The sonic self: Musical subjectivity and signification

Abstract

‘Can't paint’ believes Lily in Virginia Woolf's wartime English Novel To the Lighthouse, only to discover she can and how well she can. ‘Can't write’: Virginia Woolf finds she can too. And so does Naomi Cumming in her book The Sonic Self, a moving and serious contribution to musicology and the philosophy of music about how a musician finds her way through philosophy to solve her early anxieties about violin playing. It is a study, the author writes, ‘born of perplexities in the experience of performing‘ (p. 19), a study, we might add in Woolf's terms, that finds it can move past R to Q. ‘Can't play, can't sing’: how does a violinist learn to sing upon an instrument? By discovering that her violin is an extension of her body, and her body the embodiment of her subjectivity. Cummings book is a deeply motivated, lucid, but also a most scholarly enquiry into the relation between dynamic and lived subjectivity and the nature of music in its performance, an enquiry that is semiotic, pragmatist and slightly feminist in its methodological orientation. It is over 380 pages long and evidences a considerable breadth of reading in both the Anglo-American and Continental traditions.

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