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The idea that music may represent or ameliorate violence has become a prominent theme in musicological thinking, but what is musical violence? In this short talk, I suggest that the scholarly focus on an instrumental relationship between music and violence obscures the complexity of their interactions. Instead, I take inspiration from the work of Lydia Goehr and Theodor Adorno in considering the ways in which contemporary music/sound at once engages with violence as an aesthetic and engages in violence as a form of shock, damage, and harm. Caught between the violence of the world and the nature of the medium, is there an aesthetics of violence that might resist what Goehr called the ‘transformation of blood into aesthetic transcendence’?
This session will feature a response to the presentation from Carina Venter.
Speaker: Ariana Phillips-Hutton
Ariana Phillips-Hutton is Lecturer in Global Critical and Cultural Study of Music at the University of Leeds. Her research ranges broadly across the philosophy, performance, and politics of contemporary music, with a particular focus on musical ethics and music’s relationship to violence and conflict transformation. Recent articles can be found in Journal of Musicology, Twentieth-Century Music, Filigrane, and Journal of the Royal Musical Association. She is also the author of Music Transforming Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation (Bloomsbury, 2023), and the co-editor of Perpetual Encounter: Globalisation, Cosmopolitanism, and Acculturation in Music (Media Musica, 2024) and the Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Photo credit: Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Response by Carina Venter
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