Stoiyanova, Penka, and Emil Iliev. Politicheski
Modern England: Attending to the opasni litsa: Vudvoriavaniya, trudova
O-Factor. Chicago: University of mobilizatsiya, izsledvaniya v Bulgar-
Chicago Press, 1999. iya sled 1944 g. Sofia: Univ. izd-vo Sv.
Smith, David Nowell. Sounding/Silence: Kliment Okhridski, 1991.
Martin Heidegger and the Limits of “A Stopless Organ.” Musical Times 41, no. 1
Poetics. New York: Fordham Univer- (1900): 52.
sity Press, 2013. Stronge, Susan. Tipu’s Tigers. London: Victo-
Smith, Mark M. The Smell of Battle, the Taste ria and Albert Museum, 2009.
of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil Strozek, Przemyslaw. “Futurist Responses to
War. New York: Oxford University African American Cultures.” In Afro-
Press, 2015. modernisms: Paris, Harlem, and the
Solla Price, Derek de. “Automata and the Avant-Garde, edited by Fionnghuala
Origins of Mechanism and Mecha- Sweeney and Kate Marsh, 43–61.
nistic Philosophy.” Technology and Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 9–23. Press, 2013.
Spivey, Nigel. “Bionic Statues.” In The Greek “Subtyll and Crafty Devices.” British Medical
World, edited by Anton Powell, Journal 1 (1898): 295–96.
442–60. New York: Routledge, 1995. Szendy, Peter. “The Auditory Re-Turn (The
———. Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Point of Listening).” In Thresholds
Fortitude. Berkeley: University of of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space,
California Press, 2001. edited by Sander van Maas, 18–29.
Staden, Heinrich von. “Anatomy and Physiol- New York: Fordham University Press,
ogy.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, 2015.
edited by Nigel Wilson, 44–46. New ———. Listen: A History of Our Ears. Trans-
York: Routledge, 2006. lated by Charlotte Mandell. New
Starr, S. Frederick. Red and Hot: Jazz in the York: Fordham University Press,
Soviet Union, 1917–1991. New York: 2008.
Limelight Editions, 1994. Taussig, Michael. Walter Benjamin’s Grave.
Steinberg, Michael. Listening to Reason: Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
Culture, Subjectivity, and Nine- 2006.
teenth-Century Music. Princeton: Taylor, Karin. Let’s Twist Again: Youth and
Princeton University Press, 2004. Leisure in Socialist Bulgaria. Bruns-
Steiner, Deborah. Images in Mind: Statues in wick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2006.
Archaic and Classical Greek Literature Tenev, Dragan. Tristahilyada Sofia i az
and Thought. Princeton: Princeton mezhdu dvete boini. Sofia: Bulgarski
University Press, 2001. Pisatel, 1997.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Tenev, Stanomir. “Sasho Sladura bil
Origins of Sound Reproduction. interniran zarai ‘zhilesta’ replika kam
Durham: Duke University Press, Bai Tosho.” Razkritiya, July 9, 2010.
2003. http://‌www‌.razkritiya‌.com‌/45584
Stewart, Kathleen. A Space on the Side of the (site discontinued).
Road: Cultural Poetics of an “Other” Till, Nicholas. Mozart and the Enlightenment:
America. Princeton: Princeton Univer- Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s
sity Press, 1996. Operas. New York: W. W. Norton,
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: 1993.
Race and the Cultural Politics of Listen- “Tippoo’s Tiger.” Penny Magazine of the
ing. New York: New York University Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Press, 2016. Knowledge, August 15, 1835, 319–20.
Stoichita, Victor. The Pygmalion Effect: From Todorov, Todor. “Plovdiv vdiga pametnik na
Ovid to Hitchcock. Translated by Sasho Sladura.” Maritza Dnes 116, no.
206 Bibliography

