Author: Fisher, Alexander
Publication details: “‘Mit singen und klingen’: Urban Processional Culture and the Soundscapes of Post-Reformation Germany”. In Listening to Early Modern Catholicism, ed. Daniele V. Filippi and Michael Noone, 187-203. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
Weblink: https://brill.com
Artists: Silvia Celadin soprano, Lucas Wong piano, Timothy Kwok piano
Release Year: 2017
Recorded at Fazioli Concert Hall, Sacile, Italy
Engineer: Federico Furlanetto
Description: Playful works by Debussy and Chabrier.
Author: Fisher, Alexander
Publication details: Julius Echter, Patron der Künste. Konturen eines Fürsten und Bischofs der Renaissance, edited by Damian Dombrowski, Markus Josef Maier, and Fabian Müller, 319-28. Translated by Damian Dombrowski. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017.
Weblink: https://www.amazon.com
Author: Fisher, Alexander
Publication details: Oxford Bibliographies in Music, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com. Published 27 July 2017
Composer: Jocelyn Morlock
Performers: Corey Hamm piano, Vern Griffiths percussion
Robyn Driedger-Klassen soprano, Tyler Duncan baritone, Erika Switzer piano, Nicholas Wright violin, Ariel Barnes cello, Joseph Elworthy cello
Ensembles: Vancouver Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, Leslie Dala conductor
Recording details: CMC Centrediscs, 2017
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Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: Presented at the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, 28 May 2017
Weblink: http://www.yorku.ca
Abstract: With Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (1999), among other writings, the musicologist Daniel K. L. Chua proposed a theory of “rationalization” to account for key developments in western music that corresponded with Foucauldian epistemes. Chua derived this theory from Max Weber ’s incomplete, posthumous work on the history and enthnology of music, The Rational and Sociological Foundations of Music (1911/1921), anachronistically characterized by Chua as promoting Weber ’s concept of Entzauberung/de-enchantment. On Chua’s account, a Weberian “rationalization” demonstrated by the history of occidental music theory and musical practice is held to correspond with developments in the history of science; above all, with the “disenchantment” of a “Pythagorean” worldview in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, through the application of calculations of temperament to traditional, untempered ratios of tuning.
Careful examination of early modern sources—including texts on music by Vincenzo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, and Johannes Kepler—reveals an epistemic terrain that robustly resists such convenient demarcation, whether conceptually or chronologically, and whether in the domain of music or of science. Furthermore, Weber ’s account of distinctive rationalization in music—a domain conflicting rationalizations, rather than of uniform “disenchantment”—provides a model more attuned to the challenges confronted by early modern science in its engagement with mathematical empiricism and music.
Ensemble: Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Alexander Shelley conductor
Featured composition: My Name is Amanda Todd by Jocelyn Morlock
Recording details: Analekta, 2017
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 1 (2017): 1-33.
Weblink: https://cambridge.org
Abstract: In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau presents himself as declaiming in “the Lyceum of Athens” but in the presence of Plato and Xenocrates. Why should Rousseau’s arguments be heard in such precincts, and why, moreover, is Aristotle missing from them? Rousseau’s response to the topic proposed by the Dijon Academy, on which the Discourse was based, may be correspondingly interpreted as a response to Aristotle’s philosophy of nature and of the ways in which that philosophy informs the Politics in particular. The critique Rousseau thereby offers of an Aristotelian discourse of nature and society invokes a similar challenge once presented by ancient Epicureanism, and reflects the extraordinary revival of interest in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, a poem that became the focus of intense critical scrutiny during the Enlightenment. We may therefore understand why the Discourse on Inequality was read as an “Epicurean” text by certain contemporaries, and recognize particular critical objectives served by Epicurean philosophical resources that were further deployed in works like the Social Contract and Letters Written from the Mountain, reflecting Rousseau’s engagement with Genevan reform politics of the 1750s and 1760s.
