Thinking Music

This conference explores the ways people from across the world and throughout history have thought about music and have used such thinking to make sense of their worlds. What insights emerge, we ask, when music theory is no longer treated as an insular and elite discipline of scholarship, but as culturally embedded ways of knowing, feeling, and world-making in both discursive and embodied forms? What methodological challenges must we confront in order to reconceptualize abstract notions of “music” and “theory” in an expanded epistemic as well as cultural landscape? Organized by the Thinking Music research project at the Neubauer Collegium in partnership with the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. DOWNLOAD THE SCHEDULE SPEAKERS Kwasi Ampene, Tufts UniversityDonna Buchanan, University of IllinoisThomas Christensen, University of ChicagoDavid Cohen, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt, Germany)Gabriela Currie, University of MinnesotaChi Feng, Indiana UniversityRoger Grant, Wesleyan UniversityAndrew Hicks, Cornell UniversityLester Hu, University of California, BerkeleyLiam Hynes-Tawa, Harvard UniversityDavid Irving, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA)Nathan Martin, University of MichiganCaleb Mutch, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt, Germany)Jacob Olley, Cambridge UniversityCarmel Raz, Cornell UniversityAlex Rehding, Harvard UniversityMartin Scherzinger, New York UniversityHenry Stobart, Royal Holloway University of LondonDanny Walden, Yale UniversityRichard Widdess, SOAS This in-person event is free and open to the public. A livestream will be available via Zoom.June 13 webinarJune 14 webinar IMAGE: A page on the tuning of the 8-string oud (lute) from Al-Farabi’s “Great Book of Music” (Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir) c. 950 CE. Via Wikimedia Commons. More Info below.