3435 (2002). http://‌www‌.eunet‌.bg‌ Art. New York: Continuum Books,

/media‌/show‌_story‌.html‌?issue‌ 2010.
=‌255259808 (site discontinued). Voskuhl, Adelheid. Androids in the Enlight-
Todorov, Tsvetan. Voices from the Gulag: Life enment: Mechanics, Artisans, and
and Death in Communist Bulgaria. Cultures of the Self. Chicago: Univer-
Translated by Robert Zaretsky. sity of Chicago Press, 2013.
University Park: Pennsylvania State Walter, Brenda Gardenour. “Corrupt Air,
University Press, 1999. Poisonous Places, and the Toxic
Tomlinson, Gary. Metaphysical Song: An Breath of Witches in Late Medie-
Essay on Opera. Princeton: Princeton val Medicine and Theology.” In Toxic
University Press, 1999. Airs: Body, Place, Planet in Historical
Toulmin, Stephen, and June Goodfield. Perspective, edited by James Rodger
The Architecture of Matter. Chicago: Fleming and Ann Johnson, 1–22.
University of Chicago Press, 1982. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Trower, Shelley. Senses of Vibration: A History Press, 2014.
of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound. New ———. Our Old Monsters: Witches, Were-
York: Continuum Books, 2012. wolves, and Vampires from Medieval
Tsonchev, Doncho. Preletni dushi: Portretch- Theology to Horror Cinema. Jefferson,
eta. Sofia: Trud, 2000. NC: McFarland, 2015.
Uzadinys, Algis. “Animation of Statues in Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit
Ancient Civilization and Neopla- Visions, Metaphors, and Media into
tonism.” In Late Antique Epistemology: the Twenty-First Century. New York:
Other Ways to Truth, edited by Panay- Oxford University Press, 2006.
iota Vassilopoulou and Stephen Clark, Warwick, Genevieve. “Making Statues Speak:
118–40. New York: Palgrave Macmil- Bernini and Pasquino.” In Articulate
lan, 2009. Objects: Voice, Sculpture, and Perfor-
“Uzhasna versiya: Koi e Sasho Sladura i mance, edited by Aura Satz and Jon
zashto negova statuya e izdignata nad Wood, 29–46. New York: Peter Lang,
Amfiteatura v Plovdiv.” Blitz, August 2009.
27, 2017. https://‌blitz‌.bg‌/obshtestvo Wells, Marion. The Secret Wound: Love-Mel-
‌/regioni‌/uzhasna‌versiya‌koy‌e‌sasho ancholy and Early Modern Romance.
‌sladura‌i‌zashcho‌negova‌statuya‌e‌izdig Stanford: Stanford University Press,
nata‌nad‌amfiteatra‌v‌plovdiv‌_news 2007.
539312‌.html. West, Cornel. “A Genealogy of Modern
Vanderheyden, Jennifer. The Function of Racism.” In From Modernism to Post-
the Dream and the Body in Diderot’s modernism: An Anthology, 2nd ed.,
Works. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. edited by Lawrence Cahone, 298–309.
Verdery, Katherine. The Political Lives of Malden, MA: Blackwell Books, 2003.
Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Whiteley, Sheila. “‘The Sound of Silence’:
Change. New York: Columbia Univer- Academic Freedom and Copy-
sity Press, 1999. right.” Popular Music 16, no. 2 (1997):
Vitz, Paul. Sigmund Freud’s Christian Uncon- 220–22.
scious. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Whitmarsh, Tim. “‘Greece Is the World’:
Eerdmans, 1993. Exile and Identity in the Second
Vizcaíno-Alemán, Melina. “Counter-Moder- Sophistic.” In Being Greek Under
nity, Black Masculinity, and Female Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second
Silence in Ann Petry’s Fiction.” In Sophistic, and the Development of
Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and Empire, edited by Simon Goldhill,
the Literary Left, edited by Alex Lubin, 269–305. New York: Cambridge
120–36. Jackson: University Press of University Press, 2001.
Mississippi, 2007. Williams, Bernard. On Opera. New Haven:
Voegelin, Salomé. Listening to Noise and Yale University Press, 2006.
Silence: Toward a Philosophy of Sound
 Bibliography 207

