Arnie Cox (Oberlin College and Conservatory)
The Audible and Inaudible in Music

There is a distinction to be made between what is literally audible and what is seemingly audible, as in the case of melodic contour (the apparent rise and fall of melodies). While for most intents and purposes there may be little or no harm in pretending that melodies rise and fall, the list of such fictionally audible properties also includes musical motion, tension & release, expression, and beauty, and there are in fact disadvantages and even harm in epistemologies that are premised on such fictional audibility - or so I argue in this lecture. At the center of the set of the relevant issues is the relationship between bodies and feelings in conceptualizing what we hear, where fictional audibility disguises the roles of embodiment, enactment, and emotion. Outward from this center are then the implications for meaning-making, identity performance, and the construction of value in music education and scholarship and in societies more broadly.

Arnie Cox is Professor of Music Theory at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (Ohio, USA), where he teaches music theory, musicianship, and the courses Music & Embodied Cognition and Music & Emotion. He is author of Music & Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling & Thinking (Indiana University Press, 2016). His most recent publication is “On the Subjects and Objects of Music Analysis” (in Music, Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments, Nicholas Reyland and Rebecca Thumpston, editors; Peeters, 2018). Current projects include a book on music and emotion and an article on music and value.

Die Gastvorträge finden im Wintersemester 2020/21 als Zoom-Sessions über Moodle statt. Sollten Sie Interesse an den Vorträgen haben, möchten wir Sie bitten, sich in die Moodle-Veranstaltung "Collegium Musicologicum" einzuschreiben. Dort erhalten Sie dann den entsprechenden Link sowie das Passwort für die jeweilige Veranstaltung.