Hearing with the Side of the Ear

This paper reconsiders the role of music in Thoreau's thinking about matter. At various moments in his Journal (1837-61) Thoreau imagines the earth, the world, nature, and his own body to be musical instruments. Such moments... [ view full abstract ]

This paper reconsiders the role of music in Thoreau's thinking about matter. At various moments in his Journal (1837-61) Thoreau imagines the earth, the world, nature, and his own body to be musical instruments. Such moments gesture towards an ontology according to which "all things" are musical: tense, strained, fibrous, vibratory. The task of elaborating a musical ontology is daunting, according to Thoreau, because music proves difficult, perhaps impossible, to define; it is hard even to entertain the question of what music is ("if we ponder this question it is soon changed to—what are we?"). This paper examines Thoreau's descriptions of music as immaterial, yet strangely matter-like (thick, thin, viscous, solid). Proposing that musical sounds are capable of rearranging matter and changing one substance into another, Thoreau makes it hard to tell whether form and substance are different or the same. One of the many ambitions of Thoreau's writing in the Journal is to cultivate for himself, and form in readers, a practice he calls hearing with the side of the ear: directing attention away from desirable (healing, transformative) sounds, in order to let them be heard as "accompaniments."