Wills, Martin. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Zabalo, Jacobo. “Don Juan (Don Giovanni):
Machines: Science Fiction and the Seduction and Its Absolute Medium
Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth in Music.” In Agamemnon to
Century. Kent: Kent State University Guadalquivir. Vol. 1, 141–58, of Kierke-
Press, 2006. gaard’s Literary Figures and Motifs.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. History of the Kierkegaard Research: Sources,
Art of Antiquity. Translated by Harry Reception, and Resources 16. New
Francis Mallgrave. Los Angeles: Getty York: Routledge, 2016.
Research Institute, 2006. Zeiss, Laurel. “Permeable Boundaries in
Yurchak, Alexei. “Bodies of Lenin: The Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni.’” Cambridge
Hidden Science of Communist Sover- Opera Journal 13, no. 2 (2001): 115–39.
eignty.” Representations 129, no. 1 Ziarek, Krzysztof. Language After Heideg-
(2015): 116–57. ger. Bloomington: Indiana University
———. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was Press, 2013.
No More: The Last Soviet Generation.
Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006.
Index

acousmatic voice, 180 Bamforth, Nigel, 85

as evidence of spiritual inhabitation, 41 barrel organ, 69–70, 74–78, 185n23,
in opera staging and orchestration, 99, 186n40–41
104 Baudelaire, Charles, 18
pneumatic connections of, 55–56 Bell, Alexander Graham, 132
sound technology and, 34 Benjamin, Walter, 156–59
speculative cosmology and, 165 Berkeley, George, 92
as supplement to statuary, 18 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 35
See also voice/vocality Black Sea, 143, 146, 150–51
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 122 body
aether, 41, 52, 54, 109, 164–65 anthropocentrism of non-statues and, 29
Agamben, Giorgio, 40, 42–44, 48 black femininity and, 11, 112–14, 124–30
Alexander, Stephon, 166 color and, 115–17
Alighieri, Dante, 42–43, 89 empiricism and, 91–95
allegory, 157–59 hearing and, 13–14, 163
Anaximenes of Miletus, 44–45, 56 molecular signatures of, 167
Andrews, Donald Hatch, 12–13, 166–70, naming and, 154–60
173–74 performative reanimation of, 178, 180
Apollo and Daphne, 35 pneuma and, 41–53, 56–57
Aquinas, Thomas, 19, 34 racial representations of, 119–23
Aristotle, 49–51, 55, 76, 134, 164 sensory experience of, 31, 33, 90–91
Athenaeum (magazine), 79 silence/death and, 137–40
audiovisual litany, 8, 13 sound as becoming, 26–27, 109
auditory litany, 13 sound representing castration of, 82
aurality, 3–4, 6–7, 10–13, 58, 173 statues as representing the, 19–20, 22–23,
automaton/automata, 10, 19 39–40, 55, 176
Condillac and, 92–93 stone artifice as, 97, 102–3
head of Albertus Magnus, 181n3 vibrational affect and, 12, 24–25, 96–97,
relationship to touch, 33 123–24, 164
technology/magic dichotomy and, 65, wax and, 131–33
74–78 See also embodiment
Vaucanson and Jaquet-Droz making, Boehrer, Bruce, 20
186n39 Bohm, David, 166, 169
weirdifact and, 84, 86 Bokarov, Viktor, 177
Bond, Sarah, 122
Baal Hammon. See Moloch Boris III, 141, 153, 191n13
Badiou, Alain, 5 Boureau-Deslandes, André-François, 94–95,
Baker, Josephine, 11–12, 175 97
career in Paris, 112, 114–15, 123 Brach, Paul, 114
Château des Milandes and, 111–12, 133–34 Brakhman, Evgeny, 178–80
Chouski sculpture of, 134 Brancusi, Constantin, 23
Jorama exhibit, 112–13, 130, 133 British Empire, 11, 64–68, 73, 77–80, 85–6
race and performance, 113–15, 123, 128 Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU),
represented in wax, 133–34 141
vocal silencing of, 128–30 Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), 137,
Baker, Malcolm, 90 142–44, 146–48, 150
 Index 209

Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), 137 corps sonore, 96–97, 109

Burke, Edmund, 72 cosmopolitanism, 67, 86, 138
bronze Cowan, Bainard, 158
blackness and, 11–12, 113, 117–20, 123–25, Craig, Maxine Leeds, 118
128, 130 Cummings, E. E., 114
Bronze Horseman and, 60–61
comparison with wax, 131–33 Dafinov, Nikolas, 151, 154
Hellenic examples of, 36–37, 57–58, 61, Dankov, Danko, 137–38
182n2 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 89–90, 98, 102, 107, 109,
materiality of statues and, 29 188n25
Moloch sacrifices and, 20 Darwin, Charles, 37
Newhart statue as, 173–74 Darzhaven Sigurnost (DS), 148
Rachmaninoff statue as, 177–78 Daskalova, Svetla, 152, 193n49
silence and, 158 Davis, Richard, 73
Sladura statue as, 136, 140 De Broglie, Louis, 165–66, 169
vibration of, 33–34, 123, 162 Deleuze, Gilles, 4–5, 9, 116, 163
whiteness and, 122 Derrida, Jacques, 56, 190n11
The Bronze Horseman (Mednyi Vsadnik), Descartes, René, 4, 22
59–61, 184n66 mechanistic concepts of 52, 74, 91
mind/body dualism, 91–93, 115–16
Cage, John, 25, 139 soul in pineal gland, 53
Carlson, Roy, 108 on wax, 132
Campanella, Thomasino, 51 Dickens, Charles, 76–77
Carlyle, Thomas, 77 Diderot, Denis, 94–95, 97
Caverero, Adriana, 48 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 131
Charlottesville, 122–23 Dimbleby, David, 85
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya, 26 Doinov, Emanuil, 150
Chervenkov, Borislav, 150 Don Giovanni (character), 87–91, 100–103,
Chervenkov, Valko, 143, 147–48, 150–51, 155 105–10, 173
Cheng, Anne Anlin, 112, 115, 129 Don Giovanni (opera), 11, 60, 89–90
Chicago, 170–73 influences upon, 187–88n7
Chillida, Eduardo, 24–25 Mozart’s enthusiasm for writing, 98
Chion, Michel, 99 modern settings of, 105–9
Christian, Kathleen Wren, 58 orchestration for, 100–103
Christian Observer, 76 Dunaevskii, Isak, 145
Chrysostom, Dio, 172 Dyson, Frances, 55
Chua, Daniel, 96 Dzhaz na Mladite (Jazz of the Youth), 148
Classen, Constance, 33 Dzhaz na Optimistite (Jazz of the Opti-
Cohen, H. Floris, 51–52 mists), 144–47, 191n26
Colley, Linda, 81
Colossus of Memnon, 6–8, 172 East India Company, 63–64, 70–72, 80–81
Commendatore, 11, 29, 97–98, 175 Echevarria, Roberto González, 124
empiricist connections to, 93 Eisler, Hans, 145
Guth’s presentation of, 89, 108–10 Elizabeth I, 75
in Man and Superman, 105–7 Elvis statue, 17, 34
modern incarnations of, 108 comparison to Statue Stories Chicago,
musical aspects of, 100–104 171, 173
representative of ancien regime, 89–90 philosophical implications of, 3–4, 6, 29
vocal presence of, 91 theft and recovery of, 1–2, 181n1
Condillac, Éttiene Bonnot de, 92–94, 97, 103 pretext for Rachmaninoff event, 176–77
Connor, Steven, 116–17 embodiment
Coote, Sir Eyre, 80 Cartesian theory of, 91
Cordier, Charles-Henri-Joseph, 119 color and, 117
210 Index

