Beethoven’s deafness designates the lack where all signification is lodged: it appeals to a music not abstract or interior but endowed, one might say, with sensuous intelligibility, with an intelligibility somehow perceivable to the senses. This category is specifically revolutionary, inconceivable in terms of the old aesthetics; the oeuvre which accepts it cannot be received according to pure sensuality, which is always cultural, nor cultural according to an intelligible order which would be that of (rhetorical or thematic) development; without it, neither the modern text nor contemporary music can be accepted.
– Roland Barthes from “Musica Practica”
Ear Wave Event is a publication founded and edited by Bill Dietz and Woody Sullender.