Ron Alexander Memorial Lectures in Musicology – Nicholas Mathew, University of California Berkeley

Title: The Posthumanization of Sound (between Paris and California)

Abstract: This talk begins in 1972, at the intermission of a concert in Berkeley, California, when the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar—a veteran of twenties theosophical experimentation and sixties counterculture—took to the stage and delivered a wide-ranging lecture entitled "The Transforming Power of Tone."  Following the musical ideas and buried institutional histories in this lecture, we will head all the way back to pre-war France—and all the way forward to the vibrational ontologies of sound art and the cyber-mysticism of 90s tech utopians.  On the journey with us, it turns out, is none other than Claude Debussy—a marginal yet constant presence in the twentieth-century Euro-American fantasy of pure sound and vibrational oneness.  I will tell this eccentric story of Debussy reception with two questions in mind.  When and how is music audible as sound?  And when and why was sound associated with the non- or post-human?  Trying to answer these questions, I will suggest, helps us to clarify the (frequently submerged) cultural politics of present-day philosophies of sound and vibration.

Nicholas Mathew is Professor of Music and Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the books Political Beethoven and The Haydn Economy, and, with Benjamin Walton, contributing editor of the volume The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini.  He has co-authored two special issues of the humanities journal Representations, one with Mary Ann Smart on "Quirk Historicism" and another with Martha Feldman on music, sound, and historicism. With James Davies, he edits the University of Chicago Press book series New Material Histories of Music.  His newest publications include the review article "All the Feels" in the Cambridge Opera Journal, an essay in Keyboard Perspectives on the global peregrinations of the piano, and a chapter on William Crotch and the ethic of "omniaudience" in the Penn University Press book The Attentive Ear.

Admission Information

• Free admission