embodiment (continued) Gibson, John, 120

Condillac on, 92 golem, 17, 184n65
connection between voice and self, 13 Goswami, Supriya, 82
sculpture and, 22–23, 90, 154 Greeley, Horace, 33
sound art and, 26–27 Greenberg, Clement, 23
pneumatic voice and, 49 Gross, Kenneth, 17–19, 56–57, 59
race and, 123 Guth, Claus, 89, 108–9
Enders, Katerina, 140
Enlightenment, The, 7 Haidar Ali, 65, 67, 81, 185n19, 187n53
animated statue in, 92–95, 97 Hale, Edward, 119–20, 122
animating power of breath and, 38–40 Harris, George, 63
aristocratic power and, 60–61, 89–91 Havell, E. B., 73
demystification of statues in, 21–22, 27, hearing
29 anthropological framework for, 35
eclipse of pneumaticism in, 10, 52, 54–55, aurality as manifestation of, 3–4
183n50 Commendatore’s voice and, 90–91
French modernism as reaction to 115 comparison with sight, 8
mapped onto medieval thought, 43 comparison with touch, 33
Mozart and, 98, 103 dichotomy with listening, 9, 13–14
post-WWI failure of, 23 embodied sense of, 162–64, 169–70
racial representation and, 122 grasping materiality through, 47, 97
rationalism of automata in, 10, 76 pneuma and, 10, 42
sense of touch and, 33 public sounding statuary and, 171, 173–74
Estrada za khumor i satira, 146 sculpted ear in dialogue with, 8, 62, 175,
Evans, Henry Ridgely, 77 180
event silence as part of, 12
definition of, 4–6, 181n2 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 24–25, 29–30, 78, 163,
hearing and, 14 190n11
pneuma and, 60 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 21
resonance and, 113–14 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 30, 167
Serres on, 28 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 21–22, 25, 29, 33,
sensory transcendence as, 162 77, 95
silence as, 161 Heyer, Heather, 122
social possibilities of, 13, 164, 179–80 Hoffman, E. T. A., 19, 76
sounding statue as, 8–9, 16, 34–35, 64, Hofland, Barbara, 82, 84–85
175–76 Horowitz, Vladmir, 179
sound manifesting as, 30–31 Hugo, Victor, 104–5
Hume, David, 92
Falconet, Étienne Maurice, 21, 59, 94 Hunter, James, 69, 71, 186n27
Flaubert, Gustave, 28
Fletcher, Harvey, 30 Idomeneo (1781), 98–102, 104
Forbes, James, 72 Ihde, Don, 139
Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 122 Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organi-
Foucault, Michel, 74 zation (IMRO), 141
Fried, Michael, 24 Ivanova, Lea, 147, 152–53
Ivy, Marilyn, 138
Galatea, 33, 94–97, 103, 105
Galen, 47, 53–54 Jaquet-Droz, Henri-Louis, 75–76, 186n39
Ganev, Dimitar, 145, 149 Janasoff, Maya, 64
Gay, Peter, 23 Jarves, James Jackson, 119
Gentleman’s Magazine, 80 jazz, 137, 139–40, 142–48, 191n17
Georgiev, Lyudmil, 152 Joyce, James, 108, 171, 188n47
Gerasimov, Bogomil, 150
 Index 211

