![]() 1988, “Foucault’s Art of Seeing”, October 44: 89-117, 93.ģTo see is always to think, since what is seeable is part of what “structures thought in advance”. ![]() “Visibilities” in other words are not constants. Visuality is a matter of culture and history, not optics. As Michel Foucault (in particular) has shown, visibility is a matter of visuality: What is seen is what can be seen in one historical moment, yet not necessarily in another. Conception (including visualisation), after all, drives practice, though the two are hardly a precise mirror image of each other.ĢVisual modes of perception, like aural ones, are neither simple nor “natural”. In my view, the worth of studying visual practices relative to music history pertains principally (though hardly exclusively) to our learning more about how music was conceived in a particular historio-geographico-cultural setting by its practitioners. Indeed, I’m highly sceptical that any one-to-one relation exists. ![]() However, I should stress at the outset that my interest in the intersection of musical history with visual history has little to do with the positivistic account that visual evidence might provide for the study of, say, performance practice, organology, or the “listening public”. 1The present article is shaped by the visual record of musical practices surrounding the phenomenon of the concert and its public. ![]()
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