[Hum_Calendar_Events] Musicology Event

[CDH Help Desk]

The Musicology Distinguished Lecture Series hosts Richard Leppert,
Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of
Minnesota in a talk entitled:

"Music 'pushed to the edge of existence' (Adorno, Listening, & the
Question of Hope)"

FRIDAY, APRIL 7, 4 PM, ROOM 1230 (GREEN ROOM) SCHOENBERG MUSIC BUILDING

Abstract:

Philosopher/aesthetician and musician/musicologist/composer Theodor W. 
Adorno is commonly (if carelessly) charged with unrelenting pessimism; 
yet at the very heart of his sustained and often bitter critique of 
late modernity there lies fundamental hopefulness, if not precisely 
optimism, conceived within the context of art's role-music 
especially-in providing the wherewithal to imagine social utopia.

Taking account Adorno's philosophy of music, Ernst Bloch's philosophy 
of utopia, and Roland Barthes' theory of listening, this paper's 
principal claim is that music is the Other of the non-music and the 
anti-music of social relations. Music registers itself as a difference, 
as it were, as an alternative, to non-musical life-non-musical life 
meant both as neutral fact of existence and as a dystopian reality in 
which music is, in ironic actuality, today virtually inescapable. In 
brief, music posits the sonoric possibility of something better.