Kahn, Douglas, 26 marble

Kane, Brian, 26, 163, 182n30 animation of, 95–96
Kant, Immanuel, 21–22, 71, 74, 131 automata compared to, 77
Karavelov, Liuben, 135 Commendatore performing as, 101, 106
Keats, John, 72, 83–85 epigram carved into, 58
Kempeler, Wolfgang, 74 Greek pneumaticism and, 61
Kierkegaard, Søren, 89, 101 Hume referencing, 92
Kim-Cohen, Seth, 34 Laocoön and his Sons as, 36–37
Kirkpatrick, William, 68, 184n9 statues made of, 29, 33
Knoxville, 34, 177–79 wax compared to, 131
kontslager, 145, 148, 150, 152, 192n40, whiteness and, 118–23, 125
193n48 Winckelmann on, 39
Korabov, Nikola, 140 vibration of, 162
Korudzhiev, Dimitar, 140, 152–54 Markov, Georgi, 137, 143
Kramer, Lawrence, 89 Mehmet III, 75
Krauss, Rosalind, 23–25 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 33
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 104–5
LaBelle, Brandon, 25, 163 Michelson and Morley, 40, 54, 165
La Création du Monde (Milhaud), 114 Miller, Evelyn, 177–78
Landrieu, Mitch, 122 Milton, John, 51
Laocoön, 9, 29, 37–40, 62–63, 120, 175 Mishra, Vijay, 72
Laocoön and his Sons, 36–39, 61, 182n2, Miss Bronze pageant, 118
182n5–6 Mitchell, Andrew, 25
Laocoön (essay), 60 modernism, 23, 105, 115, 123, 133
Latour, Bruno, 27 modernity, 176, 180
Layher, William, 50 African American experience of, 124, 128
Le Corbusier, 129 automata as technologically rational in,
Lee, Robert E., 121–22 65
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 4, 33, 98 Bulgaria and, 136
Lenin, Vladimir, 20, 131, 143 crisis of subjectivity within, 89
Leporello, 89–90, 100–101, 103, 105, 108–9 decline of pneuma within, 54, 164
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 9–10, 37–41, 55, fragmentation of experience in, 23
60–63, 120, 182n4–6 Galatea as cause célèbre in, 94
Licht, Alan, 26 Heideggerian radiance as response to, 24
listening (to), 9, 13–14, 26, 30, 171, 176 problem of sounding statues in, 3
Locke, John, 21–22, 33, 92 Russolo’s intonarumuri and, 169
London statue as ritual object and, 29
automata and, 75 Tipu Sultan and, 67
barrel organ and, 76–77, 185n23, 187n46 weirdifact and, 78–79
Joyce’s Ulysses and, 108 Moloch, 20–21, 28
Madame Tussaud museum in, 112, 132 Moten, Fred, 133
Man or Superman premiere in, 105 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 11, 60, 89–91,
melodramas featuring Tipu in, 68 97–107, 109
Tipu’s Tiger in, 10, 64, 69–71, 79, 82 Mughal Empire, 66–67
Loughridge, Deirdre, 76 Munro, Hugh, 79–82, 187n55
Lynch, Michael, 31 Munro, Sir Hector, 80–81, 187n53
Musée Grévin, 112
magic of naming, 157, 159 Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, 119
Magnus, Albertus, 19, 34, 76, 181n3 Musical Times, 75
Malabou, Catherine, 29, 182n28 Mysore, 10, 63–68, 70–71, 80–81
Malhotra, Ashok, 68
Manolov, Emanuil, 150, 152 nachträglichkeit, 138, 140, 155, 159
Maratha Empire, 65–66 naturophilosophie, 104
212 Index

