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AMS 2023 Schedule

Saturday, October 11th

12:30-2:00pm- Workshop/Business Meeting (Governors Square 12)

Workshop discussion of 'White-Hot Jazz:' Aesthetic Judgement and the Racial Imagination in Occupied Paris, Kira Dralle (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Respondent: Charles Kronengold (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)

[Access reading here. Please do no circulate without permission of the author.]

8:00-10:00pm- Panel: Archives (Location: Vail)

"Earth as Sound Archive," Peter McMurry (University of Cambridge)

"Materiality, Mobility, and Music in an Early Modern Maritime Archive," Nathan Reeves (Northwestern University)

"How would a post-custodial archive look like in the case of the AUMI Consortium?," Valentina Bertolani (University of Birmingham)

"What is the Status of a Vaulted Tape When the Building Burns?," Michael Heller (University of Pittsburgh)

Abstracts

Earth as Sound Archive

Peter McMurry (University of Cambridge)

Do archives need humans to exist? Recent archival studies (e.g., post/decolonial studies, media archaeology) highlight the significant gaps caused by the various political and social contexts in which they were established. But even in these critiques of archival ontologies, humans play a central role in establishing and maintaining archives and their holdings. Yet in this moment of anthropocenic reckoning, it seems equally viable to reflect on archives beyond the human, and particularly what historian of science David Sepkoski has called “the earth as archive.” In this paper, I consider three different instances of geological listening in which the earth functions as a kind of sound archive: first, the noise of boulders being pushed by mountain rivers until they become sand in the ocean, an auditory experience Charles Darwin used to conceptualize the deep time of the earth; second, the emission of sound from bubbles in glacial ice which have recently been recorded and analyzed as a way to measure the rate of ice melt (Tegowski et al, 2014); and finally, in a slightly different configuration, the increasing use of sound (and ultrasound) waves in oil extraction, both to query the earth-as-archive in order to locate oil wells and also to extract oil more efficiently. Listening to the earth-as-archive offers affective and geological insight, yet it also suggests the ways listening itself can easily become co-opted as a tool of environmental destruction, contrary to a long history of sentimental listeners from the Romantics to the World Soundscape Project.

Materiality, Mobility, and Music in an Early Modern Maritime Archive

Nathan Reeves (Northwestern University)

Throughout the early modern period, Spanish overseers of the city of Naples maintained a fleet of galley ships that provided military protection to its busy port and patrolled the coasts of the wider kingdom. As was typical throughout the Mediterranean, these ships relied on rowing labor from enslaved men (mostly north Africans and Ottoman Turks) and local convicts, identified collectively by contemporaries as galeotti. Given the constant provisioning these ships required, Spanish bureaucratic officials called veedores kept meticulous records of rations, munitions, equipment, and the crews themselves. Today held in the military section of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli, the archive of this fleet preserves traces of musical life in a maritime carceral space. Alongside contents ranging from cannons to coils of rope, surviving inventories document the presence of musical instruments and the galeotti musicians who would have played them.

This paper examines how Spanish state agents monitored the movements of people and objects within an internal economy dependent upon forms of unfree labor, including music-making. Drawing from recent discussions in early modern studies, I consider these inventories as subjective records of space that index contemporary material associations between objects and their functions. The organizing principles of veedores allude to idiosyncratic notions of material and aesthetic value that temper the Foucauldian vision of panoptic state surveillance. Taking up Ann Stoler’s call to think along as well as against the archival grain, I argue that the maritime archive of the Mediterranean galley reveals music’s circulation within a fluid, contingent space.

How would a post-custodial archive look like in the case of the AUMI Consortium?

Valentina Bertolani (University of Birmingham)

The music archive has long favoured collections produced by a single creator, be it a composer, performer, collector. However, continuing to produce archival collections based on the primacy of individual creators is not enough to record the complex assemblages of many musical experiences of the last century. This paper mobilizes the concept of post-custodial archival paradigms, community ownership and long-term sustainability of these models in the case of the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments (AUMI) ideated by Pauline Oliveros, Leif Miller and Jackie Heyen in the early 2000s and the consortium created around AUMI (http://aumiapp.com/).

The diversity and dispersion of AUMI documentation (e.g., coding of various versions of the program; paper-based and digital documentation such as meeting minutes, email exchanges; performance documentation such as video; and traces of online presence) makes it a perfect candidate to apply post-custodial archival principles. Indeed, the post-custodial archive, theorised by Terry Cook (1994), articulates ‘a turn from “archives” as collection or location to “archiving as practice”’ (Zavala et al. 2017, 204). The work presented in this paper is based on interviews with members of the consortium and a survey of existing materials and it will propose possible ways forward on how to archive an experience such as the AUMI consortium. This case study can offer a paradigm for many other musical experiences since WWII in which the communal aspect is paramount (e.g., the Deep Listening community also started by Pauline Oliveros, improvising collectives, the live-coding community).

What is the Status of a Vaulted Tape When the Building Burns?

Michael Heller (University of Pittsburgh)

In 2008, a massive fire tore through Building 6197 of the Universal Music Group in Hollywood, a building known to employees as the “Video Vault.” This structure was a storage facility containing over a half-million master tapes recorded by luminaries of American music. While reports vary, the blaze likely destroyed over one hundred thousand tapes, a devastating loss of cultural artifacts documenting American popular music. The list of artists affected is sobering: Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Patsy Cline, Mary J. Blige, Elton John, Slayer, on and on. Yet this was hardly the first tragedy of its kind. Earlier fires had destroyed storage facilities of Atlantic and MGM Records, and in other instances record executives have intentionally destroyed archival materials in order to save money on storage costs.

This presentation considers what it means to preserve massive holdings of cultural history in the storage facilities of commercial record companies, facilities that have been repeatedly shown to be both inaccessible and fragile. In particular, it examines the fuzzy epistemological boundary between archives and vaults. While the two are often conflated in news stories about tape losses, in practice their missions can differ widely in regard to user access, preservational priorities, and conceptions of perceived value (economic, cultural, and otherwise). The presentation draws on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics to ruminate on the status of vaulted tapes, as objects which are perceived as having tremendous value, yet are intentionally shunted away from listening ears for decades, until they are (sometimes) destroyed.

