Virtuosity Knowledge and Violence

This chapter, published in the book Contemporary Musical Virtuosities, edited by Louise Devenish and Cat Hope, responds to their call to reconsider virtuosity in a contemporary context. As its contribution the chapter develops unfinished, imperfect and in-progress thoughts on the relationship between virtuosity, pleasure and violence. It considers virtuosity as a pleasure in perfection and discusses the violence of its exlusiveness. In response it shifts the discourse from finding virtuosity and quality in a work and its performance, to the pleasure of the body, as a plural body and a local body, that does not obey the politics of perfection but experiences its own pleasure beyond foundational lines of judgment.