Neely, Jack, 177–78 Pushkin, Aleksandar, 59–60, 184n66

Nelson, Charmaine, 119 Pygmalion
Neoplatonism, 43, 48–50, 183n50 desire of, 35
Neuhaus, Max, 25 French adaptations of, 94–98, 108
Newhart, Bob, 13, 171–74 influence on Don Giovanni, 11, 103, 105
Nikolov, Aleksandar, See Sladura, Sasho Mother Africa and, 126
Nikolov, Georgi, 140–41 Ovid’s version of, 17, 40, 94
Nott and Glidden, Types of Mankind (1854), sense of touch and, 33, 95–96, 182n11
120, 122 Shaw and, 107
transformation and, 109
ontography, 31
opera seria, 98 Quaglio, Lorenzo, 99
Ord-Hume, Arthur J. G., 69, 84, 185n23,
186n40 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 177–80
Ottoman Empire, 66 Ragussis, Michael, 157
Ovcharov, Asen, 142, 144–45 Rameau, Jean-Phillipe, 96
Ovid, 17, 40, 94 Reed, John, 142
Reinhardt, Ad, 22
Palmistry, 83–84 Renaissance, The
Panzanelli, Roberta, 131 automata from, 74
Paris, 98, 112, 114–15, 119, 123 influence of Laocoön and his Sons on,
Patty Duke Show, The, 156 36–37
Petry, Ann, 124–26, 189n33 pneumatological epigrams from, 58
Philo of Alexandria, 49 race and statuary during, 118
phonography, 7–8, 18, 132 rationalization of aesthetics in, 21, 26
Picasso, Pablo, 114, 123 resonance, 13
Plath, Sylvia, 159 between subject and object, 25
Plato, 20, 40, 52, 155, 170 between wave and particle, 169
Platt, J. C., 71 bronze and, 113, 123, 174
Pliny the Elder, 36, 182n2 cosmology and, 168, 170, 193n4
Plovdiv, 12, 135–37, 140–41, 143, 145–46, 160 creation in performance, 109
Plutarch, 47 pneuma and, 53–4
pneuma, 10, 109, 163, 176 sonic event and, 30
Aquinas on, 49–51 vibration of material and, 163, 166
Aristotle on, 43, 45–48 Rodin, Auguste, 23, 168
Bacon on, 53–54 Rodó, José Enrique, 123–24, 126–27
breath and, 40, 43–46, 48–50, 53–57, Romanska, Magda, 90
60–61 Romanticism, 22, 59, 89
early modern science on, 183n38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 73, 95–98, 108,
epigrams and, 56–59 188n21
Galen on, 47, 53–54 Rumph, Steven, 91, 103
musical sound and, 96 Russel, Lieutenant-Colonel, 67
Neoplatonism and, 43, 48–50, 183n50 Russolo, Luigi, 169, 193n12, 194n13
Oracle of Delphi and, 183n49
sounding statue and, 41, 44 Salzburg, 89, 98
Stoicism and, 43, 46–51, 52 Sandberg, Mark, 133
relationship with spiritus and ruah, 48 Savage, Kirk, 120–21
vibration and, 164 Schaeffer, Pierre, 25
voice and, 41–42, 44–62 Schmid, Rebecca, 89
Poizat, Michel, 102 Schroeder, David, 98
post-communist era, 140, 155 Schulze, Holger, 30–31, 163
Prampolini, Enrico, 114 Scott, Walter, 67–68
primitivism, 112–13, 128, 133 sculpted ear, 6, 8, 86, 133, 161, 175–76
 Index 213

