Conference Reports
Film-Philosophy III
University of Warwick, 15-17 July 2010
The third annual conference of
Film-Philosophy, the open access journal, was held at the University of Warwick, and organised by Dr Catherine Constable (Dept of Film and Television Studies). The 3-day conference was very successful, attracting over 100 delegates, a third of them from academic institutions outside the UK, participants travelling from all over mainland Europe, America, Australia and Tazmania. There were 5 plenary sessions and 27 parallel sessions in total.
Since its inception at Bristol in 2008, the Film-Philosophy conference format has endeavoured to hold open the space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, methods and approaches to thinking about moving images. The primary focus has been the exchanges between Film Studies and Philosophy and both subject areas are understood in broad terms: film theory and criticism, theories of aesthetics and textual analysis, as well as the diversity of traditions presented by ‘Analytical’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy.
In this respect, the Warwick iteration of Film-Philosophy was a great success, marked most insistently in the diverse range of plenary speakers: James Conant (Philosophy, University of Chicago); Sarah Cooper (Film, KCL); Richard Dyer (Film, KCL); Thomas Wartenberg (Philosophy, Mount Holyoke College, Mass.); Erica Carter (German, Warwick) and John Mullarkey (Philosophy, Dundee). For example, James Conant’s lengthy but scrupulous analysis of ‘point of view’ in his chosen example of
Lady in the Lake (1947) raised a series of crucial questions about the ontology of cinematic image; whilst Richard Dyer’s approach – aptly described as ‘theory-by-stealth’ by Constable – problematised the apparently ‘simple’ distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic music through a series of beguiling examples, from the blaxploitation picture,
Trouble Man (1972), to Italian comedies such as
L’Eroe della strada (1948). In spite of their distance from each other, methodologically and theoretically, both speakers succeeded in allowing their particular cinematic examples to disturb and unravel some common theoretical and philosophical presuppositions in the study of film. This theory or logic of exemplarity is, as Dyer himself noted in his preamble, a shared concern across disciplines in the humanities, and was taken up again by Thomas Wartenberg in his ‘defense’ of reading films as ‘illustrations’ of particular philosophical problems. This avowedly ‘moderate’ position struck me as strategically interesting, since it allows for the possibility that films might contribute to philosophical debates (against those who would claim it had none!), but it ultimately failed to conceive the kind of stubborn particularity the example, as evoked in different ways by Conant and Dyer.
For a conference series to survive, it must evolve through a reflection on these kinds of conceptual assumptions and theoretical preferences. Each of the plenaries contributed to achieving this aim in the discussions that followed, but it was in the wide-ranging parallel sessions that these debates were most vigorous and productive: a vital sign for the future of Film-Philosophy conferences, but also more broadly for future interdisciplinary study of moving image cultures.
Dr Richard Stamp
Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies
School of Humanities and Cultural Industries
European Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference
University of Udine, May 27-29, 2010
This was the second annual conference of the ESA, and was organised by Alessandro Bertinetto (Udine), Fabian Dorsch (Fribourg), and Cain Todd (Lancaster). There were four invited keynote speakers, all of them prominent figures in their fields: Professor Sergio Givone (Firenze), Professor Lambert Wiesing (Jena), Professor John Hyman (Oxford), Professor Thierry De Duve (Lille). These speakers were also chosen, in accordance with the aims of the ESA, for the variety of topics and traditions in aesthetics that they and their work represented, and these were duly manifest in their presentations.
There were 123 delegates from a number of countries, including not just Europe but also the US and Asia. This included a contingent of 15 Dutch students who are currently unable to study aesthetics at their university in Holland. Altogether 60 papers were presented over the 3 days with 4 parallel sessions running simultaneously. The papers were subsumed under broad themes including, amongst others, ‘Urban and Natural Aesthetics’; ‘Fiction, Narrativity and Imagination’; ‘Rhythm and Dance’; ‘Aesthetic Concepts’; ‘Historical Aesthetics’; ‘Pictorial Representation’.
These papers were selected from around 150 submissions through a rigorous blind refereeing process involving all members of the ESA executive committee and a panel of local organisers. The papers were chosen first for their philosophical merit, but also partly for the breadth of philosophical subjects and traditions they represented.
