Abstracts of Sessions

BAIGINA Diana The Role of the Intonation in Music and

Communicative Practices
BERTOLA Mauro Fosco The Most Sublime of the Arts? Musical Modernism, Negativity and the Trouble with the
Context(s)
BONARD Constant Musical Essence as a Quaternary Quality
CHĘĆKA Anna Performance as Understanding in Action: Re-thinking the Concept of Musical
Experience
CHOW Sheryl The Changing View in Tuning and Temperament as Essence of Chinese Traditional
Music in the Twenty-First Century
COLAS Annabel Is there such a Thing as a Perfect Performance of a Musical Work?
CZARNECKI Jan Music Beyond Music? Remarks on the Essence of Music in the Light of its Intermedial
Realizations
DAHL Per Where is the Essence of a Musical Work?
DAMMANN Guy Absolute Listening: Hanslick’s Idea of Musical Essence as Meta-programme
DRUMMOND William Ambiguities of Listening: Essence and Context in the Arrangements of Gérard Pesson
DUOBLIENĖ Lilija Music Artist, Artisan and Teacher: Towards Repetition and Affect in Deleuzean
Perspective
EFTHIMIOU Charris The Various Instrumentations of Reoccurring Motifs. A Musical Essence?
FORTUNOVA Anna Reflections About the Essence of Music in a Special Context: Music Reviews by Yuri
Ofrosimov and Ludmila Landau in Berlin in the 1920s
GRUODYTĖ Vita The Distance of Presque-rien Between Musicology and the Philosophy of Music (In
reference to Vladimir Jankélévitch)
GUHL-MILLER Solomon Essence as Form: The Sublime and the Beautiful as Tools for Interpreting Form in a
19th-Century Context
HÖCHSMANN Hyun Process of Becoming and Dialectical Temporality in Nono and Adorno
HÜNNEMAN Ronald, Taking Notes. How Media Shape Our Conception of Musical Essences
LAMAIN David
KARACHEVSKAYA Mikhail Gnessin on the Essence of Russian Music
Maria
KOLINEK-SIECHOWICZ The Essence of Changeability – Performance as the Crucial Issue of Discourse About
Karolina Music
LEE Mei-Yen “Is there an Essence in Guqin Music?”
LEUNG Ki Ki “Music Is Not to Be Decorative; It Is to Be True”: Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music as
Symbolic Form
LOOS Helmut Leitfigur Beethoven – Thoughts on the Development of German Musicology in the
Light of the 1968 Movement
LUNDBLAD Jonas The Subjective Constitution of Music: Perspectives from Schelling
MACAUSLAN John Essence and ‘Geist’ in Musical Works
MAGRE Fernando de The Essence and the Context in Blirium C-9 by Gilberto Mendes
Oliveira, BERG Silvia
MENGOZZI Stefano Essentially Agnostic: Toward a Rhetorical Approach to the History of Music Theory
MILLER Malcolm Essence, Context and Meaning in Versions of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder by
Wagner, Mottl and Henze
NAVICKAITĖ- Unveiling the Significations of Music Performance: An Application of Gino Stefani’s
MARTINELLI Lina Theory of Musical Competence
NICOLETTI Daniela From Schiller to Dalcroze: the Aesthetical Musical Game as a Way to Freedom and a
Amaral Rodrigues, Comprehensive Human Development
BERG Silvia
PERKOVIĆ Ivana Singing with Mind, Singing with Heart. Music and Metaphor in Serbian Medieval
Literature
PODLIPNIAK Piotr The Biological Constraints on Musical Structure as the Foundations of Musical
Essence
POLITE Brandon “Musical Kinds as Social Kinds: Or, There’s More Than One Way to Rock”
POPOVIĆ ‘In-between’ the Autonomous and Contingent Worlds of Music
MLADJENOVIĆ Tijana
REIMANN Heli Discovering the Cultural Meaning of Jazz: The Example of Soviet Estonia
 ROSANI Silvia Who is There?
ROYER-ARTUSO Formulating the Essence All Together
Nicolas
RUNDELL John Chromaticism and Polyvocality
RUPEIKAITĖ Kamilė Musical Images in the Tanakh: Between Their Essence, Context and Interpretation
SAVENKO Svetlana Some Thoughts on Verbal Models in Music
SCHNEEMAN Eric Ritter Gluck and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Search for the Essence of Music
SILIUS Vytis Origins of Music and Its Influence to Ethical Life in Early Confucian Texts
STRATILKOVÁ Martina Music and Sense in Jan Patočka’sPhilosophy
SULUMUNA Temina Essence and Context – Exploring the Links between Music and Philosophy in the Light
Cadi of Henriette Renié’s Reflections
ŠUMILA Edvardas Neoliberal Aesthetics: Music as Social and Political Critique
SZYSZKOWSKA Musical Essences: The Experience of Music as a Process of [Self] Development
Małgorzata A.
TRIPPETT David Jacob von Uexküll, a Third Ear, and the Limits of Sensation
ZANETTI Roberto What is a Musical Act? Understanding Improvisation through Artefact and
Performance