[musicandphilosophy]

CFP: AMS 2023

CFP: Archives

AMS 2023, Denver, Music and Philosophy Study Group

Archives and archival work hold a contested position within music studies, especially given recent attempts to redress the forms of exclusion that have traditionally structured the field’s intellectual commitments. As much as they have functioned as the guarantors of scholarly legitimacy and objectivity, archives present a fruitful site to reflect on the larger historiographic, epistemological, and political aporias that accompany their existence. To this end, a growing body of literature has theorized “the archive” to better account for the ways that minoritized lives and practices have been obscured, rendered unruly, or simply forgotten within hegemonic narratives. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Diana Taylor, Ann Laura Stoler, Ann Cvetkovich, and Robin Gray have thus articulated new critical perspectives on and from within the archive that productively sit alongside previous accounts from the likes of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

The Music and Philosophy Study Group seeks to continue these efforts and invites proposals for projects that conceptualize, critique, or generally reflect on archives or archival theory. Given the multiple “archival turns” that have been staged across the humanities, we encourage submissions from any critical tradition and welcome contributions that engage both the theory and praxis involved in archival work. We ask that proposals be no more than 250 words and indicate the intended form of the presentation, as we are amenable to projects outside of the standard 15-minute paper.

Possible topics include:

-Acts of reclamation, rematriation, repatriation

-Critical fabulation and speculative approaches

-Materialist perspectives and theories of conservation

-Archives related to theory and philosophy   

-Colonial, corporate, and/or institutional archives

-Politics and/or economics of archival labor

-Archives as community engagement

-Psychoanalytic approaches to loss, damage, and impermanence 

-Historical conceptions of archives

-Philosophy of memory

-Digitization and its ethics

Submission details:  Proposals (of less that 250 words) are due by 10 March 2023, 11:59pm PST. Please upload proposals through this submission form.

Any and all further inquiries can be sent to mpsgsubmissions@gmail.com.

[musicandphilosophy]

CFP: AMS 2020

CFP: Hatred and/of Music AMS 2020, Minneapolis, Music and Philosophy Study Group

What might it mean to hate music, or for music to be a site of hatred? What is hate, such that it can affect, or be affected by, music? The Music and Philosophy Study Group invites submissions for fifteen-minute papers on the topic of “Hatred and/of Music.” Longstanding traditions of musical thought and practice have associated music with feelings and affects. But what is the place of hate among these feelings, and how has music’s relationship with hatred been theorized historically? To what extent has our ethical aversion towards hatred in society produced a bias against a better understanding of how music can be linked to hatred? In recent years, many humanities disciplines have raised productive critiques of their objects of study framed in terms of hatred, or related feelings of disgust, contempt and anger. These critiques can take on added significance within music studies in light of recent challenges to the disciplinary habits that have limited or defined the field’s proper object of study.

If scholarship sometimes uses powerful language to perform a kind of love for the music it studies, can this kind of love bring with it the risk of subsuming any sounding practice under the label of “music,” thus reproducing forms of sonic colonization via claims of emotional or intellectual ownership? And if there is a risk to this love, what might be the place of hate in the delineation of disciplinary objects? Attempts to discipline music’s elastic borders can also join up with affective responses to music that are rarely discussed, as when listening to particular music leads to feelings of genuine disgust or hatred—or feeling nothing at all, as in musical anhedonia. Given that many musicologists pride themselves on loving music, and given how that emotion can be rewarded, celebrated, and considered reason enough to enter the discipline, we ask panelists to reflect on potential hatred(s) towards music as sounding practice and as disciplinary object.

Proposals should be of approximately 250 words; imaginative approaches to the topic are encouraged. Some guiding prompts include but are not limited to:

- Hatred of music in scholarship and disciplinary formation

- Hatred in affective and emotional approaches to music

- Hatred in the phenomenology or ontology of music

- Music’s etymologies, origins, genealogies as they establish legacies of hate

- “Music” as a label of sonic colonization

- The colonizing or fetishizing risks of loving music

- Hatred and ethics: why/how do we hate morally compromised music?

- Historical instances of hating music

- Artists who seek to destroy/ damage/critique normative conceptions of music

- Antimusic and its disciplinary stakes

- Hatred and disgust as the foundation of creative work or interpretation (for example, quit lit)

- Musical anhedonia and misophonia

Please submit an anonymous PDF of your abstract to mpsg2020.ams@gmail.com. Make sure to provide your name, the proposed title of your talk and a brief bio of 50 words in your email. The deadline for applications is March 12, 2020, 11:59pm PST. Applications by independent scholars, underfunded scholars, and scholars of underrepresented identities are especially encouraged.

[musicandphilosophy]

AMS 2019

Mysticism

Chair, Delia Casadei (University of California, Berkeley)


Edwin Li (Harvard University), “Mysticism as Philosophical (Non-)Foundation: Reconstructing a Daoist Critique of Confucian Discourse of Music in Early China”

Karen Leistra-Jones (Franklin and Marshall College), “Summoning Beethoven: Spiritualism and the Act of Performance”

Martin Scherzinger (New York University), “Music’s Xenogenesis (The African Mbira)”

Codee Ann Spinner (University of Pittsburgh), “Spiritualist Hymnals and Parlor Songs for the Dead”

Phil Ford (Indiana University), “Diviner’s Time”

Abstracts:

Presenter 1: Edwin Li (Harvard University), “Mysticism as Philosophical (Non-) Foundation: Reconstructing a Daoist Critique of Confucian Discourse of Music in Early China”

Confucian discourse of music in early China has been unambiguously characterized as that which is bound up with the construction of the hierarchy of sound (sheng), tone (yin), and music/joy (yue/le). This unanimous voice can be attributed to the “Book of Music” (Yueji), which has, at its outset, provides readers with a clear definition of the three sonic categories. The Daoist critique of the Confucian musical discourse, however, has engendered incompatible interpretations. Scholars have characterized Daoist musical thought as “nihilistic,” (Yang Yinliu) the opposition of “all kinds of man-made music” (Cai Zhongde), and recently, a questioning of “how to eventually reach musical Dao” (Park So Jeong). In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct a Daoist critique of the Confucian discourse of music, which centers on a philosophical foundation these scholars have neglected: mysticism (xuan). Drawing on Laozi’s Daodejing and the Zhuangzi (especially on the under-appreciated chapters), I argue that mysticism is the form and formlessness of Dao (a state of mind in which one does not assert, and forgets oneself), a philosophical foundation for music when it is not—a philosophical (non)foundation. Laozi expresses this by claiming that the Dao cannot be named, and is the shape that has no shape. In other words, to “reach musical Dao” is not to declare reaching musical Dao. Mysticism thus grounds “music” in groundlessness. I conclude by relating Daoist mysticism to the present, arguing that such an ontological blackhole invites an empathetic understanding of musical experiences beyond humans.

