Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind

Book excerpt: Why does Stanley Cavell's philosophical thought matter for music? And how did Cavell's musical practice and appreciation of music give shape to his indelible philosophical claims about cinema, human speech, opera, the expression of skepticism, and ordinary language philosophy? Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind provides a first-of-its-kind intervention by leading philosophers and scholars of music into an intellectual landscape in need of such charting. As a performer who then trained as a philosopher, the arc of Cavell's wide-ranging investigation of music maps consistently with a proximate concern for the features of human experience that involve music and sound, including the sound of prose, authorial voice (its possession, its divestment, its arrogation), the presence/problem/potentiality of silence in communication, and related features of sonic phenomena central to life lived at the scale of the everyday. Despite widespread scholarly fascination with the intersection of “Cavell” and “music”--that music is famously a core theme for him--no book like this has yet appeared. Moreover, our efforts here are addressed to the serious student (at all levels) and the general reader alike arriving from many precincts of thought and practice: musical performance, literary theory, cultural studies, musicology, and philosophy.