Given that it was only the second annual conference of the ESA (which was founded in November 2008), the conference was an immense success in terms of its size and the overall quality of philosophical presentations and discussion, but also in achieving the ESA’s central aim of bringing philosophers from diverse countries and traditions, and with a wide variety of research interests, into an open and fruitful exchange.
From a practical point of view the conference ran very smoothly thanks largely to the very professional efforts of the four local organisers and the help and facilities provided by the University of Udine and its Department of Philosophy. Ultimately, all of this was made possible by the generous financial sponsorship provided for the event by the following donors:
British Academy
British Society of Aesthetics
Department of Philosophy, Udine
Scuola Superiore, Udine
Faculty of Humanities, Udine
Italian Society of Aesthetics (AISE)
Finally, the conference included the third general meeting of the society, the main purpose of which was to inform delegates about the ESA, to thank all of the conference sponsors, provide a brief report on the society’s finances, and to encourage interest in hosting the next annual conference. Although as yet there are no volunteers to organise next year’s conference, we have commitments from the University of Guimaraes in Portugal to host the 2012 conference, and the University of Prague to host the 2013 conference.
Cain Todd – ESA Treasurer
Music and Philosophy: A Royal Musical Association Study Day in association with the British Society of Aesthetics
This study day, held at King’s College London on Saturday 20th February 2010, brought together about a hundred musicologists and philosophers to share and discuss work, in the hope of fostering a dialogue between the two disciplines. The day also aimed to cross the divide between analytic and continental philosophy concerning music. No organiser wants to pre-empt or to pre-script the outcome of an event, but, within the confines of ‘music and philosophy’, the focus of this day was left especially open in order to avoid any one discipline leaving its stamp too heavily. Rather than a single sharp focus, therefore, several constellations of shared interest emerged over the course of the day.
One such area was that of authenticity in performance practice. This was the topic of Julian Dodd’s opening keynote address, in which he argued in favour of a nuanced conception of authenticity that stressed its difference from
historical authenticity on the one hand and
sonic accuracy on the other. Dodd’s talk provoked two particularly rich areas of discussion: how his conception might interact with musicology and musical practice (John Irving’s responses were exemplary in this regard), and whether his views on authenticity could remain independent of his well-known Platonist views concerning musical works.
Another area of shared interest concerned the relationship between music and language. Julian Johnson’s paper on ‘Music as Self-Critique’ explored the ways in which music is mimetic both of the discursive structures of languages and of the gestural movements of the body. Music, it was claimed, is ‘like a language, but not a language.’ It was a particular pleasure to see Johnson drawing fruitfully on the published work of Andrew Bowie, especially his 2007 book Music, Philosophy, and Modernity, whilst making practical examples central to his exposition. Andrew Bowie’s keynote address, in turn, reflected on the preconceptual aspects of our engagement with the world, the inarticulable underpinnings of conceptual thought, such as certain bodily and social aspects of our being. Music, Bowie argued, can draw our attention to these aspects of our being, and thus alert us to the limits of conceptual philosophical investigation. Such questions of the method and scope of philosophy formed another of the day’s focuses. Two papers from musicologists, for example, explored the boundary between philosophy and criticism.
According to a collaborative paper from Erkki Huovinen and Tobias Pontara, the necessary types of philosophical intuitions required to construct the thought experiments often used to test philosophical theories are not available in the case of music, leading to a reliance on subjective impressions. As such, they claimed, it is not possible to distinguish between the person conducting the experiment and the person imagined in the experiment. Much analytic philosophy of music is, therefore, less rational than it claims to be, they argued, and might better fall under the heading of criticism. Nanette Nielsen’s paper ‘Towards an Ethical Criticism of Music’, on the other hand, drew a sharp divide between analytic philosophy and criticism, arguing that criticism is the better placed to engage with music’s ethical potential. Her method of contrasting reviews by Richard Taruskin and Susan McClary of each other’s work was highly engaging, conveying as it did the human dimension of all criticism.
