Feldenkrais’s Touch, Ephram’s laughter, Gould’s sensorium : listening and musical practice between thinking and doing

This study addresses listening as a hinge between a therapeutic and musical context. In the first two sections I examine the productive confluence of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought and Mosche Feldenkrais’s somatic practice. I show that the ‘subject’ is configured as both embodied and enactivist. Drawing on Nancy’s work, Jacques Lacan and education and developmental child psychology, I position the listening subject on a fulcrum of balance and imbalance essential to learning and musical practice. In the third part of this study, I concretise Feldenkrais’s ideals of correct action and listening in musical practice. Using Glenn Gould and empirical work on musical practice, I explore the significance of listening between acts of playing. Listening is proposed not merely as a phenomenological form of making sense (Nancy), but as a form of self-negotiation, and an enactivist and imaginative space that leads to new possibilities of thought and refinement of action.