Sensual Encounters with the Materiality of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.2

Abstract

This chapter offers a transdisciplinary collaboration that disrupts the discursive and theoretical boundaries between the Social Sciences and the discipline of Music. It draws on both the vocabularies of the Music discipline and on new materialist philosophies of Deleuze, Barad and Bennett. The authors, a social scientist and a musician/musicologist, together explore the specific materiality of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18 (Rach 2) and their intra-actions with it. They explore the social and expressive dimensions of this opus as it is performed and video-recorded by the StPetersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Yuri Temirkanov, with Denis Matsuev as pianist. The authors document their intra-action with the music, that is, its affect, as it impacts on them through their encounter with it—through their immersion in it—through the emergent listening that brings it to life. The focus of the chapter is on the music and its performance, and on the authors’ multi- sensual encounters with it. In those encounters they open themselves to the vitality and aliveness of the musical matter, registering its vibrations on the matter of their own bodies, and through those bodies’ memories and emotional and philosophical attachments. In doing so they venture outside Music’s more familiar, specific, disciplinary languages and syntax. The music is read, in this way, as visual and tactile material, its vibrations registering within human/music/instrument/score relations, which are always in-between, and not separable from each other. In this way, the authors register the music in its material moment-by moment, relational specificity, and, at the same time, they consider the infinite, manifold of entanglements that emanate from this singular, extraordinary work. They explore its many and diverse apparatuses of bodily production, including their own entanglements within it. In solidarity with the bells tolling in Ukraine and across Europe, the authors leap off the opening bars of this particular performance of Rach 2 to consider the lively array of entangled possibilities that emerge from the bells that have been woven into the materiality of the work, making connections with other works that have also emerged from Eastern Europe.