Music Graduate Colloquium: Alexander Rehding

Presented by Graduate Studies in Music, the Don Wright Faculty of Music Graduate Colloquium series includes lectures by distinguished guests, Western faculty members, and senior graduate students on all fields of research and creative activity in music.

Alexander Rehding(Harvard University)
"Music and the Anthropocene: Taking the Long View"

Abstract

Music and Climate Change?—Is an exploration of “listening” while the world is on fire not the equivalent of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic? Can something that often entertains us shed light on something that should deeply concern us? This talk offers some not-so-obvious answers to some burning questions of our time. The first step to take for any eco-musicology is to critically examine its hyphen. Much attention has gone to the prefix eco-, but this will go nowhere if the other side is not also reviewed, and we revise our notion of what we mean by music.

It is useful to remember that the Anthropocene, defined as the geological epoch that is shaped by human intervention and officially accepted by vote by the International Geological Society in 2008, serves first and foremost as a historiographic device. (On the geological clock, the differences between its narrow definition, which sets the detonation of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as its starting point, its broader version, which is tied to the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, or even its latest definition, which takes the American conquest around 1500 as its starting point, pale into insignificance.) As such the Anthropocene is absolutely a topic for humanistic inquiry. The humanities have now taken up the challenge—though music, no doubt because of its complex materiality, is easily sidelined besides other artforms that enjoy more direct forms of representation. My paper zooms in on Jem Finer’s Longplayer (1999), a composition that explodes our conventional notion of what constitutes music and that tackles musically a number of issues central to the climate debate, and unpacks some broader points on either side of the hyphen.

Admission is free, and all are welcome to join.

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