This emphasis on the human dimension of thinking about music segued neatly into a broad interest in the history of musical-philosophical thought. The work presented here exposed the ongoing importance of Nineteenth-Century German thought in the area of music and philosophy (although an exaggeration, John Deathridge’s suggestion that research on music and philosophy is still ‘entombed’ in this tradition was not without merit). Kathy Fry’s paper on ‘Music and Language in the Early Nietzsche’ and Elisabete de Sousa’s paper on ‘What Kierkegaard Did after Reading Wagner’ both provoked lively discussion. The final keynote address from Mark Evan Bonds tackled not only the history of musical-philosophical thought but also the mutual interdependence of many histories of music and philosophies of music. Bonds focused on the surprising similarity between Hanslick and Wagner, as early as 1854. Both figures agreed on what absolute music was, and both wove narratives of music history centred around a Classical Era of pure form (absolute music). The motivations for these narratives were almost diametrically opposed—Wagner needed a staging post en-route to the Gesamtkunstwerk; Hanslick needed an ideal from which to trace music’s decline—but both motivations (qua motivations) are foreign to the present day, whereas the ensuing narratives remain strikingly familiar.
There is not space to discuss every contribution here, but high quality and thought-provoking papers were also given by Louise Gibbs (‘Improvisation and Composition: The ‘Perfect’ Storm’), Philip Letts (‘Nihilism and Descriptivism: A Reply to Andrew Kania’), Elisa Negretto (‘Expectation, Anticipation, and Meaning in Music’), Julia Peters (‘Is There Progress in Music?’), Víctor García Priego (‘Music and the Human Condition’), Stefan Lorenz Sogner (‘Music and Two Types of Empfindungenand Suzie Wilkins (‘Empirical Methods and the Aesthetic Theories of Hans Robert Jauss’
Coming back to our original goal of encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue, there is only so much that can be said or discussed in a day. As such, the greatest pleasures of the day were, for me, twofold: firstly, to discover some of the deeply imaginative interdisciplinary work that was already taking place; and secondly, to see new bridges being built that will (we hope) last into the future. In order to encourage the growth of such dialogue, a BSA-supported Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group has been set up, and will be running a variety of music and philosophy events. Watch this space!
The organisers are grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics, the Royal Musical Association, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and King’s College London, for their generous support of this event.I am particularly indebted to Víctor Durà-Vilà
(co-organiser: philosophy), to Michael Fend, and to Susan Bagust
Tomas McAuley, Department of Music, King’s College London (event organiser)
Time and Image
One-day workshop, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds
Wednesday 19th May
The theme of the workshop was the representation of time by artificial images, both static (individual photographs) and moving (film), and its connections to philosophical issues concerning artistic representation, perception and the nature of time. In ‘Screen Present and Fictional Present’, Robin Le Poidevin (Leeds) took a critical look at what Gregory Currie has called ‘the claim of presentness’, the thesis that the image on the screen represents the depicted fictional events as fictionally present. Then, in ‘Exposure Time: the Significance of Time for the Photographic Image’, Dawn Phillips (Warwick) argued that an understanding of what photographs are must include an account of the photographic process, and drew attention to the different roles time can play in that process, and what implications that has for photographic content. The workshop closed with ‘Pictures, Images and Time’, in which
Rob Hopkins (Sheffield) showed what was wrong with the apparently plausible thesis that it is possible for a picture to depict a scene without depicting any temporal property of that scene.
The workshop was attended by 40 delegates, in which there was a good mixture, both of academics and staff, and of disciplines (Philosophy, English, Fine Art, Theatre and Cultural Studies). There was a lively discussion after each paper, and feedback afterwards suggested that the workshop had succeeded in tearing down (or at least gently disturbing) disciplinary boundaries.
The event was sponsored both by the British Society of Aesthetics and the Centre for Aesthetics at Leeds. Many thanks to both.