Presenter 2: Karen Leistra-Jones (Franklin and Marshall College), “Summoning Beethoven: Spiritualism and the Act of Performance”

In 1893, a “consecration ceremony” celebrated the opening of a museum in Beethoven’s birth house. The ceremony occurred in the room of Beethoven’s birth and included a performance of the Cavatina from the String Quartet op. 130 by the Joseph Joachim Quartet, playing on instruments once owned by the composer. As numerous contemporary accounts noted, the quasi-religious function of this event and its proximity to Beethovenian relics combined with spoken texts before and after the Cavatina and aspects of the performance itself to create a séance-like experience: the Kölnische Zeitung reported that the audience “believed… that through the eloquent tones [of the Cavatina] his transfigured spirit appeared to proclaim itself in the present.”

The notion of performance as communion with a dead composer is a familiar trope in music criticism. Yet its particular foregrounding in these sources invites a consideration of such rhetoric as more than mere metaphor. In Germany in the 1890s there was widespread interest in mysticism and the occult, including spiritualist séances. While these movements are often described as a counter-cultural reaction to modernity’s rationalizing tendencies, recent scholarship has emphasized their interrelationship with contemporaneous developments in science and philosophy and the serious consideration they were given within establishment circles. Mystical claims such as those surrounding this ceremony often implied that music’s vibrational disruptions of matter were what allowed a spiritual dimension to make contact with the phenomenal world; ultimately, they suggest a view of performance that merged Romantic metaphysics with seemingly incompatible materialist concepts.

Presenter 3: Martin Scherzinger (New York University), “Music’s Xenogenesis (The African Mbira)”

Forward Kwenda, an acclaimed mbira player from Zimbabwe claims that the power of the mbira’s sound transports performers and listeners out of the commonplace, into a realm “much greater than a human being can understand” (Kwenda 1997). For the traditionalist Tute Chigamba, the religious and introspective attitude demanded by mbira music renders it unsuitable as an instrument of mere entertainment (personal communication, 1999). Echoing this sentiment, Hakurotwi Mude asserts, “The mbira dza vadzimu is not played for pleasure” (Mude, in Berliner, 1991, 134). Far from providing sensuous experiences alone, mbira music, especially for the traditionalists, is central to the spiritual cosmology of the Shona. It mystically “speaks back” to performers (Chigamba, 1999). Andrew Tracey reports that the idea that one mbira sounds like more than itself is still more pronounced with other lamellaphone-types, like matepe, njari, and nyonganyonga (personal communication). Matepe players actually boast of it. The perplexing ability of the music to elicit audile condundra, issue forth asynchronous sounds, materialize phantom melodies and rhythms, and recoup similitude in contexts of metamorphosis facilitates listening experiences that grow beyond the dimensions of the tactile performance alone, touching instead upon something unguessed-at. These are the ventriloquizing musical lines emerging as if of unknown origin. This is a music of xenogenesis, explicitly designed to invoke the powers of ancestral spirits in contexts of social crisis and upheaval. Set adrift of the generalized project of disenchantment in music studies, this paper aims to re-enchant the material force of xenogenetic sound in the mbira scenario.

Presenter 4: Codee Ann Spinner (University of Pittsburgh), “Spiritualist Hymnals and Parlor Songs for the Dead”

Like their Christian neighbors, Spiritualists in North America have frequently incorporated hymnals into their worship and rituals. Spiritualist hymns often share language, imagery, and entire hymns and texts with mainstream Protestant denominations. I argue that despite these similarities, hymns and singing take on new significance in Spiritualist practice. Analyzing the melodies and texts of Spiritualist hymns, specifically The Spiritual Harp (1868) and Longley’s Choice Collection of Beautiful Songs (1899), I compare song collections to a wider body of religious hymnody in North America—specifically in the Northeastern region of the United States. These comparisons demonstrate the ways in which Spiritualist acoustemologies—understanding mundane sounds in terms of spiritual sources—arose through music. Whereas a Protestant congregation might use a hymn for a metaphorical communication with an almighty power, Spiritualists used hymn—occasionally even the same hymns—to directly speak to and with the dead.

My argument is based on research conducted in a small Spiritualist community, Lily Dale, NY. Founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Lily Dale is home to a collection of historic hymnals and songbooks donated by former residents. Though the books themselves are informative for understanding what was important to the community members who used them, they are particularly valuable for the autographs, handwritten notes, and supplemental materials placed there by their former owners. These material publications—combined with the hymns, their music and texts—are vital for understanding Spiritualists’ conceptions of interactions between the living and the dead. 

Presenter 5: Phil Ford (Indiana University), "Diviner’s Time”

Mysticism resists assimilation to scholarly understanding, not because the latter is rational and the former irrational, but because each is defined by its own order of knowledge. Mystical knowledge is gnosis — initiatory knowledge, revealed in experience, that changes the knower. This paper concerns an object of gnosis it designates diviner’s time. In considering the Azande concept of the “second spear,” Joshua Ramey’s essay “Contingency Without Unreason” adds a fifth cause, the divining cause, to Aristotle’s canonical four. The divining cause “is linked … to the singularity of an event”: it accounts not only for what things happen but when, and for the significance of their timing. The diviner’s cause registers on the human organism much as musical time does; indeed, it might be that the temporality of divination makes of human life a kind of music. 

