Hearing the Music in COVID-19’s Medically-Induced Coma: An Interview with Dr. William C. Banfield

In this interview of Dr. William Banfield by music therapist, Dr. Suzanne Hanser, Banfield describes his diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. While in a medically-induced coma, Banfield heard the music that his wife brought to the hospital, and the music became a vital part of the dreams and nightmares he experienced during his 17 days in a coma (April 4-20, 2020). Dr. Banfield describes how this affected his life and shares lessons about music and meaning.

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera (What the Listener Sees…)

The internalized visualization of symphonic music was validated by “New German School” programmaticism. Wagner’s mature music-dramas, with their symphonic “underscores,” were even theorized by him as “deeds of music made visible.” By locating dramatic agency in his concealed orchestra, Wagner problematized in advance his later disparagement by critics for whom the cinema downgraded music to the role of redundant accompaniment. Recent work on music in popular melodrama further complicates our understanding of critical battles fought over music and meaning in mass-entertainment theatre, where its melodramatic use seems initially to have served to repress socially disruptive “meaning.” Implications for film music-study of discoveries about melodramatic music are traced here with reference to a 1989 film realization of Delius’s opera A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901), whose last orchestral interlude (“The Walk to the Paradise Garden”) is turned there into a fully realized, “silent” cinematic narrative.

Tobias Pontara, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from Solaris to The Sacrifice

Tobias Pontara, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from Solaris to The SacrificeAbingdon, UK. Routledge, 2020. [206pp. ISBN: 9780367277291. $124.00 (hardback)]. Musical examples, photos, bibliography, index.

Meaning and Scepticism

This chapter revisits the classic questions whether absolute music can express extra-musical meaning and whether such meaning should be thought of as playing an important role in our understanding and appreciation of music. It argues that music’s expressive ability plays a central role in our conception of its phenomenology and value—in our perception of music as expressive and in its capacity to move us, both in the understudied generic sense, and in the sense of arousing specific emotions in us. It examines a type of scepticism about music’s expressive ability made influential by Eduard Hanslick and considers to what extent it can be answered. The chapter concludes that, while the extreme scepticism espoused by Hanslick cannot be sustained, his discussion teaches us deep lessons about the expressive indeterminacy involved in music. The chapter illustrates some of the issues it deals with through an analysis of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major and explores the connection between meaning in music and meaning in poetry.

Aesthetics, Music, and Meaning-Making

The paper discusses the connection between rhythm and meaning based on Augustine’s De musica. This central topic is illuminated by the analysis of other particular aesthetic concepts that one can find in Augustine (such as sentience and desire, in its many Latin variations), as well as in reference to modern aesthetics. The result is the emergence of a relationship between aesthetics and the making of meaning in a co-creative operation between the divine and the human based upon an understanding of rhythm.