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Love at First Sight “ ” An Academic Seminar by Dr. Giorgio Biancorosso, Associate Professor, Department of Music, The University of Hong Kong Date: Time: Venue: 30 June 2015 (Tuesday) 10:00 am – 11:45 am Room 401, General Studies Building “When Love speaks, the voice of all the gods /Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony,” writes Shakespeare (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3). This and countless other literary passages point to a long-standing use of musical metaphors in the discourse on love. But a moment’s reflection indicate that they also sketch a phenomenology: his attention focused obsessively on the love object, his senses numbed, the love-struck subject lives in a bubble of his own making, no longer aware of his surroundings. The pervasive use of sonic metaphors, moreover, points to a widely held agreement that hearing is – or ought to be - affected as much as sight or touch. Such a scenario, as anyone who has ever paid even the scantiest attention to a soap opera will know, has found counterparts, in seemingly endless elaborations, in both cinema and the television. Indeed, as re-elaborated at the hands of film makers and musicians, “love at first sight” scenes unabashedly incorporate music, the use of which under the circumstances has become proverbial (not to say notorious). In this paper, I examine a few paradigmatic examples of “love at first sight” drawing from both European and Hollywood cinema. In each of them, by an ironic form of mimesis, anesthesia is sublimated into a music of its own -- what I would like to call heterological silence. Giorgio Biancorosso holds a PhD in Musicology from Princeton University, and was for three years a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Columbia University. In 2005, he took a teaching position at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he is now Associate Professor in Music. He has published in the areas of musical aesthetics, film, music, Hong Kong cinema, and the psychology of music for a number of journals and anthologies, and is completing the book Situated Listening: Music and the Representation of the Attention in the Cinema for Oxford University Press. Biancorosso is a member of the Programme Committee of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, and the Chairman of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. Abstract Speaker Bio The Leopard (1963)
