David Kasunic, PhD

The thread that runs through my work is an emphasis on human bodies making and listening to music, and the relationship between and historical and material contingency of these activities. Chopin has been my central case study, where I have been interested in how he navigated his sick body to play the piano, which is how he composed; how the contemporary music he heard was mediated by his reproducing it on the piano; and how that music makes its way into Chopin's musical vocabulary. And I am interested in how people listened to Chopin performing his music; how a new diagnostic pathology based on listening inflected a new mode of music listening and the emergent field of music analysis (as we understand it today); how that listening was a multi-sensory activity; and how perceptions of disease, gender, and nationality conditioned how that music was heard.