"The Romantic Movement and Rock Music." THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE January 2, 2010.

Romantic ideas and philosophy live on in certain strains of modern rock music, according to this week's guest, Craig Schuftan, author of Hey Nietzsche - Leave Them Kids Alone. David Bowie, The Cure, The Smiths, Queen, and more contemporary bands like My Chemical Romance and Weezer share some seriously Romantic tendencies with people like Byron, Schopenhauer, Wagner and even Nietzsche - and it's not just because they all viewed the world through the same gloomy prism. . . .

Download the podcast here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/2759561.htm.

Rinderle, Peter. Review of Peter Kivy's ANTITHETICAL ARTS. NDPR (September 2009).

Kivy, Peter. Antithetical Arts: on the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music. Oxford: OUP, 2009. How are we to understand those beautiful noises made by a symphony orchestra, a string quartet or a piano player? And why do we value them so highly? It is the quarrel between two opposing traditions about how to understand music to which the title alludes. The narrativists, as Kivy calls them, use a literary analogy. They attribute meaning to a piece of instrumental music as they attribute meaning to a novel or a theatre play. For them, in music as in novels we are mainly interested in the representation and arousal of certain emotions. The formalists, on the other hand -- and Kivy is the leading musical formalist of our times -- are strongly opposed to this way of "reading" absolute music. It is the formal composition in which the meaning of music resides and it is an ecstatic or even mystical experience to which music, if attended to appropriately, might lead that is the true source of its value. Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17485.

"Hideous Gnosis," Black Metal Theory Symposium, Brooklyn, December 12, 2009.

Papers:

• Erik Butler, “The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances”
• Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, TBA
• Nicola Masciandaro, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya”
• Benjamin Noys, “‘Remain true to the earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal” (in absentia)
• Joseph Russo, TBA
• Anthony Sciscione, TBA
• Niall Scott, “Black Confessions and Absu-lution”
• Steven Shakespeare, “The light that illuminates itself, the dark that soils itself: blackened notes from Schelling’s underground”
• Aspasia Stephanou, “Black Metal and Evil”
• Brandon Stosuy, TBA
• Evan Calder Williams, “The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse”
• Scott Wilson, “BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum”

Art:

• Lionel Maunz, sculpture
• Nader Sadek, Baptism in Black (Phase II)

Visit the conference homepage here: http://blackmetaltheory.blogspot.com/.

Bostridge, Ian. "Timing is Everything." STANDPOINT ONLINE (January 2009).

The subjectivity of our experience of time is widely acknowledged. As we get older, time seems to go faster - or is it that we seem to move faster in time? The spatial metaphors we use are confused and confusing. The theories to explain this change range from the physiological (the body cools as we age) to the arithmetical (each moment is a smaller proportion of a lengthening lifespan). If time is so mutable, so much a matter of the ebb and flow of consciousness, is it in fact illusory? The commonsense view has long been that of classical science. Isaac Newton contrasted "absolute, true, and mathematical time" which "in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration" with what he called "relative, apparent and common time". This is the view he bequeathed to the industrial age, the world of clocks, measurement and effective time management, but one which was exploded in its metaphysical aspects by Einstein's musings on relative motion and the speed of light, by the space-time continuum, and the uncertainties of quantum mechanics. Time is the stuff of music: music manipulates our experience of time; it plays with the rhythm of experience; it stretches and complicates our relationship to the passing of time. If the world of physics is a space-time continuum, music is a pitch-time continuum. We use spatial metaphors to express our experience of frequency - notes are higher and lower, something expressed formally in staff notation, and deeply inscribed in our experience of music as performers and listeners. A large interval between two notes is a gulf to be stretched over. The quintessential musical form, melody, as it moves up and down in pitch space, over time, is a sort of quasi-miraculous bridging of the gap between the abandoned past, the ungraspable present and the as-yet-to-be-achieved, utterly unreal future. We grasp it and, as we do so, time is attended to and made palpable and affective. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/723/full.

Cfp: "Music and Modernism," Courtauld Institute of Art, May 16, 2009.

Exploring Kandinsky's contention that the "various arts are drawing together, finding in music the best teacher," Music and Modernism will re-evaluate the significant connections between the disciplines of music and fine art in the period covering the emergence and flowering of Modernism, c. 1849-1950. During this time both music and fine art were concerned with issues of equality, equivalence, relativity and subjectivity themes that have since been taken as key to the definition of Modernism. Composers and artists repeatedly borrowed from one another, yet their motives have seldom been explored. Did such quotation amount to a conscious statement of their modernity, or was this merely a symptom of shared interests? This study day will question not only what it was music gave to fine art, or fine art music, but will ask whether we can in fact think in terms of two opposing directions of influence in this period at all. Contemporary criticism adopted an overtly musical language for modernism that had been defined in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bergson. This was however a reflexive process in which the use of a shared terminology in turn expanded the range of musical vocabulary. Filtered into popular texts, the precision which distinguished analogous intent from synonymous intent rapidly vanished, leaving scholars with an ill-defined discourse that is too readily accepted. Critically appraising the outcome of this richly suggestive inter-textuality, Music and Modernism will question the value, relevance, and usage of this terminology. The linguistic convergence of art and music in this period was itself couched in the broader developments of psychology. Noting our innate "susceptibility" to music, William James was one amongst many to instigate and chart a shift in emphasis from description to emotional directness. Re-thinking the reception of artworks in terms of the representational or the abstract, philosophers, psychologists, and critics gave voice to an aesthetic appreciation that was increasingly questioning of its cultural situation. This cross-culturalism encouraged a shift from the traditional division of the arts that had held sway since Lessing's Laokoon (1766) to embrace a melding of media and reference in the act or event of creation. Keynote Speaker: Peter Vergo (University of Essex), "Music and the Visual Arts: Some Unanswered Questions" Twenty minute papers are invited from scholars, artists, and musicians. Topics may include, but are not restricted to: - Questions of language - Representation: writing, notation, visualisation of music, music publishing - Creativity - Disciplinarity - Collaborative projects - Synaesthesia - Reception: association, subjectivity, polemic - Performance: issues of staging, artwork as event - The Gesamtkunstwerk Send proposals (max 300 words) to Charlotte.Demille@courtauld.ac.uk by January 31, 2009.