Robin Le Poidevin
Music & Representation
Merton College, University of Oxford 26-28 March
The concept of representation has been discussed in depth in academic fields including literary studies, art history, and aesthetics, but has been addressed with less frequency in musicology. And yet representation is a crucial subject to the study of music; in seeking to interpret and understand music and its history, scholars are frequently faced with the question whether music functions representationally, and those who argue that it does have begun to ask how. Representation is a crucial issue to many recent approaches to the study of music history, theory, and aesthetics, including studies of musical perception and performance, music’s social functions, its uses in identity construction, and its depiction in analytical diagrams. The conference on ‘Music and Representation’ provided a forum in which scholars were able to offer a broad range of perspectives on the subject, and discuss and debate related issues. The conference was divided into seven sessions, each containing three papers that addressed subjects including but by no means limited to musical aesthetics, psychology of listening, compositional influence, performance, and text setting, as well as in historical issues of nineteenth and twentieth century music. Papers also considered how music is represented in other media, analytical diagrams, the visual arts, literature, scholarship, and popular culture. A keynote address by Richard Taruskin, author of the six-volume
Oxford History of Western Music, suggested ways in which scholars might move beyond the understanding of representation as simply mimesis, introducing the concept of affordance to better comprehend music’s ability to elicit physical responses in listeners, and convey meanings in social and cultural contexts.
The schedule of presentations was as follows:
Session 1
Hermann Danuser (Humboldt-Universität): On Music’s Self- Representation
Christopher Doll (Rutgers): Representations of Early Rock’n’Roll in Post-Sixties Popular Music
Suzannah Clark (Harvard): Music as Geometry
Keynote address
Richard Taruskin (University of California at Berkeley): What Else?
Session 2
Matthew Gelbart (Fordham): Layers of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Genres: The Case of One Brahms Ballade
Rachel Beckles Willson (Royal Holloway): Twisting the Representation of Western Music
W. Anthony Sheppard (Williams): The Persistence and Parody of Orientalism in Recent Opera and Operatic Production
Session 3
Karol Berger (Stanford):
Der Dichter spricht: Self-Representation in
Parsifal
Laurence Dreyfus (Oxford): Allusive Representations: Homoerotics in Wagner’s
Tristan
Lydia Goehr (Columbia): Ekphrastic Displacements: Saying and Showing in the Contest of the Arts
Session 4
Eric Clarke (Oxford): Musical Meaning Without Representation
Michael Spitzer (Durham): Representing Musical Emotion
Alison Denham (Oxford and Tulane): When the Feeling Has Gone: Amusia and the Experience of Musical Meaning
Session 5
Marina Frolova-Walker (Cambridge): ‘Music is Something Obscure’: Textless Soviet Works and Their Phantom ProgramsGiorgio Biancorosso (University of Hong Kong): The Transparency of Film Music or, ‘What is it Like to Be a Shark’?
Walter Frisch (Columbia): Appreciating Arlen
Session 6
Davinia Caddy (University of Auckland): Nijinsky’s
Faune Revisited
Nicholas Cook (Cambridge): Performances Representing and Representing Performances
Roger Parker (King’s College London): Musical Meanings in 1830s London
Session 7
Simon Shaw-Miller (Birkbeck): Art Representing Music
Daniel Grimley (Oxford): Funen Dreams: Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Landscape
Thomas Grey (Stanford): ‘On Wings of Song’: Representing Music as Agency in Nineteenth Century Culture
The proceedings embodied a diversity of approaches, and during discussion sessions after each paper, participants drew attention to the conceptual threads that connected them. The hard work of the conference’s speakers and session chairs was reflected in the high level of the papers and the lively discussions that they engendered throughout the weekend. The active participation of audience members helped make the conference on Music and Representation a productive and enjoyable event.
White Rose Aesthetics Conference - The Unity of Imagining
22nd September 2009, University of Sheffield
The first annual White Rose Aesthetics Conference was held at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield on Tuesday September 22nd 2009. The theme of this one day conference was The Unity of Imagining.Robert Hopkins (Sheffield) began the day by speaking on the topic of 'Imagining the Past'. Hopkins argued that episodic memory is, in key part, a kind of imagining. He defended this account against some obvious objections and explored some of its consequences for the epistemology of episodic memory. In his paper, 'Imaginability: Improbability, Impossibility, and Resistance', Jonathan Ichikawa (Arché, St Andrews) explored connections between phenomena associated with imaginative resistance and certain puzzles about probabilistic reasoning. Kathleen Stock (Sussex) offered a paper entitled ‘What Is the Content of a Mental Image?’ in which she explored the view that mental images represent only appearances or ‘looks’ of objects, and not the objects themselves. Stock persuasively argued that that there are no compelling considerations in favour of such a view. In the final paper of the day, 'Imagine What?: Imaginative Underdetermination and The Task of the Audience', Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana) argued against the widespread view that visual fictions are different from literary fictions in that the former require that we imagine of ourselves that we are seeing the events shown in them. Weinberg made the case that it is better to consider visual imagining as different only in format from literary imagining rather than involving a special viewer-involving content.More than twenty people attended the conference. They enjoyed vigorous discussion and debate which continued over drinks and dinner. Generous support for the event was provided by the British Society of Aesthetics, the Mind Association, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Leeds.
