The Music Event: On Mozart

Let us assume that synesthesia is any involuntary crossing of the senses.

In some sense, then, all music goes beyond the mere ear, all music a kind of synesthetic caress. Think about it: as you listen you are always already seeing, feeling, smelling—you perceive a network of sense, each sense perception an affective force continually working over your body, your mind, your emotions, all inaugurating intricate networks in and of themselves! But sensory affect does not move according to a single chain of action; rather, the meetings of these various networks fold sense into complex configurations, configurations that bleed into other senses.

Listen to Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony. This indeed proffers sense-networks meeting emotion-mind-networks with an affective force to be reckoned with, a magnum opus of sense.

The work itself operates as an intricate musical network: at first, a traditional classical symphony, its thematic development, as musicologist Lajos Zeke showed us in his classes on the symphony, becomes a five-part counterpoint. A classical-baroque architecture interacting in impossible modes of movement, collisions and speeds, pure intensities, fluxes and flows—as Kierkegaard would say, this is the musical erotic, the ultimate sensual experience.

Indeed, this symphony choreographs our bodies (and perceptions) in new and unfamiliar ways each and every listening. Seeing and feeling, for instance, while listening to Mozart, is not the same as seeing while listening to, say, The Beatles. What changes? Affect, that is to say, music doesn’t just go in your ears—it works over your emotional state. And as your emotions drift, perception drifts; every sense thus is inflecting every other sense, always. The role of emotion, then, takes on a greater significance: where before it was passive, it now plays an active role in shaping sensory experience.

It seems, then, that synesthesia, by token of the way emotional networks meet sensory networks, is intimately intertwined with emotion; and hearing—inseparable from emotion, from some affect—, to some degree, is experienced synesthetically. But it is not just hearing: every sense exhibits synesthetic tendencies; our perception, from the womb, is synesthetic. Think about that—we are all synesthetes.