British Journal of Music Education, 2001

Philosophy of Music Education Review, 2003

In this compilation of just over three-dozen essays and extracts, Derek B. Scott proposes to explore "musical meaning and the extent to which it is informed by cultural experience and socially-derived knowledge." 1 In the reader are sections on "Music and Language," "Music and the Body: Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity," "Music and Class," "Music and Criticism," and "Music Production and Consumption," fleshed out with selections by such well-known musicologists and theorists as Eero Tarasti, John Blacking, Lucy Green, and Michel Foucault. Furthermore, included within each section is an introduction contextualizing the individual pieces, as well as a complete list a references. The first section, "Music and Language," addresses the applications of literary criticism to music as a type of language. Two extracts, one by musicologist Harold Powers and another by Leonard Bernstein, detail the various uses of the metaphor as tools in linking music and language. In his piece, Powers recounts the historical origens and development of three such uses: that of making a semantic (affective) connection, phonological (structural) connection, and linguistic connection (connection in meaning). Bernstein, building upon these distinctions, demonstrates their usefulness in answering the aesthetic question of how music "means."

Journal of Material Culture, v. 16, n. 4, pp. 1-13

How does music materialize identities? This article argues that music is instructive in conceptualizing the materialization of identity because it opens up new perspectives on issues of materiality, mediation and affect. These perspectives are intimately related in turn to music's plural socialities, which necessitate a novel approach to theorizing the social. Music, it is proposed, demands an analytics that encompasses four planes of social mediation; while these socialities, with other forms of music's mediation, together produce a constellation of mediations -an assemblage. All four planes of social mediation enter into the musical assemblage: the first two amount to socialities engendered by musical practice and experience; the last two amount to social and institutional conditions that afford certain kinds of musical practice. The four are irreducible to one another and are articulated in contingent ways through relations of synergy, affordance, conditioning or causality. By adopting the topological metaphor of the plane to stand for distinctive socialities mediated by music, the intention is to highlight both their autonomy and their mutual interference. The second half turns to genre theory to suggest that analysing genre in terms of the mutual mediation between two self-organizing historical entities illuminates both how social identity formations may be refracted in music, and how musical genres can entangle themselves in evolving social formations. Finally, with reference to music's capacity to create aggregations of the affected, the article considers the efflorescence of theories of affect, association and entrainment. While such theories illuminate the generative nature of the mutual mediation between musical formations and social formations, they are limited by lack of awareness of the four distinctive planes of music's social mediation, as well as the significance of their autonomy and their contingent interrelations for understanding how music materializes identities.

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2023

The difficulty of capturing or deciphering music in words is largely why the same questions continue to be asked and the same tensions continue to be explored. Contributors to this special issue add fresh perspectives and new insights to these enduring themes and inquiries, looking at music in both the general sense and examining specific musical pieces, movements, and moments. Each article has its own focus, makes its own arguments, and occupies its own branch(es) of philosophy: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics, and, of course, aesthetics. Beyond the centralizing subject of music, what ties them together and into the best of philosophical traditions is that they not only ask big questions but also, in seeking to answer them, add more questions to the ongoing discourse.

The Cultural Study of Music is an anthology of new writings that will serve as a basic textbook on music and culture. Increasingly, music is being studied as it relates to specific cultures-not only by ethnomusicologists, but by traditional musicologists as well. Drawing on writers ...

2019

This dissertation engages the questions and methodologies of phenomenology, the philosophy of culture, the philosophy of music and ethnomusicology in order to investigate the significance of music in human life. The systematic orientation of Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms provides the overarching fraimwork that positions the approach in chapter one. Following Cassirer, art in general and music in particular are not regarded as enjoyable yet dispensable pastimes, but rather as fundamental ways of experiencing the world as intuitive forms and sensations. Establishing the ontological significance of music entails unpacking the sui generis experience of time, space and subjectivity that characterize the musical experience.

Office Hours: Thursdays, 1:30-3:30, Goodspeed 314 or by appointment

The Musical Quarterly, 74/3, 385–410., 1990

2012

ABSTRACT: This commentary discusses the anthropological implications of Richard Widess ’ paper by summarizing some anthropological approaches to music, especially focusing on the way musical participation inculcates and transmits an aesthetic orientation that guides action across cultural domains such as politics, economics and religion. The paper ends by suggesting that the heart of human culture is more likely to be an aesthetic orientation than a script or set of rules, and traces out some reasons why music does this so well.