Thus this paper coins the term diviner’s time_ to describe a temporality whereby the sign, charged with emotion, announces itself in experience. Divinatory signs manifest in a paradoxical interdependence of difference and repetition. The sign repeats not in the manner of two identical words on a page, but like a resonance between sounding bodies. The resonance (literal and figurative) of bells arrange a symmetry between the first and third acts of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, in which the repetition-in-difference of diviner’s time registers as gnosis. In the uncanny repetition of diviner’s time, we might feel not only that we are listening to music, but as if we are living in music, or are ourselves music.

[musicandphilosophy]

AMS 2018

Intoxication

Andrew Hicks (Cornell University), Chair

Edward Spencer (University of Oxford), “Beyond Intoxication: On Sobering Experiences of Electronic Dance Music”

Tomas McAuley (University of Cambridge), “Orgasmic Rapture and Devotional Bliss: Schopenhauer on Music and Sex”

Beth Abbate (Boston Conservatory at Berklee), “Musical Intoxication in Tippett’s Magical Midsummer Marriage”

Victor Szabo (Hampden-Sydney College), “Highs for Highbrows? Rhetorics of Contemplative Intoxication from Atmospheric Minimalism to Ambient Music, 1960–80”

JoAnn Taricani (University of Washington), “The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and its Intoxicating Musical Antidote (1661)”

For many philosophers, music and intoxication are powerfully intertwined. The “music theorists of Dionysus,” Plutarch reports, drink wine and water in accord with the harmony of the lyre; the best cocktail (producing the ideal inebriation) is three parts wine to two parts water, the musical intoxication of the fifth. For Adorno and Horkheimer, musical intoxication is akin to a phantasmagoric delusion concealing reality and suspending one’s sense of self. In Sufism, musical intoxication dissolves barriers between what is seen and unseen; in such cases, self-annihilation is self-preservation. Even far outside the annals of “official” philosophy, vernacular speculations recur at the nexus of music and intoxication: in social and military battlegrounds, around gateway drugs, behind and across police lines, in alliances with occult forms and mysticisms, as triggers of social and metaphysical bonds, and as blinding illusions or portals to the real. With remarkable regularity, musical intoxicants seem to transfigure foundational concepts of the self, of logic, reason, society, and being. In this special evening session, five scholars tackle the question of intoxication and music from a philosophical point of view. Their studies range from subversive intoxications of seventeenth-century England to the hypermodern ecstasy of electronic dance music.

PAPER ABSTRACTS:

Edward Spencer (University of Oxford), “Beyond Intoxication: On Sobering Experiences of Electronic Dance Music”

Since the early 1990s, philosophical approaches to electronic dance music (EDM) have privileged intoxication. Appearing in various theoretical guises, intoxication has drugged our thinking and contributed to an orthodox, quasi-monist philosophy of EDM. In this vein, ravers surrender themselves to ‘Dionysian pleasure’ (Melechi 1993: 32) and experience ‘forgetfulness, selflessness, and oblivion’ (Gauthier 2004: 69). Lost within the socio-chemical-musical assemblage of the rave, dancers assume an undifferentiated oneness akin to a Deleuze-Guattarian Body-without-Organs (Jordan 1995). All semiotic structures are digested and Baudrillard’s hyperreal singularity reigns supreme at acid-fuelled psytrance parties (Vitos 2010; 2017). Ekstasis dances freely (e.g. Gilbert & Pearson 1999) as a black-boxed buzzword. In music theoretical work, EDM’s temporal infinity produces intoxicating process pleasure (Garcia 2005) and flow (Butler 2014).

This paper provides an antidote to the above by considering North American dubstep post-2010 in the company of Adorno. Drawing upon fieldwork at Spring Awakening Music Festival (Chicago, IL, June 9th–11th 2017) and Lost Lands Music Festival (Thornville, OH, September 29th–October 1st 2017), I demonstrate that many festival-goers are addicted to the sobering experience of the dubstep drop (a musical fetish defined by explicitness). I problematize abstraction, oneness and forgetfulness by arguing that the drop choreographs a grave awareness of self and an intense interrogation of others. I then focus on the online reception of dubstep tracks such Drowning by Excision with reference to Adorno’s emotional listener. In the final part of the paper I consider dubstep's preoccupation with 'hype' alongside Adorno's conception of self-conscious hysteria.

Tomas McAuley (University of Cambridge), “Orgasmic Rapture and Devotional Bliss: Schopenhauer on Music and Sex”

At the close of his discussion of music in Volume II of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1848), Arthur Schopenhauer equates music with ānanda, a Sanskrit term traditionally translated as “blissfulness,” but which refers specifically to devotional bliss, to orgasmic rapture, and to the connection between these experiences. Taking this puzzling passage as its starting point, the first part of this paper attempts to reread Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music from the perspective of his philosophy of sex. So doing illuminates the philosopher’s concept of “will”—a blind, destructive striving that remains opaque when reading Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music outside of its wider context. This, in turn, leads me to argue that Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music is not primarily metaphysical, as it is almost universally painted in the literature, but rather metaethical.

In the second part of the paper, I argue that just as Schopenhauer’s remarks on sex can cast light on his philosophy of music, so too can music suggest a new reading of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of sex – and, by extension, of the will itself. Schopenhauer’s general view of sex is darkly pessimistic: sexual desire, on his view, causes nothing but suffering, and the only reasonable response is chastity. Yet Schopenhauer cannot escape his intoxication with music, which, by showing the pleasures of satisfaction, shows the pleasures of willing, and leads him, in his discussion of music, to describe ānanda as the highest Ātman: the truest self. In so doing, Schopenhauer offers a uniquely positive – for him – assessment of human sexuality.

Beth Abbate (Boston Conservatory at Berklee), “Ritual and Ecstasy in Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage”

The third act of Tippett’s 1952 opera The Midsummer Marriage contains clearly Dionysian elements, reflecting the composer’s interest in both Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian and Jung’s discussion of it. In this act’s climactic scene, the Dionysian effect of musical intoxication acts as a component of ritual, designed to include the audience in the work of both becoming whole as individuals and restoring fertility to the damaged society of contemporary England. In a representation of Jung’s psychologically interpreted “Great Work” of alchemy (intended for “the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of the cosmos”), Tippett’s Act 3 contains a stylized sex rite enacted by the central characters embodied as Shiva and Shakti. In addition to suggesting the merging of anima and animus into a unified whole, the scene was also intended to evoke the fertility rite from Naomi Mitchison’s 1931 novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (itself drawn from Frazer’s famous Golden Bough), in which both music and intoxicating beverages play an important role. Musical elements creating a sense of magic and intoxication are multiple, including long vocal melismas in canon, juxtaposed rhythmic patterns in threes and fours that reflect Jungian and alchemical references in the text, and orchestration that verges at times on chaos. The several esoteric texts (all written by Tippett) are sung simultaneously, while dancers present a “Fire Dance” for St. John’s/Midsummer’s Eve. In its magical aspect, Tippett’s scene recalls the eruption of intoxicated music at the visit of the gods in C.S. Lewis’s 1945 That Hideous Strength.

