LICA research seminar series 2009.
We are pleased to announce that the final speaker in our research seminar
series will be Lydia Goehr. The talk will take place at 4:30 in Bowland North
Seminar Room 10, Lancaster University.
'Broken strings, Dismembered Bodies: Paragonal Theses on the Embodiment
and Disembodiment of Music'
This talk explores different dimensions of a history of philosophy and the
arts in which musical instruments have been broken or their players
dismembered or otherwise disembodied. It considers several paradoxical
theses: a thesis of music's disembodiment that demonstrates just how
embodied the art of music is; a metaphysics of music that prefers a music
that isn't heard; a musical view of the world in which the eye is awarded
priority over the ear; and a celebrated conception of purely instrumental
music that forgoes an interest in the instruments by which it is produced.
The talk takes a strategically indirect approach: it asks what we can learn
about music by looking at the painting, poetry, and philosophy that has
competed with it.
Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In 2005, she
received a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching
and in 2007-8 received The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)'s
Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA). She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and
Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor
in the Music Department at U. California, Berkeley, where she gave a series
of lectures on Richard Wagner. In 2002-3, she was the visiting Aby Warburg
Professor in Hamburg and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In
2005-6, she delivered the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in
Musicology in London and the Wort Lectures at Cambridge University. In 2008,
she was a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin (Cluster: "The
Language of Emotions"). She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1992; second edition with a new
essay, 2007); The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of
Philosophy [essays on Richard Wagner] (1998); Elective Affinities: Musical
Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory [essays on Adorno and Danto]
(2008), and co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment. Essays
on the legacy of an Opera (2006). With Gregg Horowitz, she is series editor
of Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts, Columbia
University Press.
|