Rob Hopkins (Sheffield) and Aaron Meskin (Leeds)
International Conference on Music and Morality
London June 15-17, Institute of Musical Research and Institute of Philosophy
Although nowadays many would consider them entirely separate realms, strong links between the moral sphere and musical practice and experience have long been held to exist. Reflecting developments in both musicology and philosophy, the conference organisers felt the time was ripe for a widespread reassessment of the subject. For while the majority of musicologists and composers have long since shelved the unworkable but extraordinarily persistent notion that music cannot sustain meaningful links to anything outside itself, the hegemony of utilitarianism in public conceptions of the moral sphere is fast being supplemented by a growth of moral enquiry only too happy to take its cue from the world of human emotion and experience. Whether the links between them are best characterised in terms of emotional awareness, the manipulation of sensibility, representation, narrative, or more simply with the help of the numerous metaphorical constructions we use to anchor our musical experience to the imaginative and cognitive processes it demands from us - these and other factors, it was felt, should once now be available for discussion together, of course, with the possibility that there is no meaningful link to be uncovered.
Having recruited six very high profile keynote speakers, all representing remarkably different approaches, a call for papers was issued in the autumn of 2008. We received well over 100 proposals for additional papers from a wide range of sources, as well as significant interest in the conference elsewhere. BBC Radio 3 organised a special issue of Music Matters around the conference theme, including a long discussion with three of the keynote speakers (John Deathridge, Deirdre Gribbin and Roger Scruton). In the end, some 34 papers were selected for parallel sessions, leading to a packed conference schedule with a total of 40 addresses. A total of around 90 delegates from over 15 countries attended over the three days, stretching the resources of the Institute of Advanced Study but also making for extremely vibrant and varied discussion.
The theme of the conference was approached from many different angles. Among the keynote speakers, composer Deirdre Gribbin and musicologists John Deathridge and Susan McClary drew on personal experience from which to elaborate their positions. Gribbin argued that composers have a strong duty to write music which reflects the moral and political climate in which they and their listeners live. Susan McClary used her own now legendary gendered analysis of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to illustrate ways in which the "moral force" of music was in many ways inescapable. John Deathridge pursued a more sceptical line, arguing that the trajectory pursued by "art music" in the post-war period has led to a position in which artistic fraudulence is indistinguishable from authenticity, hinting at the moral ramifications of this.
Illustrating his lecture with some fine vocalisations, the philosopher Jerry Levinson explored the moral character expressed in jazz standards. Roger Scruton, by contrast, mostly kept to the classical repertoire, arguing that music can both embody moral character and shape communities of listeners who are open to it. In this way, Scruton argued it is possible to distinguish noble music from ignoble, just as it provides a model for grounding notions of the cultural importance of musical excellence. In an unexpected conference first, Scruton's lecture proved to be his Powerpoint debut. The conference committee do not know if he has revisited the genre.
The line taken by the composer George Benjamin was in many ways the most general of all. In conversation with Guy Dammann, Benjamin argued that although it was not the duty of the composer to try to "engage" in moral and political issues directly - music should not be a form of protest or coercion - the compositional imperative to write music that was both new and, most importantly of all, beautiful is something in itself that may be considered to have a moral extension. This was understood both in the sense of a composer's private moral code but also, and more importantly, in the sense that the experience of profound beauty may itself be one of the things that ignites moral awareness and the sense of our freedom to act.
Much of the success of the conference owed to the quality of the selected papers, and to the liveliness of the discussions following them. It was generally felt that this was an interdisciplinary conference that had enabled the participants to make genuine progress in their research of the central theme, and the atmosphere was particularly positive throughout. In response to one of the papers, for example, a straw poll was arranged to canvas opinion on the question of whether music can lie. Roughly 65% felt that it could and lively debate ensued.
