First workshop of the Spring Quarter!!  Tuesday, April 24 @4:30pm in JRL 264.Refreshments will be served.

ABSTRACT

“It is no longer quite fashionable these days to use the word ‘spiritual,’” observed the eminent French historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot. Yet he found the term necessary in order to explain practices of philosophy  before before such practices were relegated to their own specialized epistemic domain. For example, Hadot writes, “The Stoics…declared explicitly that philosophy, for them, was an ‘exercise’…not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being.”

Taking Hadot’s essay “Spiritual Exercises” as a point of departure, in this workshop I will explore an analogy between practices of philosophy as a spiritual exercise and practices of music analysis. This exploration unfolds along two parallel tracks. The first is philosophical. That is to say—what happens if we think of music analysis not as (only) a “categorical quest” for musical knowledge, to borrow Jim Samson’s phrase, but as a means for shaping a certain kind of subject? In this case the focus would not be on “how it [music] works” but on the work one must do in order to understand, where “to understand” means to stand in a certain relationship to music.

In contrast, the second track is historical. The emphasis here will be nineteenth-century Germany—if not the birthplace, arguably the cradle of modern music analytic practices. Here questions of the spirit (or Geist) do not seem so strange; for example, the critic and theorist A.B. Marx, credited as the first to theorize sonata form, explicitly linked music analysis with spirituality and personal growth. More generally, I will suggest that there is evidence that the “pre-history” of music analysis as an institutionalized practice was in some instances conceived and carried out as something like a spiritual exercise.

Hadot’s essay is available here: Hadot 1995 Spiritual Exercises. A presentation structured around this essay will be followed by discussion.

Those needing additional assistance to attend this event should contact one of the graduate coordinators, Mary Caldwell(marycaldwell@uchicago.edu) or August Sheehy (aasheehy@uchicago.edu)