Matter and Meaning in Music – The Collective and the Culture-Relative

The lecture will first discuss the ‘materiality' of music: how the sounds and their organizations come into being and are perceived, it will then examine how this relates to musical ‘meaning’, thereby also drawing parallels to certain philosophical concepts regarding music’s metaphysical or practical role in life, and it will finally reflect on how these general features relate to the fact of cultural relativity regarding musical structures and musical hearing.

 

Simone Mahrenholz (PhD TU Berlin, Habilitation FU Berlin) is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of the books Musik und Erkenntnis (Music and Cognition) Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart, 2000, and Kreativität - Eine philosophische Analyse (Creativity - A Philosophical Analysis), Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2011, as well as of numerous articles on, among other topics, epistemology, philosophy of music, creativity & rationality, aesthetics, film studies, etc. More information can be found here: https://umanitoba.academia.edu/SimoneMahrenholz and here: https://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/departments/philosophy/facstaff/Mahrenholz.html