The overwhelming majority of the delegates expressed interest in continuing the discussion in the form of a publication, most probably a collection of selected papers. Barry Smith, Director of the Institute of Philosophy, and Guy Dammann are currently exploring this. We hope to have a proposal ready in the beginning of 2010.
International Conference on Music and Emotion, 2009
31 August - 3 September 2009, Durham University
Organised by Michael Spitzer (Durham University)
As the first interdisciplinary conference on music and emotion to have been organized by a music theorist, this gathering of philosophers, psychologists, engineers, experimental composers, ethnomusicologists, musicologists, and music theorists presented a unique opportunity for theorists to demonstrate the intricate tools of analysis for teasing out a spectrum of moods and shifting emotional states in musical works. In turn, psychologists provided a reality check as to the physiological and cognitive potential of music’s acoustic and gestural signals, and philosophers provided a reality check as to the appropriateness of the linguistic formulations for expressive meanings that theorists and musicologists interpret and attempt to ground in musical structure and form. In the midst of all this scholarly ferment, experimental composers (those who are creating new soundscapes with interactive input from listeners’ physiological responses) demonstrated what is yet possible for music to achieve in the realm of emotion.
A sampling of the large number of sponsors reveals the scope and ambition of this project: SMA, SMT, the British Society of Aesthetics, Durham University, London University’s IMR, Queen’s University in Belfast, Music and Letters, Oxford University Press, Musicon, SEMPRE . . . and the list goes on. Over 150 delegates representing Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia presented nearly 90 papers in four parallel sessions over four days, coming together for no less than sixteen plenary talks distributed among several of the many disciplines represented.
From the philosophers of music, principal themes included various weightings of arousal and cognitive appraisal (Jenefer Robinson and Derek Matravers), Adorno on mimesis and expression (Max Paddison), the projection of a persona or protagonist or fictive subject (at least for 19th-century music), and the distinction between metaphorical and literal language for music’s expressive states (Nick Zangwill)
From the psychologists of music (including here the bridging music theorist David Huron), topics embraced everything from evolutionary and ethological roots of emotion, to sophisticated dimensional studies of listeners’ categorization of their emotional responses (Roddie Cowie, leader of HUMAINE), subtle cross-modal experiments of the impact of music on perception in other realms, measuring models of entrainment in ensemble performance (Antonio Camurri), imaging mirror neurons in the context of musical expectation (Katie Overy), assessing the emotional effects of music in therapy, and at the end – complementing Patrik Juslin’s opening address on the new paradigm in emotion studies – John Sloboda’s eloquent plea for a new field of study, music in everyday life (note, however, the inherent problem of an individual’s degraded attention to the music’s more subtly expressed aesthetic emotions, if heavily engaged in other activities).
From the music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, themes ranged from the analytical (Robert Hatten and Michael Spitzer calibrating emotional expression in Mozart, Barry Cooper on the use of silence in Beethoven) to the cognitive (iconicity and emotive analogues in music), from the study of music and violence (both in art music and in the use of music in society) to the psychoanalytical approach to desire (Stephen Downes and Kenneth Smith on Lacan), and from emotion and rhetoric as projected in performance (John Butt) or as embedded in performance practice (Thérèse de Goede) to the emotional effects of bodily synchronization with groove-based music (Nikki Dibben)
Experimental composers demonstrated the close link between their research and compositional application, involving spectral manipulation (Trevor Wishart) and the kinematic and physiological symptoms of listeners as interactively helping to direct musical events in a live performance realization of a new compositions (Eric Lyons and Ben Knapp). Delegates were recruited as participants in an evening’s demonstration of these creative fusions of science and art. Another example of the conference’s integration of theory and practice was John Butt’s pre-concert talk on the philosophy of time consciousness in Schütz and Bach, prior to taking up the baton to conduct his Dunedin Consort for a splendid evening of music. An extra bonus was an OUP book launch of Juslin and Sloboda’s new Handbook of Music and Emotion, hugely expanded successor to their seminal 2001 volume.
