Hi everyone,
As we agreed, we’ll go with excerpts from Holly Watkins’s book, Musical Vitalities (Chicago, 2018). We’ll be reading the introduction and Chapter 6, “On Not Letting Sounds Be Themselves”, which you can download from here.
Here’s the blurb from the publisher’s website:
Redefining music as “the art of possibly animate things,” Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music’s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music’s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music’s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share.
Here’s a couple of reviews:
As ever, blog responses on any aspect of the reading in any form are welcome.
The next discussion group meeting will be online at 12 p.m. (New York) / 5 p.m. (London) on June 15th 2020 Saturday, June 20th at 11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. BST; please contact either of us on Twitter for the link to the video conference.
— Eamonn and Ezra
Watkins, Holly. Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music. New Material Histories of Music. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018.