Announcing the next Music History/Theory Workshop:

August Sheehy, Ph.D. Student in Music History and Theory
Music Analysis as a Practice of the Self
Wednesday, February 13 @ 4:30 PM
Logan Center, Room 802

August writes:

In the 1980 New Grove Dictionary, Ian Bent wrote, “[Music] analysis is a means of answering directly the question ‘How does it work?’” Analysis, he added, “strives toward the status of a natural science.” The same year, Joseph Kerman asserted in Critical Inquiry, “[T]he true intellectual milieu of analysis is not science but ideology.” The terms were thus set for polemical debates that unfolded over the next two decades but, ultimately, yielded inconclusive results. Analysis continued basically as it had before, as one form of recognized scholarship in an intellectual environment Kofi Agawu characterized as “precarious pluralism.”

What I find most intriguing about the debates over analysis in the 1980s and 1990s was the missed opportunity for theorists to develop an ethics of music analysis that would have answered to the criticisms rather than trying to deflect or deflate them. My dissertation proposal takes some preliminary steps toward such a defense. Beginning with Foucault’s observation, “Where there is power, there is resistance,” I argue that an ethics of analysis ought to begin with the study of individual analysts and their work. Through a series of bottom-up case studies spanning the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth, I hope to show that modern music analysis can be a site of resistance to certain subjectivizing forms of power: the law, the university, the church, and, finally, music itself (by which I mean something quite different from absolute music, or the putative object of music analysis).

Abigail Fine will be our respondent.

Please familiarize yourself with the pre-circulated reading, available here. If you require the password, please contact one of the student coordinators.

Refreshments will be provided. We hope to see you there!

–