Given the slant of the conference, I will concentrate on the four music theory plenaries. I must confess it was difficult to choose among the concurrent sessions (the book of abstracts is a treasure trove), and I was thus grateful for the numerous plenary gatherings.
Among the plenary talks by music theorists, David Huron’s was the least analytical, but he offered a marvelously cogent argument for a surprising relationship, based on evolutionary, ethological, and physiological evidence, between weeping and laughing. At the root of each is some form fear (including uncertainty, embarrassment, etc.), which, when cognitively appraised as non-threatening, leads to the contrastive reaction of laughter. The goal of his presentation was to demonstrate the importance of this finding for our aesthetic appreciation of so-called negative emotions in music: “in normal circumstances, weeping is a negatively valenced affective state, but in the context of cortical appraisal of innocuousness (such as when listening to music), contrastive affect renders the experience pleasurable. In this, the positive feelings evoked by music-induced weeping have similar underlying mechanisms to laughter.”
Lawrence Zbikowski’s lecture moved up the cognitive scale to explore sonic analogues (iconicity at the diagrammatic level, in Peirce’s terminology) to human processes, focusing on emotion. The neurological evidence, drawn from Barsalou and Damasio, suggests that we construct fragmentary feature maps for each sensory modality, “conjunctive neurons” capture them for future use, and they can be reactivated—either in imagination without stimuli, or in immediate response to similar patterns (as in music’s acoustical signals)—such that we sense almost immediately the analogue with our previously encoded patterns. Thus, if we know the relative frame of experience (e.g., emotional) for those signals, we can have near-immediate access to their specifically encoded emotive patterns. His illustration at the guitar of Sagreras’s “El Colibri” (the hummingbird) demonstrated how music can embody such patterns.
Michael Spitzer’s and my own contributions moved analysis toward center stage, while bringing to bear insights from both philosophical and psychological studies. Michael’s central theme was the power of analysis in tracking emotional change, from the first apprehension of a feeling tone through the traversal of a unique musical form. In his exploration of the Minuet and Trio from Mozart’s Symphony no. 40, he identified vectors of anger (exploding, breakthrough) vs. tenderness (comforting) as conveyed by a range of parameters, including instrumentation, phrasing, and metric structure (with such analogues as metric dissonance conveying cognitive dissonance). His evidence was drawn from Izard and Ackerman’s ethology of emotional behavior, which links basic emotions with behavior in time. Thus, if we can analyze “thwarting” in music, leading to an “explosion,” then that process suggests the emotional behavior associated with “anger.” He also noted the once-removed aesthetic emotion experienced when our appreciation of form displaces the everyday emotion of anger, such that the emotion we actually experience might be a sense of triumph over recalcitrant material.
Since my plenary talk was paired with that of philosopher of music Jenefer Robinson, I chose to frame my contribution along philosophical lines of inquiry. As does Robinson, I outlined the varieties of musical emotional experience (drawing on the analogy with William James’s varieties of religious experience) in order to focus on what I call “aesthetically warranted emotions.” I further focused on “composed expressive trajectories” (my notion of “expressive genre” is a global type, but I concentrated here on smaller phrase trajectories), as interpreted by a stylistically competent listener. Playing my stylistically adequate but rather unmarked rewriting of the opening to the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 533, I noted how Mozart’s version can be understood as an enhancement of expressive intensity by means of marked tonal events and their rhythmic and phrase-structural consequences. Next, I explored the role of previous emotional experience in helping us gauge the expressive significance of such passages, and whether our response need be fully emotional in order to appreciate composed expressive trajectories. Finally, I conjectured on emergent emotions (compare Spitzer) that may not be isomorphic (compare Zbikowski) with those composed trajectories, but that may nevertheless be considered as aesthetically warranted.
This is a remarkable time to be a music theorist in Great Britain. The profusion of timely conferences is bringing together some of the best minds to ponder issues of performance, tonality, and emotion in music, in addition to the various themes of several innovative study days, and the recently launched summer school in music analysis. These are strong indicators of the success of the Society for Music Analysis and its leadership, which has progressively transformed the musical landscape in Britain. As a North American who is increasingly drawn to these shores, I applaud your efforts, and hope that we can emulate your inspiring model of interdisciplinary cooperation.