Diana BAIGINA
National Institute of Education, BELARUS

The Role of the Intonation in Music and Communicative Practices

In this paper I’d like to study the role of music as a phenomenon of communication. The absence of fixed
significations which could have been attributed to the musical elements implies that we cannot qualify music as a
language. However, music permits to put into practice various modes of social interaction (such as interpersonal,
group or mass communication, introspection, or communication with the transcendental). In my research of music
as a modality of social exchange, I have a particular interest to intonation as a basic characteristic of music, and as
a basis for the verbal and non-verbal communication alike. This topic for me is of particular interest, as in my
research I imply that human communication, performed with the help of sound and tonic speech, surpasses in
complexity any form of transmission of signals, the meaning of which would be prescribed by a fixed code. Human
thinking is not entirely mediated by verbal language and its richness surpasses in its complexity any forms of verbal
expression; that is, we might suppose that there are domains in which the process of thinking is possible as a non-
verbal one.
Considering intonation as a crucial means of communication and interaction, we assume that the need for
communication could lie at the origins of music. Along these lines, music is considered as a unique type of social
communication, in which the transmission of dynamic phenomena, abstract ideas and concepts occurs more
directly and integrally than in verbal and logical thinking. Musical culture is understood as an area in which the
transmission of socially significant meanings takes place. In my research, I am paying a particular interest to the
capacity of this mode of communication to influence the society on a wider scale.

Diana Baigina is a PhD student at the National Institute of Education in Minsk, since 2012 (dissertation topic
The Principal Methodological Strategies in the Philosophy of Music in the 19th-20th centuries). In 2006–
2011, she studied philosophy at the Belarusian State University. In 2011–2012, she was an assistant at the
department of Philosophy and Methodology of Sciences at the Belarusian State University. Her research
focuses on social philosophy, philosophy of music, aesthetics, ethnomusicology, philosophy of mind,
semiotics studies, myth theory, cultural studies.
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Mauro Fosco BERTOLA

Heidelberg University, GERMANY

The Most Sublime of the Arts? Musical Modernism, Negativity and the Trouble with the Context(s)

