Historicizing Musical Expression

song?
Wednesday, February 9, 2022 - 16:00 to 17:00
Bewerunge Room, Logic House

It has been tempting, ever since Darwin, to regard expression as an anthropological category. There is an inner and an outer side to human beings, and expression must then be the movement from one to the other. Why should not that universal structure constitute the core of musical expression? Yet even if it did, it hardly accounts for particular instances of artistic expression. They depend on historical contexts, require a peculiar contextual economy, get realized through artistic divisions of labour. To do them justice, we are ill-advised to start with animal cries rather than, say, Roman rhetoric 
Andreas Dorschel is a philosopher and music scholar; he has been professor of aesthetics and head of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of Arts Graz (Austria) since 2002. Before that appointment, he taught at universities in Britain, Germany and Switzerland where, in 2002, the University of Berne awarded him the habilitation. He was Visiting Professor at Emory University in 1994 and at Stanford University in 2006. From 2010 on, he has been on the Board of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) Music and Philosophy Study Group. In 2014 he received the Caroline Schlegel Award for Essay. Andreas Dorschel was elected member of the London-based Academia Europaea in 2019. He is the author of six monographs; articles by Andreas Dorschel have appeared, i.a., in The Cambridge Quarterly (OUP), Philosophy (CUP), The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (OUP) and The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (OUP).