Musical sound ‘touches’ humans in a variety of ways, as for instance if I remark after listening to the recording of Promises by Pharoah Sanders, Floating Points, and the London Symphony Orchestra that the music was ‘touching’. We also speak of a pianist’s ‘touch’ on the keyboard, referring to how the speed of the arm and finger movement create different qualities of sound.
There is another sense of ‘touch,’ a sense rendered by composer Liza Lim who remarks: ‘For me music is absolutely haptic.’ For Lim, the hapticity of musical sound is a central component of musical meaning. The sonic touch of music—music’s hapticity--bestows a sensuous significance through the body’s communion with sonic vibrations. Musical sound touches, literally, through the vibratory effects of air. But it also touches through the listening body’s sense-making communications with the sonic world.
In this lecture, I develop the idea of sonic touch through which music communicates with embodied listeners. Building upon the thought of 20th and 21st century philosophers about the sense of touch, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Kearney, Judith Butler and others, I develop an understanding and approach to sonic touch. My musical interlocutor is Anthony Cheung’s Tactile Values (2023), for 2 pianos + keyboards and 2 percussionists. I present a phenomenology of sonic touch, investigating the music of Cheung’s Tactile Values.
Eschewing any explanatory mode in his program notes, Cheung includes two quotations. One, by the early twentieth century art critic Bernard Berenson on Renaissance painting, gives the work its title. Berenson writes that the painter and the viewer together are involved in the craft of ‘giving tactile values to retinal impressions.’ In engaging in a phenomenological investigation of Cheung’s work, I explore how composer and listener give tactile values to musical impressions.
Judith Lochhead is Professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University and President of the Society for Music Theory. Lochhead’s research focuses on music of the present from analytical, historical, critical, and ethnographic perspectives. Lochhead recently co-edited The Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium, together with Peter Edwards and Christine Dysers (Edinburgh University Press). Other recent articles in edited collections include: “Canonic Machines: Repetition and Progressive Variation in Gubaidulina’s Fourth String Quartet,” Oxford Handbook of Variation and Motivic Development, edited by Jeffrey Swinkin (2025); “Timbre Realities: A Phenomenological Study of Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus.” Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, Steege, Wiskus, De Souza, eds. (2023); “Undisciplined,” SMT Colloquy, Music Theory Spectrum (2023); “Multiplicities, Truth, Ethics: A Queering Analysis of Chaya Czernowin’s Anea Crystal,” Queer Music Theory, ed. Gavin Lee (2023); “Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho and Heroes of the 21st Century,” The Heroic in Music, Beate Kutsche and Katherine Butler, eds. (2022). Recent books as co-editor include: Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World, Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta and Stephen Decatur Smith, eds. (2021); Music’s Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies, Sally Macarthur, Judith Lochhead, and Jennifer Shaw eds. (2015). As sole author, Lochhead published Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis (2015).