Seattle, 1–3, 34, 171, 173 Stewart, Kathleen, 179–80

Segesten, Anamaria Dutceac, 155 stilyagi, 147
Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, 64, 79 Sveta Nedelya, 141, 149, 191n13
Seringapatam (Sri Rangapattana), 63, 67–69, Sydenham, Benjamin, 69
71, 184n1, 185n25 syrrhesis, 30–31
Serres, Michel, 28–31, 33–34, 115–17 Szendy, Peter, 14, 102
Shaho, 153
Shaw, George Bernard, 105–8 Taussig, Michael, 156–57, 159, 179
Sherrod, Alan, 179 Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, 114
silence/silencing, 138–40, 175, 190–91n11 Tipu Sultan Fath Ali Khan, 10
as allegorical presence, 158–60 British political imagination and, 67–68
death as form of, 152 British popular culture and, 64, 78,
epigrams and, 58 82–86, 184n4
mouth of Laocoön embodying, 36–40, collections of objects, 64, 66, 184n9,
182n6 184n10
operatic manifestations of, 99–100 death at Seringapatam, 63
political repression and, 154–55 knowledge of Hugh Munro’s death,
race and, 12, 130, 189n34 80–81, 187n55
relationship to sounding, 161–62 rise to power, rule, and political sensi-
sound art and, 27, 36 bilities, 65–67, 184n11, 184–85n12,
statuary and, 9, 12, 61, 113, 128 185n17, 187n53
Simeonov, Dimitar, 144–46 Tipu’s Tiger and, 70–72, 185n23, 185n25
Simpson, Homer, 15–17, 35, 176 Tipu’s Tiger, 10–11, 64–65, 175
Sing London, 170 acquisition and display in London, 70
skin description of mechanisms, 69–70,
Baker, Josephine, and, 113–15, 123, 130, 185n22, 185n23, 186n35
134 Regency-era literature and poetry and,
bronze as analogous to, 12, 113, 117–18, 82–84
123, 125, 134 related to concept of the sublime, 72–73
concept of “second skin” and, 115, 129 relationship to automata, 74–75
etymology of color and, 116–17 relationship to barrel organ, 75–76
hearing through, 25 speculation of origins, 71–72, 185n25,
locus of the soul in, 115–16 186n27, 187n55
Pygmalion and, 126 weirdifact and, 77–79, 81, 84–86
representations of race through, 117–20 Tomlinson, Gary, 102
wax as representation of, 113, 130–33 Trower, Shelley, 164
Sladura, Sasho, 12, 161, 175, 176 Tsonchev, Doncho, 152
allegory and, 158–60 Tussaud, Madame, 112, 131–32
background and career of, 140–42
duality of naming, 155–57 Wagner, Richard, 99
imprisonment and death of, 149–54, Wales, James, 72
192n47 Walter, Brenda Gardenour, 50
statue of, 136–39 Warner, William John (“Chiero”), 84
Smith, Bruce, 52 Waugh, Edwin, 75
Sofia, 136, 140–43, 145–49, 151, 153, 190n4 wax, 11–12, 112–14, 130–33, 190n49, 190n53,
sound art, 9, 13, 25–27, 32–34, 163 190n54
sounding statue, 3–6, 8–11, 13–14 weird, 78
sound studies, 3, 12, 30, 162–63 weirdifact, 78–81, 84–86
Spasov, Mircho, 148–50 Wellesley, Arthur, 63
Spinoza, Baruch, 4, 162 Wellesley, Richard, 63, 67, 70
Statue Stories Chicago, 13, 170–73, 175 Whitehead, Alfred North, 4–5, 162, 193n2
Steinberg, Michael, 102 Williams, Bernard, 105
Sterne, Jonathan, 7–8, 13
214 Index

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 21, 38–40, embodiment and representation of, 84

77, 182n11 interpreting sound from statue as, 19–20,
35
Varesco, Giambattista, 98 materiality and, 11, 91, 96–97, 101–10,
Vaucanson, Jacques, 74–76, 186n39 123, 126–30
Verdery, Katherine, 19 metaphysical manifestations of, 7, 13,
vibration 101–2
affect and, 12, 124, 162–63 pneumatological implications of, 10,
Andrews on, 166–69 40–42, 44–62
human body creating, 96 sculptural exhibtion and, 133, 170–73
science of, 164–66, 193n4, 193n5 sensory perception and, 91
sculpture and, 24–25 silencing of, 12
performance of, 109, 193–94n12 vibration and, 124, 168, 173
Vienna, 98 See also acousmatic voice
Voegelin, Salomé, 14, 190n11
voice/vocality Zhivkov, Todor, 148–50, 155
aurality and, 3 Zlatnata Reshetka, 152
death scream and, 82–83, 154 Zlatni Piasutsi, 150