DISPLACER :: Aristotle on place and movement

counter)induction's printed programs often have a poetic or historical quotation to help frame the concert without drifting too far towards didacticism.  I was concerned about what to use as a prelude for Friday's concert, and then I remembered that someone else was thinking about this stuff long before I was:

"Place is thought to be something important and hard to grasp, both because the matter and the shape present themselves along with it, and because the displacement of the body that is moved takes place in a stationary container, for it seems possible that there should be an interval which is other than the bodies which are moved. The air, too, which is thought to be incorporeal, contributes something to the belief: it is not only the boundaries of the vessel which seem to be place, but also what is between them, regarded as empty. Just, in fact, as the vessel is transportable place, so place is a non-portable vessel. So when what is within a thing which is moved, is moved and changes its place, as a boat on a river, what contains plays the part of a vessel rather than that of place. Place on the other hand is rather what is motionless: so it is rather the whole river that is place, because as a whole it is motionless.
Hence we conclude that the innermost motionless boundary of what contains is place."

– Aristotle, The Physics (Book IV, chapter 4)

Here the link between place and movement is essential to any discussion of being; this is richly resonant with a concert involving spatial and temporal manipulation of sound  all the more appropriate for a concert in which sound itself is moved, a motion which reveal that the object being moved is itself a collection of motions – motions of string, of bows, of bodies, of wood, of air.