Whether in a text that is scholarly or meditative, and whether, as Barthes put it in
S/Z, a text is 'readerly' or 'writerly', music and letters never did comfortably embrace each other, for all that we need them to. Kudos to Noudelmann for offering something expertly imaginative, trying to meet that need.
Costica Bradatan:
In today's philosophical culture, where thinkers seem to have succumbed to a fashion of soulless scholasticism, the significance of an invigorating book like Noudelmann's is difficult to overestimate.
Cynthia Peck:
A musical reverie, a meditation, best if savoured slowly.
Jeremy Eichler:
The book probes the meanings of these elective affinities, and speculates on both the yawning gaps and hidden passageways between intellectual and corporeal pleasures, the travails of the mind and the secret life of the fingers.
Scott McLemee:
...essays that pique the reader's interest, rather than bludgeoning it.
Daniel Herwitz:
Noudelmann's book is musically sophisticated and informed by deep knowledge of thepiano...This little book is a unique chapter in the aesthetics of thepiano, and serves as a wonderful opening beat for a suite of others to follow.
a remarkable and revealing book.
An elegant ode to the emotional and intellectual importance of music and solitude.Publishers WeeklyPublishers Weekly
Avital Ronell, New York University and the European Graduate School, author of The Test Drive and Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millenium:
Amateur pianist and philosopher François Noudelmann was jolted into action when he saw a video of Sartre at the piano. Like a recurring traumatic flashback, the Sartrean performance touches off a series of reflections on the covert practices of three highly attuned thinkers. The relation to music, private and protected, offers another register by which to read the unsayable in the imposing works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes. Ever vying with language for sovereignty, music disrupts the implacable habits of linguistic positing and delivers these exemplary writers to the scene of their greatest vulnerability.
Robert Harvey, professor of French and comparative literatures, State University of New York, Stony Brook:
Who before François Noudelmann has shone a spotlight on great thinkers enamored with the piano? In the lives of Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes, exercising at the keyboard for pleasure was crucial. Yet their writing about music is relatively scant, implicit, or even, sometimes, discordant with their work. Breaking boldly with the academism all too common on the French scene of writing, Noudelmann's The Philosopher's Touch reveals an entirely new dimension of these figures' writing styles and thinking patterns. His piano is a harmonics of three disparate philosophers.