Robert Hatten - Indiana University
British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2009
4-6 September 2009, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford
The three-day, 2009 British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference – organised by Stacie Friend, Ian Ground, Derek Matravers and Aaron Meskin – took place, as before, at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, in the beginning of September. Unlike previous occasions, though, this year’s conference was attended by 73 delegates (a record number) and the graduate papers delivered were twice as many as before.
The conference kicked off with a thought-provoking paper given by David Davies (McGill) on the ontology of art, broadly construed. Informed by examples in which certain works of art are created for specific locations, Davies argued that, since the reception conditions influence the way we, viewers, appreciate the manifest properties of visual artworks, the correct appreciation of some of those works requires acquaintance with the works’ original context (say, the church to which an altarpiece was commissioned). In a similar vein, but in relation to the ontology of architecture, Daniel Barnes (Nottingham) claimed that architecture is a singular, rather than a multiple, art form mainly drawing upon the assumptions that buildings are site-specific and historically-located objects.
Rounding off the first day of conference, Catherine Abell (Macquarie/Manchester) presented on ‘Representation, Expression and Interpretation’ and, followed by Aaron Ridley’s (Southampton) formal commentary, James Shelley (Auburn) presented on ‘Why Aesthetic Judgments Should be True’. Abell sought to understand, based on speech act theory, how works of fiction and non-fiction express mental states and, moreover, what the real aim of both artistic and narrative interpretations should be. In his turn, Shelley attempted to explain why aesthetic valuing is prescriptive and why we should not over-valuate and under-valuate artworks.
Amongst this year’s graduate sessions, two were on historical issues: Ian Blaustein (Boston) presented a paper on Kant’s aesthetics and Bob Mahoney (Southampton) another on Hume’s. Arguing that Hume’s true judge is not ideal, but a character-type instead, Mahoney’s paper was awarded the BSA 2009 Graduate Prize. The other graduate papers were on diverse, though sometimes related, topics. For instance, Louise Hanson (Oxford) addressed the question of whether conceptual artworks are paraphrasable – claiming that, even if that were the case, it would not follow that conceptual art is a redundant project – while Andrew Huddleston (Princeton) raised objections to Noël Carroll’s analogy between engaging with art and having a conversation, concluding that, in a conversation, grasping our interlocutor’s intention should be a point of departure, not a point of arrival. The remaining papers were delivered by Dan Cavedon-Taylor (Birkbeck) on ‘What’s Really Wrong with Photographic Transparency’, Simone Neuber (Tübingen) on ‘An Ordinary Perception Account of Picture Perception and Gombrichian Schemata’, Paloma Atencia (UCL) on ‘Should Imagining Seeing Turn (Moving) Pictures into Fiction?’, and Emily Caddick (Cambridge) on ‘The Real Problem with Fictional Feelings’.
In the afternoon of the second day, Katherine Thomson-Jones (Oberlin) considered the possibility that moving, but not static, cinematic images can produce a sense of movement in the viewers themselves, seeking to explore what sort of imaginings they generate – particularly, when associated with a cinematic narrator – and suggesting, amongst other things, that film may prompt experiential imaginings in a way that other forms of visual art cannot. David Osipovich (Allegheny), in his interesting paper on the art of theatre, sought to identify the conditions in which something counts as a theatrical performance, putting forward two main features of it: liveness and enactment. And Martin Gayford, the art historian and critic who delivered this year’s William Empson Lecture at the BSA conference, dealt with the philosophical question ‘What is a Portrait?’ from the point of view of art history.
The third, final day of conference was opened by Andy Hamilton’s (Durham) discussion about the role of rhythm in music and closed by James Harold’s (Mount Holyoke) subtle reason for why we ought to prefer autonomism over interactionism when evaluating artworks. In between these presentations, there was also time for Dominic McIver Lopes (British Columbia) to persuasively defend the view – subsequently commented by Nick Zangwill (Durham) – according to which, if artistic value is to be distinguished from aesthetic value (i.e., if they are not one and the same thing), there is no such thing as artistic value – or, to paraphrase Lopes, artistic value is nothing but a myth.
Miguel F. dos Santos—St. Andrews