“After the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism” (Adorno 1997: 197).
Positioning at its core the category of the sublime, the modernist aesthetic famously engenders a problematic
relationship between music – characterized as an autonomous, self-relating agent of nonrepresentational negativity
pursuing on its own terms a powerful critique of the Western metaphysic of presence – and its embeddedness in
cultural contexts. At its most radical, like in Lyotard’s aesthetic, music’s ‘immaterial matter’ becomes a traumatic,
‘inhuman’ Otherness, a sublime, otherworldly sound-event, “which is not addressed […and] does not address”
(Lyotard 1991: 142).
Picking up again her old polemical stance from 1989 against this kind of aesthetic and dismissing the modernist
sublime as a fundamentally ‘male’ category, Susan McClary recently highlighted how in the last few decades a new
generation of composers like George Benjamin or Salvatore Sciarrino has arisen, which by still drawing on the
modernist tradition nonetheless engages more directly with signification and the cultural inscription of music
(McClary 2015: 32-33). On this basis McClary calls for rehabilitating the allegedly feminine category of the
beautiful, thus relocating music’s essence within the anthropological boundaries of pleasure and opening it for
cultural diversity and contextuality (see also Bérubé 2005: 1-27 and Wolff 2008: 11-29). Yet, is the beautiful the
more apt category for aesthetically framing this artistic development? And does it really account for this alleged
relocation of music’s essence within the dimension of the human and of cultural diversity?
As Catherine Belsey has pointed out, the specific twist at the core of Žižek’s philosophy consists in its conflating
Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory of sublimation with Kant’s concept of the sublime (Belsey 2005: 141). Žižek’s
sublime object thus intermingles not only pleasure and pain but also the absolute negativity of the Lacanian Real
and the positive features of its cultural inscription. In my paper I intend to explore the potential this theoretical frame
offers for reading these recent artistic developments neither in terms of a domesticated modernism nor as a return
to the aesthetic category of beauty as a culturally embedded fit between form and content. Instead, I will propose
that we read them as the exploration of a specific, twisted space at the crossroad of the ‘meaningful’ positivity of
culture and that ‘sublime’ negativity that the modernist aesthetic sees as the nonrepresentational essence of music.

Bibliography of works cited:

Adorno, Theodor W. (1997), Aesthetic Theory, Minneapolis/MN.
Belsey, Catherine (2005), Culture and the Real, Abingdon and New York/NY.
Bérubé, Michael (2005), Introduction: Engaging the Aesthetic, in M. Bérubé (ed.), The Aesthetics of Cultural
Studies, Oxford, pp. 1-27.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991), The Inhuman, Cambridge.
McClary, Susan (2015), The lure of the Sublime: revisiting the modernist project, in E. Guldbrandsen, J. Johnson
(ed.), Transformations of Musical Modernism, Cambridge, pp. 21-35.
Wolff, Janet (2008), The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, New York/NY.

Mauro Fosco Bertola is an assistant lecturer in musicology at Heidelberg University. After completing his
master’s thesis in philosophy in Italy, he studied musicology in Heidelberg. In his PhD (Die List der
Vergangenheit. Musikwissenschaft, Rundfunk und Deutschlandbezug in Italien, 1890-1945, Böhlau 2014) he
analyzed the role of music traditions for constructing national and fascist identities in Italian and German
musicology and radio broadcasting. He has been a Fellow of the Landesgraduiertenförderung Baden-
Württemberg, of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome and of the Richard Wagner Verband. He has
published numerous articles on various subjects ranging from the emergence of Italian musicology at the
end of the 19th century to Toru Takemitsu’s reception of Debussy, from Philip Glass’ operas to the role of
ancient music in Italian and German radio broadcasting before World War II, and to the link between opera,
film and ideology. He is currently working on a monograph that examines the link between the Western
discourse on sovereignty, humanism and the operatic reception of the orphic myth from the 19th to the 21st
century and, together with Rex Butler, on a special issue of the International Journal of Žižek Studies
focusing on Žižek and music.
______________________________________