Victor Szabo (Hampden-Sydney College), “Highs for Highbrows? Rhetorics of Contemplative Intoxication from Atmospheric Minimalism to Ambient Music, 1960–80”

    This paper investigates the aesthetic, experiential, and rhetorical links between atmospheric minimalism, psychedelic drug use, and hip highbrow lifestyle consumerism from 1960–80. During this time period, composers, critics, and advertisers represented the minimal music listening experience as one of contemplative intoxication—akin to the psychedelic trip, but involving more awareness, concentration, and control on the part of the user. From the sleeve notes for Columbia’s 1968 premiere recording of Terry Riley’s In C (“The nature of your trip is determined by you”) to Atlantic’s Environments series of “psychological” ambient sound LPs (“A decongestant for the mind.... Better than booze and safer than pot”) to Charlemagne Palestine’s droning multi-hour “meditative sound environments” to the inclusion of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s “continuous light and sound environments” in Edward Rosenfeld’s 1973 The Book of Highs (“250 methods for altering your consciousness without drugs”) to Brian Eno’s 1978 coinage of ambient music (a “surrounding influence” made to “induce calm”) and Peter Michael Hamel’s theorization of minimal music as kontemplative Musik (music to “aid self-absorption and contemplation, thus making drugs superfluous”), many of minimal music’s earliest purveyors fashioned electrified drones and loops as contemplative intoxicants: not hedonistic escapes from reality (see psychedelic rock, Muzak), but rather meditative vehicles for attaining inward focus and awareness. The retrospective labelling of minimalism and ambient music as coherent styles, I will argue, was inherently informed by the classed and gendered rhetoric of intoxication and self-control that validated these practices.

JoAnn Taricani (University of Washington), “The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and its Intoxicating Musical Antidote (1661)”

When Robert Burton pondered the physical and philosophical aspects of melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), he could not have imagined that this temperament would emerge as a pervasive national melancholia that would afflict British monarchists throughout the eleven-year Interregnum following the execution of Charles I in 1649.  Drinking became a political emblem of Royalism as well as solace during this era of melancholy, with taverns and clubs the environment where improvised poetry and music blended with whiskey and tobacco to create a subversive opposition culture to the reigning Republic.  When the monarchy was restored with Charles II as King in 1660, the unshackled print culture memorialized this vast repertory of underground drinking songs through published broadsides and anthologies.  One particular anthology provided a musical riposte the nation’s former malaise: An Antidote against Melancholy (1661), which ostensibly was a collection of drinking songs, but in fact was the core repertory of the Royalists, an intoxicating distillation of resistance.  Even though it was issued to commemorate the 1661 coronation procession of Charles II, it still bore the mask of Interregnum intrigue, replete with covert symbolism. Even its editor (John Playford) slyly winked at the repression of the Interregnum by publishing it under a pseudonym.  The musical component has been elusive, yet once this Antidote is musically interpreted within the extensive culture of political drinking songs, its remedy of songs about politics and liquor distinctly expresses the relief of the Restoration while still ruminating on the persistent melancholy of 1650s Britain.

[musicandphilosophy]

AMS 2017: Rancière

Rancière

Jairo Moreno (University of Pennsylvania), Chair

Ignorant Readers Delia Casadei (University of California, Berkeley)

The Low Music Patrick Nickleson (Mount Allison University)

Triangulating Rancière Katharina Clausius (University of Cambridge)

Music’s Singularity Benjamin Court (University of California, Los Angeles)

The work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière (b. 1940) has become increasingly influential for those interested in rethinking the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the modern world. Of what value might his writings be for music? Though Rancière has not written about music beyond the occasional mention of well-known gures like Rousseau or Wagner, his writings have much to offer scholars of music and sound. In particular, his approach to the cultures of the working class, his three broad historical schemas that describe the linkage between aesthetic and politics, and his overarching theory of the “distribution of the sensible” hold fruitful possibilities for scholars seeking to understand why certain kinds of music and sound are rendered audible or inaudible, and how we, in communities of scholars and artists, might move towards a more equitable soundscape of what politically counts within the framework of aesthetic perception.

This session engages Rancière’s thinking as it might relate to music. Delia Casadei draws on Rancière’s ideas about literacy, emancipation, and non-hierarchical learning; she asks whether and how musicology could redevelop a reading of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1929–35) into an open-ended, even iconoclastic practice that draws powerful links between aesthetics and politics. Patrick Nickleson examines Rancière’s use of the terms noise (bruit) and stulti cation (abrutir), and argues that musical metaphors have played a central role across the philosopher’s published writing. For Katharina Klausius, Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987) and his essay “Politics, Identifcation, Subjectivization” (1991) are taken to exemplify what she describes as a “geometrical” approach to aesthetic historiography, which, in her view, embodies the model of a triangulation that resists pinpointing its third angle. Finally, Benjamin Court revisits the age-old question as to whether or not music can still have a unique or singular status among the arts. In dialogue with recent works by Kanye West and Frank Ocean, Court contends that Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” when applied to the worlds of contemporary popular music, must also account for the constitutive and instructive character of “all the mysteries which lead theory into mysticism.”

