THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE at New York University presents:
ADAM HARPER, INFINITE MUSIC: IMAGINING A 21ST CENTURY MUSICAL MODERNISM - followed by a conversation with Martin Scherzinger
Where: 20 Cooper Square, Room 471 [East 5th Street and Bowery]
When: Tuesday 23 October 2012, 6:30pm
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Much as it has done across the arts, faith in modernism seems to have faltered in music. In this talk, ADAM HARPER attempts to sketch a way we could imagine the broadest and most subtle possibilities of musical change and invention, so as to create and understand new music in the present and the future while avoiding all constraints, hierarchies and divisions in its cultural production and even its ontology. His talk will draw from continental philosophy and information theory in seeing all possible ‘musical objects’ as spaces of possibility described by variables, whether they be pieces, instruments, styles, melodies or anything else. When it comes to listening, these become ‘images of music’ that both regulate and emancipate how we think of music. Harper will also discuss the philosophical, aesthetic and methodological consequences of this move.
ADAM HARPER is a music theorist, critic, and author of ‘Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making’ (Zer0), as well as pamphlets on the future of music and underground pop music for the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts and Precinct respectively. He is a PhD candidate, tutor and teacher at the University of Oxford, writes regularly for The Wire and Dummy magazine (where he writes a biweekly column) and blogs at Rouge’s Foam. He has given talks and seminars at the Darmstadt Summer School of Music, spoken at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival and for the Guardian Music Weekly Podcast.
MARTIN SCHERZINGER is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. His research specializes in sound studies, musical culture, media and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular interest in non-western music, the political hermeneutics of absolute music, cultures of musicology, philosophy, and music theory, in relation to political economy in an international frame. Forthcoming book projects include ‘The Political Stakes of Musical Form’ and ‘African Genealogies of European and American Concert Music (1950-1980)’
Queries: ss162@nyu.edu
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