Cfp: "Music and Morality," Institute of Musical Research & Institute of Philosophy, University of London, June 16-17, 2009.

Confirmed keynote speakers include: George Benjamin, John Deathridge, Deirdre Gribbin, Jerrold Levinson, Susan McClary, Roger Scruton Convenor: Guy Dammann, Institute of Musical Research Music has commonly been considered the most elusive of artforms and yet throughout history there have been frequent assertions of its strong links with our moral sensibilities. While this situation may suggest shifting views and expectations of art and music, it may also point to some deeper questions about the nature of music and morality. In the context of increased academic and practical interest in the question of music’s moral value and potential, we are seeking contributions from academic and practical musicians, philosophers, psychologists and historians of ideas, offering critical reflections on questions or cases that touch on the theme of music and morality. Interested contributors should send, in a first instance, a 300 word abstract for a proposed paper of not more than 20 minutes reading time to Valerie James, Institute of Musical Research, music@sas.ac.uk by the deadline of 31 January 2009. Notice of acceptances of submissions will be announced within one month of this deadline. General questions of interest include but are not limited to the following: Can music yield moral knowledge or understanding? Must good music have a moral value? Is there such a thing as immoral music? Is the idea of morality in music compatible with aesthetic formalism? Further information may be found here: http://www.philosophy.sas.ac.uk/Music_Morality_CFP2.doc.

Ralston, Laurel. "A Derridean Approach to Musical Identity." POSTGRADUATE JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS 5.2 (2008).

The issue of musical identity—of what defines works of music, gives each its unique character and distinguishes them from one another—is one of the central issues in the philosophy of music. Too often in the philosophical literature it is approached as a purely theoretical question, one that can be answered adequately through careful intellectual consideration of scores and performances. The typical philosophical approach to the performance of Western art music, particularly that composed between the Baroque and Romantic eras, is to offer descriptions of how musical works come into being, what their origins may be, which of their structural and aesthetic elements must be observed and conserved in their representations, and so on. It takes the written notation of a musical work, the score, to be a kind of blueprint created by a composer, defining and describing an autonomous musical entity, the musical work, such that another person might perform it. The work is recognized paradoxically as something existing independently of, yet deriving its identity from, its origins with the composer. In this essay I propose that an alternative to this approach can be constructed by analogy with the ‘textual strategies’ characteristic of Jacques Derrida’s approach to literary theory, criticism and the philosophy of language. Philosophical accounts of literary identity have upheld the supposed immutability of the ‘original version’ of the text and allowed it to remain the ‘ultimate reference’ for its identity. Derrida, however, has pointed out the problematic nature of traditional thought regarding literary texts: that there is a certain tension between the recognition of the enigmatic nature of the identity conditions of a literary work and the continued belief that it is possible to articulate such conditions. The structure of writing, of all writing, precludes any notion of the written text as fixed and eternal, because signification, representation, and the substitution of one meaning or context for another all occur indefinitely within it and without closure. Writing works in such a way that it engages signified meaning “in its own economy so that it always signifies again and differs. . . . [That] which is written is never identical to itself.” The centre that would enclose this economy, that could cause the chain of signification to close itself by linking the origin and the end and boiling all substitutions down to a single, cohesive interpretation, would transgress this structure of writing. Substitution as it occurs in writing does not simply happen once and for all; it is structurally bound to occur ad infinitum. In music this encompasses the substitution of notation for sound—a dual structure set in motion by différance, the playing movement that emerges within musical practice not only as the theoretical interaction of possible interpretations, but also as the concrete exercise of creating sound, time and again: of playing music. This is the case with all written texts—they do not possess a simple origin, because they are originally iterable. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.british-aesthetics.org/uploads/A%20Derridean%20Approach%20to%20Musical%20Identity%20-%20Laurel%20Ralston.pdf.

Currie, James. "Review of Andrew Bowie's MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY AND MODERNITY." NDPR June 16, 2008.

Bowie, Andrew. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Bowie's own language is almost completely free of any trace of the excesses that both characterize my own prose and which I am prepared, tentatively, to call music -- a point and problem to which I will return later. But its apparent sobriety nevertheless articulates a call for philosophy to address music, and, further (something potentially quite shocking) that music should not merely be philosophy's object of investigation since music, as it were, knows something that much Anglo-American philosophy, in particular, as yet does not. As Adorno writes: "We do not understand music -- it understands us. This is as true for the musician as for the layman. When we think ourselves closest to it, it speaks to us and waits sad-eyed for us to answer." Or Bowie's words: "One possibility is to regard the 'philosophy of music,' not as the philosophy whose job is conceptually to determine the object 'music,' but rather as the philosophy that emerges from music" (p. 11). . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13328.