Business Meeting

Time & Location: Friday, November 10, 5–7 p.m. (Hyatt: Grand Ballroom A/B)

Discussion of Fred Moten’s In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

Discussion Leader: Alisha Lola Jones (Indiana University

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AMS 2016: Suzanne Langer Reconsidered

Susanne Langer Reconsidered

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota), Chair

Holly Watkins (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester), Respondent

"To Feel Is Not to Say: Immediacy at the Center of Langer’s eory of Music as 'Living Form'" Anne Pollok (University of South Carolina)

"Right and Left Formalism" Bryan Parkhurst (University of South Florida)

"Do Animals Get Earworms?" Eldritch Priest (New York University)

Session Abstract:

Philosopher Susanne Langer’s work exerted a significant infuence on the arts and aesthetic debates of mid-century. Figures as diverse as composer Elliott Carter, performance artist Allan Kaprow, music theorist Leonard Meyer, and more recently literary and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai have found significant resources in Langer’s writings. Notably, the affective impact of musical experience stands as a central theme in her thinking. In Philosophy in a New Key (1941) andFeeling and Form (1953), Langer argued that music was materially linked to feeling and expression at the same time that it required a minimal sense of structure that loosely resembled the workings of logic. In her view, music’s unique amalgam of the material and the ideal also gave it distinct affordances. It could resemble the patterned temporal fows of life while also conveying imprecise, ambivalent, and implicit content; for her, music was “peculiarly adapted to the explication of ‘unspeakable’ things.” This session revisits Langer’s writings on music in light of twenty-first century scholarly concerns. The papers cross the fields of musicology, music theory, philosophy, critical theory, and animal studies.

Paper Abstracts:

"To Feel Is Not to Say: Immediacy at the Center of Langer’s eory of Music as 'Living Form'" Anne Pollok (Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina)

Do we know more about our feelings after going through a thorough music education? As a Langerian I say: no. In spite of the underlying cognitivism in her aesthetics, Langer never claims that exposure to music makes us more knowledgeableabout our emotional life. What she advocates, rather, is that music education offers the cognitive benefit of an intuitive grasp of the organic form of feeling. This intuitive grasp, as it were, is not readily translatable into concepts (hence our intellectual disappointment), but stays firmly within the limits of genuinely aesthetic experience. This is due to an implicit but fundamental notion of Langer’s aesthetics: immediacy, stressing both the unity of form and content, as well as of experience and meaning in a work of art. In this paper, I aim to account for this notion of immediacy that underlies the presentational function in aesthetic experience, and to explain why it is best achieved through music. To this end, I will reconstruct Langer’s account of how a musical piece is functionally related to the “form” of a feeling, and how it can ever be rendered as “alive.” With a return to Langer’s roots in Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy, I will further show how experience understood as “contemplation” allows to see aesthetically presented emotions as “transparent” both in their intuitive force as well as their formal constituents. We may not be able to conceptually express what we feel, but we can rationally account for the formal presuppositions of an emotion conveyed.

"Right and Left Formalism" Bryan Parkhurst (Music Theory, University of South Florida)

The basic contention of Susanne Langer’s theory of musical symbolism is that there is a “connotative relationship between music and subjective experience, a certain similarity of logical form.” “Logical form” should here be understood not in the sense of argumentative or syllogistic form, but instead in one of the primary senses of the Greek logos, i.e. “ratio,” “proportion,” or “organizing principle.” For Langer, that is to say, the immanent patterns of music and of our emotional lives are homologous (homo + logos): there is a structure-preserving mapping from one to the other. Whereas Langer sees in music’s formal properties an affinity with the constitution of our a ective selves, such Marxian theorists as Adorno, Bloch, Maróthy, and Knepler see music’s constitutive patterns as having a social correspondent or homologue. Adorno, for instance, apprehends in the structure of organically unified music the same reciprocal accommodation and reconciliation of part to part and part to whole that must characterize the relations of individual subjects to one another and to the social totality within a non-alienated society. We are thus confronted by a distinction between what we could call “right formalism” and “left formalism”: views which agree that abstract structure is the fundamental datum for musical aesthetics, but which have starkly divergent positions on the ultimate significance or referent of this structure. In this paper, I will be interested in how Langer’s carefully worked-out account of music-emotion homology can help to illuminate the sometimes less explicit homology claims of the left formalists.

"Do Animals Get Earworms?" Eldritch Priest (School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University)

Late in her career Susanne Langer developed an incredibly nuanced and highly original philosophy of mind in which human and animal mentality part ways not according to a capacity for abstraction, but to what is done with this capacity. For Langer, “All sensitivity bears the stamp of mentality” insofar as the latter is a phase of vital activity in its mode of being felt abstractly, which is to say, being felt as thought. For us, where animals use their ability to feel vital activity abstractly as a pragmatic value, humans use it to feel a symbolic sense (i.e., meaning). But Langer’s focus on human mentality caused her to overlook some of the more radical insights she made into the nature of abstraction and animal thought. A particular case in point is her near-heretical hypothesis that vocal acts “were probably not purposive in their origin, but purely autistic, spontaneous acts of self-enlargement.” This implies that before they are used to extend an organism’s exterior milieu—to communicate—vocal sounds are made to swell its intensive world. In other words, vocalization is an affective abstraction. The “peculiar emotive character” of audition—a property that musical techniques arguably take to its highest degree of expression—is in this respect a felt abstraction that suggests an animal’s autogenic sounds are immediately doubled with value and sense. In this paper I assume Langer’s heresy and draw from Brian Massumi’s recent work on animal play a line of speculation that asks: If animals are able to feel vital activities abstractly can they get earworms? If so, can the abstractions that distinguish a “musical” from a “linguistic” expression, or value from symbol, be understood to mark not the human stock’s departure from its animality but rather its return?

[musicandphilosophy]

CFP: Susanne Langer Reconsidered

Philosopher Susanne Langer’s work exerted a significant influence on the arts and aesthetic debates of mid-century. Figures as diverse as composer Elliott Carter, performance artist Allan Kaprow, music theorist Leonard Meyer, and more recently literary and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai have found significant resources in Langer’s writings. Notably, the affective impact of musical experience stands as a central theme in her thinking. In Philosophy in a New Key (1941) and Feeling and Form (1953), Langer argued that music was materially linked to feeling and expression at the same time that it required a minimal sense of structure that loosely resembled the workings of logic. In her view, music’s unique amalgam of the material and the ideal also gave it distinct affordances. It could resemble the patterned temporal flows of life while also conveying imprecise, ambivalent, and implicit content; for her, music was “peculiarly adapted to the explication of ‘unspeakable’ things.”

The AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group will convene a panel at the 2016 AMS/SMT Annual Meeting in Vancouver that both engages Langer’s writings on music and confronts broader topics that have some affinity with her work. Possible paper topics include: intersections between Langer’s work and affect theory, music cognition, and biomusicology; her influence on or affinities with various composers, musicians, and intellectuals; and comparative assessments of her writings on music in the context of mid-century philosophy, psychology, formalism, and aesthetics. We also welcome engagements, revivals, and critiques of Langer’s work in light of twenty-first century interest in queer and feminist theory, theories that engage music’s significance with respect to racial and ethnic difference, as well as the emergent nexus of sound studies.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to langer.mpsg@gmail.com.

Deadline: Monday, May 2nd, 5 p.m., Eastern Time.

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AMS 2015

Music and Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity 


Chair: George E. Lewis (Columbia University)  Time & Location: 8-11pm, Thursday, November 12 (Grand Ballroom B)

Guthrie Ramsey, (University of Pennsylvania) “Hiphopnitized: Music, Genre and Philosophical Turns”

Alisha Lola Jones, (Indiana University, Bloomington) “Church Realness: The Performance of Discretionary Devices and Deliverance"


Paul Taylor, (Pennsylvania State University) Racialism Without Provincialism: Toward a DuBoisian Theory of Cultural Appropriation”

 Jann Pasler, (University of California, San Diego) “Epistemologies of Control and the Limits of Knowledge”

Joanna Love, (University of Richmond) “Selling Difference: Sonic Hipness and Racial Tension in Contemporary Advertising”


Session Abstract

What role does music play in a twenty-first century world still riven by racial and ethnic discord? How does music mark racial and ethnic commonalities and differences? How has music been implicated in larger processes of racial and ethnic formation? How has the interpretation, representation and explanation of racial dynamics shaped our understanding of music’s historical past? How have music and race been co-implicated in processes of capitalist production? This evening session proposes to renew these and other challenging philosophical questions that were once posed over a century ago by philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois in his canonical book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Featured presenters include Guthrie Ramsey (University of Pennsylvania), Alisha Lola Jones (Indiana University, Bloomington), Paul Taylor (Pennsylvania State University), Joanna Love (University of Richmond), and Jann Pasler (University of California San Diego). Presenters will query music’s relationship to the moral status of the concept of race, the problem of racism, and the dynamics of racial formation. They will look at the relationship between race and musical genre, as well as the affective import of musical performance in African-American religious communities, and they will re-examine the fraught terrain of cultural appropriation. They will also question the linkage between race and hipness in music’s use in advertising, and propose a historical examination of the epistemological issues wrapped up in transcription. Across this wide array of topics, the Music and Philosophy Study Group hopes to open a challenging discussion of questions concerning music, race and ethnicity, as they pertain both to the historical past and the complex world of the present day.

— 

Business Meeting 

Time & Location: 5-7pm, Friday, November 13 (Wilkinson)

Devon Borowski (University of Chicago) “His Name is Porgy’: Performing Racial Uplift at the Cotton Club and  Beyond”

Felipe Ledesma Núñez (Harvard University) “Defining Mestizaje: Race and Power in Modern Ecuador”

Yvette Janine Jackson (University of California, San Diego) “Confronting the Middle Passage Through African-American Soundscape Composition”

 Kai Finlayson (New York University) “Sensing Noisy Objects”

[musicandphilosophy]

CFP: Music and Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity

CFP: Music and Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity

AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group

Louisville, 2015

How can philosophical approaches to music tackle the topics of race and ethnicity? And how might philosophical approaches to race respond to the specificity of musical experience? In this call for papers, the AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group seeks proposals that address music through philosophical accounts of race and critical race theory, as well as philosophical approaches to music that are oriented towards the question of race. Approaches might query the moral status of the concept of race, the problem of racism, or the dynamics of racial identity and its linkages with ethnicity, while relating them to questions specific to music: for example, the contested boundaries of intellectual property, epistemologies of literate and vernacular modes of reproduction, the affective dimensions of musical experience, and the ways various ontologies of music are defined by racial formations. We hope to represent a range of musical situations: in cities and megacities, rural and peripheral, sacred and secular, colonial and postcolonial, as well as among diasporic groups.

The MPSG will hold two linked sessions at this year's AMS. Our daytime business meeting will host papers devoted to the general topic of Music and Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity. For the evening session, we would like to program a panel of three proposed papers and two invited speakers for a discussion that is more narrowly focused on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Thus, we welcome proposals engaged with Du Bois’ musical thought, as well as applications and critical responses to his philosophy that are placed in dialogue with musical practices.

The sessions will feature papers of eight to ten minutes each, and will be oriented towards discussion. Those interested should send a proposal of 250 words (maximum) to the following email address: philosophymusic[at]gmail[dot]com.

The deadline for submissions is midnight E.S.T. on Monday, May 18, 2015.

[musicandphilosophy]

With contributions by: Gary Tomlinson, Christopher Norris, Stephen Decatur Smith, Max Paddison, Katherine Fry, Aaron Ridley, James O. Young, Michael Spitzer, Jonathan Owen Clark, Michael Fend, Michael Gallope, Brian Kane, Naomi Waltham-Smith, and Kenneth Reinhard. Edited by Tomas McAuley and Nanette Nielsen.

[musicandphilosophy]

A pioneer of “Afrofuturism,” bandleader Sun Ra emerged from a traditional swing scene in Alabama, touring the country in his teens as a member of his high school biology teacher’s big band.

[musicandphilosophy]

CFP: New Ontologies of Sound and Music

AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group

Milwaukee, 2014

What is the “ontology” of music? Twenty years ago, the phrase connoted a series of debates among philosophers and music scholars concerning the nature of musical works (universals, sound-structures, or regulative concepts) and their relation to musical performances. But today, in dialog with the “ontological turn” in the humanities, the rise of sound studies, and the increasing importance of media studies in the humanities, the ontology of music has expanded in scope and shifted in focus.