Constant BONARD
University of Geneva, SWITZERLAND

Musical Essence as a Quaternary Quality

In this paper, I defend an empirically informed version of the classical view (Plato; Aristotle) according to which the
essence of music is to be found in the value of sounds produced intentionally. More specifically, I argue that we
should consider musical essence to be metaphysically grounded (in the sense of Fine (1994) or Correia (2013)) in
what we might call quaternary qualities. This claim might be described as follows: Physical vibrations are often
considered as primary qualities as they are mind-independent properties of real objects. Sounds are secondary
qualities as they are metaphysically grounded not only in physical vibrations, but also in our auditory system (which
is why X-Rays are physical vibrations but not sounds). Now, the value of sounds (e.g. the scariness of a howl; the
disgustingness of a slurp; the awesomeness of a thunder) can be considered as tertiary qualities as they are not
only metaphysically grounded in sounds, but also in emotions (respectively: fear; disgust; awe). Their grounding in
emotions is a plausible consequence of the fact that emotions’ formal objects are values (philosophy: Deonna &
Teroni, 2012; psychology: Moors & Scherer, 2013). Finally, I argue that musical essence is a quaternary quality as
it is not only metaphysically grounded in the value of sounds – which seems to be one of the few musical
universals (Nettl, 2005), – but also in our capacity for ostensive-intentional communication, a cognitive system that
homo sapiens probably acquired between 100,000 and 250,000 B.P. (Scott-Phillips, 2014). Indeed, evolutionary
and cognitive theories of music support the idea that music is universally grounded in such an ostensive-inferential
system (Brown, 2000; Zbikowski, 2002; Mithen, 2005; Patel, 2008). As I will show, this idea also fits nicely with a
score of contemporary æsthetic and metaphysical theories of music that insist on the importance of musicians’
intentions (e.g. Levinson, 1990/2011; Davies, 2001; Thomasson, 2005).
References:
Brown, Steven, 2000, “The “Musilanguage” Model of Music Evolution”
Correia, Fabrice, 2013, “Metaphysical Grounds and Essence”
Davies, David, 2001, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration
Deonna, Julien, & Teroni, Fabrice, 2012, Emotions: a philosophical introduction
Fine, Kit, 1994, “Essence and Modality”
Levinson, Jerrold, 1990/2011, Music, Art, & Metaphysics
Mithen, Stevens, 2005, The Singing Neanderthal
Moors, Agnes & Scherer, Klaus, 2013, “The role of appraisal in emotion”
Nettl, Bruno, 2005, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts
Patel, Aniruddh, 2008, Music, Language, and the Brain
Scott-Phillips, Thom, 2014, Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different and why language
evolved to make it special
Thomasson, Amy, 2004, “The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics”
Zbikowski, Lawrence, 2002, Conceptualizing Music

Constant Bonard is presently assistant-doctorant for the Chair ‘philosophy of emotions’ at the University of
Geneva, Switzerland, and a PhD candidate at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. There Professors
Julien Deonna (philosophy) and Didier Grandjean (neuroscience) co-direct my doctoral dissertation, which
explores intersections between cognitive mechanisms used in music and language, from an interdisciplinary
(philosophy, psychology, linguistics, ethnomusicology) and cross-cultural perspective (case-studies are
Western classical music, South Indian classical music, and rap music). I am also a member of Thumos, a
research group on emotions, values, and norms. I have obtained a MA in philosophy and a BA in philosophy
and musicology at the University of Geneva and have been a visiting graduate student at the University of
California, Los Angeles, in ethnomusicology and at the University of Maryland, College Park, in philosophy.
There, Pr. Jerrold Levinson supervised a Master's thesis on the ontology of musical genres.
______________________________________

Anna CHĘĆKA
University of Gdansk, POLAND

Performance as Understanding in Action: Re-thinking the Concept of Musical Experience

