[Historyoftheory] CFP: Voice and Sound in Diderot

[Loughridge, Deirdre]

Dear SMT History of Music Theory interest group,

Please see below for a CFP of potential interest. Feel free to get in touch with me with any questions!

All best,
Deirdre


CFP: Voice and Sound in Diderot - themed issue of Diderot Studies

We propose to gather contributions that examine voice and sound in Diderot’s works and cultural milieu. Scholars across literary and music studies have found the French Enlightenment to be a formative moment for thinking about the production, meanings and powers of voice and sound. However, the disputes between Rameau and Rousseau and the canon of critical theory have largely overshadowed Diderot’s discussions and theorizations of the voice. How might histories and theorizations of voice be different, taking Diderot’s thought into fuller account? How might we understand Diderot differently, paying greater heed to the dynamics of sound?

We wish to bring together perspectives from multiple disciplines in order to address the complex operations of voice and sound in Diderot’s writings and the globally networked world in which he produced them. Denis Diderot discussed, theorized and described the voice across a variety of works and genres: literary, musical, philosophical and scientific. For the literary voice, Diderot discusses in Eloge de Richardson how readers encounter descriptions of a simulated literary voice in which a reader could listen to the tone and accents of characters. According to Diderot, a reader of Richardson should recognize the temperament of a character through his speech. “If there is a secret feeling in the soul of the character [Richardson] introduces, listen carefully, and you will hear a dissonant tone that will reveal it.” The simulated voice that Diderot describes in Richardson’s novels is present in Diderot’s literary works such as La Religieuse and Jacques le Fataliste. Diderot however is not merely concerned with the literary representation of the voice. His writings on acoustics, aesthetics, and materialism explore how instrumental music could evoke emotional meaning, or even narrative action, through sound; how expressivity could be achieved by a mechanical organ; and how the mechanics of musical instruments helped explain conscious thought. The voice was also a material and sonic phenomenon at the heart of conceptions of what it meant to be human, traversing “natural” and “artificial” expression, and drawn into issues of universality and difference. In arguing against the view that humans were originally solitary, the Histoire des deux Indes states that “the multiplication of signs of communication in a physical system which joins to the accents of the voice, common to so many animals, the language of fingers and gestures, which is specific to the human species…all these facts and arguments seem to prove that humans tend by their nature to being sociable.” For this special edition, we invite essays that explore representations of the voice and sound across a range of genres and texts.

We invite proposals from a variety of scholars engaged with questions of voice and sound, including from the perspectives of literary studies, musicology, music theory, history of science, and media studies. Through the lens of Diderot, we ask contributors to reflect on such matters as: what and who has a voice (humans, animals, objects); the relationship between speaking or singing voices and their textual representations, virtual counterparts, or metaphorical extensions; the roles of voice, sound, and text in the circulation of ideas, feelings, commodities, etc. Please propose essays that explore the voice and sound in theater, opera, music, music theory, philosophy, literature or science.

Deadlines

Volume Editors: Deirdre Loughridge and Scott M. Sanders

Proposals should be submitted by November 1, 2022, in the form of an abstract (150-300 words), to d.loughridge at northeastern.edu and scott.m.sanders at dartmouth.edu.

The text of selected proposals should be received by May 15, 2023 (30,000 to 40,000 characters, including spaces and notes) and the contributions will be published in Diderot Studies in 2024.

Contributions may be written in French or English.

CFP website: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/diderotvoiceandsound/



Deirdre Loughridge, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Music

Department of Music | College of Arts, Media & Design

Northeastern University

365 Ryder Hall | 617-373-2702

d.loughridge at northeastern.edu
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