by Glenn Holtzman
(Introductory note to a lecture delivered and recorded on September 10, 2021, as part of the “Thinking Through Complexity” Seminar Series hosted by the South African Research Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa at Nelson Mandela University)
When I was invited by Oppositional Conversations to offer my thoughts on Joy, I shared with Cally the truth that my relationship to joy is rooted in words of the poet Rumi: "When you do things from your soul, you feel a joy within." These words have had a profound influence on my identity as an artist and musician from the moment I first read them. The idea of doing music from my soul in a way that produces joy means for me connecting the most deeply personal, secret aspect of myself to the very public spectacle of my stage performances. In the strange and contradictory union of my most secret self with an anonymous public of “others” created by my music making I glimpse a joyful potential for non-oppressive community. Carrying such associations, Rumi’s words continue to ring preternaturally true for me. I suspect they ring true for many others as well.
The simultaneity of a privacy too deep for words and a moment of collective public exaltation produces, I think, the feeling of being able to float outside oneself. This profound moment had me thinking about music and metaphysical ascension. In thinking about the complexity of embodied and “out-of-body” joy, I realized I was struggling to articulate my sense of the ineffable nature of the nirvana that I believe it is the goal of artistic labor to produce. By “labor” I mean the acting out of the artistry resulting in an induced altered state of euphoria. That euphoria is both filled with tension and delivers release for listener and performer alike during a successful performance. Such moments signify a perhaps unique kind of joy that performing musical artists achieve. It is an ecstatic feeling of being depleted but delighted. What could be accomplished, I ask in my recorded lecture, if we explored the joy of music using the concept of “musical orgasm”?
There is scholarship on this subject, but it is deeply unsatisfying. It confines its definition of “musical orgasm” to “skin orgasms” meaning the “goosebump” or “shiver down the spine” effect. Instead, I believe we should explore the potential of the idea of musical orgasm through the musical idea of "appassionata." “Appassionata” is a musical term that refers to passion and/or to a performance with deep feeling that mirrors and sometimes constitutes transcendental rapture. Doesn’t transcendental rapture mirror the sexual climax? Do passionate moments in music imitate and extend this relation?
As you will hear in my preliminary explorations pursued in my lecture whose link is provided below, I begin by assembling various instances of musical orgasm in the classical repertoire. I do this to demonstrate the inadequacy of the prevailing scholarly idea that the musical orgasm is best limited to the essentially behaviorist and intellectually “neutral” concept of “skin orgasm.” The universal phenomenon of ecstatic joy in music and its relation to sexuality is much more complex than this. I want musicians, scholars, and listeners to be able to explore the idea of musical joy as a question of musical form that goes to the heart of the role music plays in human psychology and the role musicians play in all societies.
References
I wish to acknowledge the following sources and authors who have influenced my thinking and some of whose work has been incorporated into my talk.
Author unknown. 2015. 8 overwhelming ‘skin orgasm moments’ in Classical music. Classicfm.com https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/latest/music-orgasm/
Author unknown. 2017. When music provokes orgasms. Francemusique.fr https://www.francemusique.fr/en/when-music-provokes-orgasms-15718
Dilworth, Crystal. 2015. Can music give you an orgasm? Seeker.
https://www.seeker.com/can-music-give-you-an-orgasm-1792645713.html
Hubschman, Thomas J. 2013. Posts tagged ‘Tristan und Isolde’. Pianomusicman Blog.
https://pianomusicman.wordpress.com/tag/tristan-und-isolde/
Mah, Kenneth and Binik, Yitzchak M. 2001. The nature of human orgasm: a critical review of major trends.
Clinical Psychology Review, Volume 21, Issue 6, 823-856,
ISSN 0272-7358,
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-7358(00)00069-6.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735800000696)
Harrison, Luke and Loui, Psyche. 2014. Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00790
Noguiera, Gonçalo. 2020. Tension and release - the fundamental way we listen to music. Medium.com
This work is based on the research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number 99188, SARChI Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa, Nelson Mandela University). Opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this work are those of the author alone, and the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.