By focusing on the word “ontology,” music studies has begun not only to reconsider the kinds of objects out of which music is made, but also to articulate new ways of addressing music’s relationality, agency, materiality, and modes of existence more broadly. Under the rubric of the ontology of music, we seek new investigations into the relationship between music, sound, and noise: from theories and histories of “sound objects,” to challenges of the semiotic and language-like dimensions of music, to vibrationalist accounts of sound that focus on the capacity of music to affect and move bodies, to new experimental practices in composition and sound art that seek to explore the material, spatial, and corporeal nature of sound and music. We are particularly interested in the political dimension of ontologies that distribute and allocate an expanded notion of agency to objects, things and matter, as well as broader inquiries about the role of power in defining any ontology of sound and music.

Possible topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

•   The agency of music, sound, and noise •   Music and the relationality of sound •   Contemporary and historical accounts of music and sonic vibration •   Music, humanism, post-humanism, and critiques of anthropocentrism •   Ontologies of collaboration and competition •   Ontology and format: the album, the single, compression, streaming, etc. •  New sound-image relationships (mash-up videos, projections, light shows, animations) •   Ontologies of recording (hi-fi, lo-fi), mixing, and sampling •   Sonic evanescence, fragility, and ineffability •   Environmental sound and Radical Ecology •   Ontologies of music theory: formalism, cognitivism, corporealism, and historicism •   Ontology, politics, and sound •   Music and the New Materialism•   Music and Thing Theory •   Music and Speculative Realism •   Schaefferian and post-Schaefferian sound objects •   Music and Object-Oriented Ontology

Our panel will feature papers of eight to ten minutes each; the session will be oriented towards discussion. Abstracts will be selected based upon the strength of the intellectual project they propose, as well as their clarity.  

Please send a proposal of 250 words to the following email address: philosophymusic[at]gmail[dot]com

The deadline for submissions is April 25, 2014.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact Amy Cimini (acimini[at]ucsd[dot]edu ) or any other member of the MPSG Organizing Board.

MPSG Chair:
 Amy Cimini (University of California at San Diego)

MPSG Organizing Board: Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota)
 Brian Kane (Yale University) 
Tamara Levitz (UCLA)
 Jairo Moreno (University of Pennsylvania) Stephen Decatur Smith (Stony Brook University)  Holly Watkins (Eastman School of Music)

[musicandphilosophy]

MPSG Events at AMS 2013 in Pittsburgh

MPSG Events at AMS 2013, Pittsburgh

Evening Event: Thursday, November 7, 8:00-10:00 pm

Roundtable: Sound, Music, Affect

Location: Sterlings 1

Session Chair: Tamara Levitz, Professor of Musicology, UCLA

Speakers and Titles:

Murray Dineen, Professor of Music Theory and Musicology, University of Ottawa

"The 'After' Affect: Musical Labor and Classical Music"

Charles Kronengold, Assistant Professor of Music, Stanford University

"Genres, Affects, Temporalities"

Roger Grant, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, University of Oregon

"After the Natural Sign: Affect Theory's End?"

Christina Baade, Associate Professor of Communications Studies and Music, McMaster University

"Sentimentality, Stickiness, and Circulation: 'We'll Meet Again' as an Emotional Object"

Andrew Berish, Associate Professor of Humanities and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Florida

"Sentimental Journeys: Tin Pan Alley Ballads, Affect, and American Emotional Life during the Second World War"

Business Meeting: Friday, November 8, 12:15-1:45

Continuing Roundtable: Sound, Music, Affect

Location: Le Bateau

Abstracts

Presenters:

Andrew Burgard, NYU

"Affective Dynamics of Choral Singing and the Musical Mediation of Cultural Belonging"

David McCarthy, CUNY Graduate Center

"'Oirse: o irse. ¿Adónde?'": Affect in Octavio Paz's 'Recapitulations' (1967), Melancholy inClose-Up(1990), and the Politics of Experience

Clara Latham, NYU

"Towards a Psychoanalytic Model of Sonic Affect: Listening as Transference"

Christopher Culp, SUNY Buffalo

"No-Place like Home: Queer Utopias and the Affective Break into Song"

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CFP: Music, Sound, Affect

Recent years have witnessed what has been described as an “affective turn” in the humanities. Inspired especially by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and by various strains of psychology and psychoanalysis, scholars in a number of humanistic disciplines have elaborated a conception of affect as a field of intensities that are pre-personal, prior to or apart from meaning, extra-subjective, pre-linguistic, inhuman, and so on. This year’s meeting of the AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group seeks to offer a forum for critical reflection upon the significance of this affective turn for music studies. We invite contributions that consider avenues of research that are opened up by a concern with affect, as well as ways in which the affective turn allows us to reconceive old themes and problems. We also encourage submissions that explore the possible pitfalls and shortcomings that affect theory might present for music studies, or the special challenges that music and sound may present to this body of thought.

Possible topics and questions may include (but are by no means limited to) the following:

• Historical conceptions of musical affect (especially the Affektenlehre) vis-à-vis contemporary affect theory • Affect and voice • Affect and sound studies • Social mediations of affect and sound (e.g. economic, cultural, intellectual) • Affective labor • Affect and technology • Music and role of affect in politics • Sound, affect, and mass culture • Theorizing affect across sonic practices (music, film sound, sound art) • Sound’s relationship to emotion, meaning, and memory  • Sound’s relationship to the unconscious, the irrational, and the erotic • Affective theology, spirituality, and religious thought • Affect and form or formal analysis

Our panel will feature papers of eight to ten minutes each; the session will be oriented towards discussion. Abstracts will be selected based upon the strength of the intellectual project they propose, as well as their clarity.

Please send a proposal of 250 words to the following email address: philosophymusic@gmail.com

The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2013.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact Stephen Decatur Smith (stephen.d.smith@stonybrook.edu), Chair of the AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group, or contact any other member of the MPSG Organizing Board.

MPSG Chair: 

Stephen Decatur Smith (Stony Brook University)

MPSG Organizing Board:

Seth Brodsky (University of Chicago) Amy Cimini (University of Pennsylvania) Joanna Demers (University of Southern California) Michael Gallope (University of Chicago) Brian Kane (Yale University) Tamara Levitz (UCLA) Jairo Moreno (University of Pennsylvania) Holly Watkins (Eastman School of Music)

[musicandphilosophy]

Adorno & Bloch on German Radio