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SEMINAR: School of Music presents � Free Research Seminar

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Today's date is Tuesday, March 19, 2024
School of Music presents � Free Research Seminar : Death, music and the ineffable Other events...
UWA School of Music is a vibrant centre for research in music and music education, where a thriving community of scholars is engaged in exploring the frontiers of knowledge, working on a wide range of research projects with diverse outputs.

A free weekly seminar series, with presenters from within UWA and from the wider community.

Martin Evans (Trevelyan College & University of Durham)- Death, music and the ineffable:

The plausible view that music conveys the ineffable was as widely-held in the nineteenth-century as it was before or since. This paper offers the suggestion that through some nineteenth-century metaphysical conjectures, death – improbably – offers a clue to understanding music’s ineffability.

Music’s intrinsic ineffability, part of the larger problem of music and meaning, is adroitly caught in Mendelssohn’s dictum that music is ‘too definite to be put into words’. But music is also a response to a wider, extrinsic, ineffability. If the ineffable emerges within experience – things that we just know, yet know (or can say) little or nothing about – it also frames our finitude. In particular, death is an event outside our experience (outside life, as Wittgenstein has it). Our experience arises without antecedents and disappears without remainder. One response to this finitude is a sense of wonder; another is, on occasion, the production of music.

We can explore this link fruitfully through Schopenhauer’s ambitious metaphysics. Proceeding from Kant, Schopenhauer reasoned his way to the inaccessible (and ineffable) ‘noumenon,’ the timeless reality that must underlie the ordinary ‘phenomenal’ world of everyday experience. If in birth we somehow fall out of the noumenal into the phenomenal, then in death we are dissolved back into it. Beyond this we can say almost nothing – yet in music, Schopenhauer believed (along with a substantial cohort within nineteenth-century metaphysics of music), we directly and uniquely glimpse the noumenal: music’s uniqueness among the arts lies chiefly here.

But from this it seems that in music we glimpse also our own post-dissolution destiny: music comprises existential songs of finite experience and transcendental songs of dissolution into the ineffable.

I shall try to elucidate and defend this provocative claim.
Speaker(s) Martin Evans (Trevelyan College & University of Durham)
Location Tunley Lecture Theatre (G05) School of Music
Contact Alona Saldanha <[email protected] > : 6488 7836
URL http://www.music.uwa.edu.au/concerts
Start Tue, 18 Oct 2016 17:00
End Tue, 18 Oct 2016 18:15
Submitted by Julie Seaton <[email protected] >
Last Updated Thu, 10 Nov 2016 11:06
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