Biography

Andreas Mayer is CNRS Senior Research Professor at the EHESS in Paris. His research focuses on the history and anthropology of science and its relations to literature, music and the arts. He is the author of several monographs, notably Sites of the Unconscious. Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting (Chicago UP, 2013) and The Science of Walking (Chicago, 2020, French trans. La marche. Histoire d’une fascination savante, Belles Lettres, 2025). Among other projects, he is currently completing a new French and German annotated edition of Balzac’s ‘Analytical Studies’ from The Human Comedy.

Project Summary

Voices and gestures prove to be elusive objects. Since Antiquity, various attempts at their description and codification have been undertaken. The advent of new expressive forms of singing in the Renaissance madrigali, lamenti and recitativi has given rise to a new repertoire of musical gestures whose resonances can still be felt. How can we account for the persistance of these elusive forms in the history of Western music? What are the forms of descriptions and stabilization that matter in the transmission of singing techniques? Following up on his earlier historical work on the study of body movement and the irreducible quality of vocal performance, Mayer investigates the distinctive gestural quality of Western vocal music since the 17th century within a longterm process of mediation involving singers, composers, critics, music theorists and audiences.