Many music lovers, critics and professional performers firmly believe that music can provide deep insight into the
interior of human life. However, the customary ways in which we describe the musical experience in philosophical
and musicological discourse are analytical and formal ones. While the most influential contemporary philosophers
of music (Peter Kivy, Malcolm Budd, Nick Zangwill) are prominent defenders of formalism (of one variety or
another), other philosophers are often skeptical about the view that music has content. My own view is that pure,
instrumental music is intended to resonate with inner life of an interpreter (performer, critic, listener). I call my view
“moderate aesthetic personalism”. It comes to the defence of the person of the performer, but it does not ignore his
role of a messenger between the composer and the audience. Originality – which distinguishes performances
singled out from the perspective of moderate personalism – reminds us of the “source that beats in the distance”. It
reminds us, as George Steiner writes in Real Presences, about the ‘dur désir de durer’ of a work of art. After all,
interpretation is a personal statement in favour of values; it is standing between them (inter-pretium). Listeners
discover 'the essence of music' when experience and compare different performances of the same musical work.
According to George Steiner, no musicology can tell us as much as the action of meaning which is performance.
Interpretation is ‘experiencing the essence’ in action. This is the task of my paper to spell out the implication of the
musical experience remembering that, as Steiner put it, ‘our master intelligencers are the performers’. The process
of negotiating the meaning and discovering the essence of music is rooted in the dialectic of freedom and
necessity, determined by the musical text, and yet wondrously unpredictable.

Dr. Hab. Anna Chęćka-Gotkowicz is a philosopher and pianist. She currently works as an associate
professor at the Department of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture at the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology
and Journalism, University of Gdansk. She has completed piano studies at the Academy of Music in Gdansk
(master degree in 1998, with distinction) and studied with Bernard Ringeissen in Paris on a French
government scholarship (in 1999). In 2002, she recorded CD The Soul of Music, with works of Bach, Chopin,
Brahms, Rachmaninov and Debussy. In 2005, she completed her PhD studies in philosophy (dissertation On
criticising music. Metacritical aspects of musical performance’s evaluation). She has published two books:
Dysonanse krytyki. O ocenie wykonania dzieła muzycznego [Critical dissonance. Evaluating performances of
musical works, 2008] and Ucho i umysł. Szkice o doświadczaniu muzyki [Ear and mind. Sketches of musical
experience, 2012]. In 2014, she got her habilitation in philosophy. She has also published articles in Estetyka
i Krytyka, Sztuka i Filozofia as well as the series Punkt po Punkcie.
______________________________________

Sheryl CHOW
Princeton University, USA
The Changing View in Tuning and Temperament as Essence of Chinese Traditional Music in the Twenty-
First Century

Since the twentieth century, the circulation of Western music has elicited different reactions in the non-Western
world (Nettl). The ways in which people in the non-Western world handle Western music are not only conditioned
by the nature of their musical systems but also by their attitudes toward their own musical traditions under the
influence of Western culture and ideology. In the twentieth century, Chinese music reformers saw Western music
as scientific in its use of harmony, technologically advanced instruments, mathematically rational temperament, and
its association with scientifically advanced societies. They saw the absence of harmony and standardized tuning in
their music as a sign of inferiority, and hence advocated the incorporation of tonal harmony and equal temperament
into their music (Kraus, Mittler). Many fretted or fixed-pitch traditional Chinese instruments, such as the pipa and
the yangqin, were modified for equal temperament. The determination of which features or parameters of traditional
music are to be incorporated or dismissed inevitably leads to an essentialization of Chineseness in that some
musical parameters (e.g. pentatonic mode) are selected at the expense of others (e.g. microtonal intonation). Their
attitude toward the musical tuning or microtonal intonation of Chinese traditional music in the face of equal
temperament reflected their conception about the essence of Chinese musical culture. For instance, although both
Chinese and Egyptian modernizers saw the piano as a vehicle of musical progress for its mechanical technology
and standardized tuning, the Egyptians were more inclined to retune the piano to play microtonal intonation for
Arab music while the Chinese maintained the equal temperament. However, in the twentieth-first century, more and
more Chinese music scholars and musicians advocated the use of microtonal intonations an essential feature of
traditional Chinese music. Isolating the little-studied parameter of tuning and temperament, this paper explores the
changing view of the essence of Chinese music in the context of the globalization of Western music.

Sheryl Chow is a PhD candidate in musicology at Princeton University. She received her BA and MPhil in
musicology from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include the interaction of language and
music, film music, the history of Chinese music, and protest music. She has presented on the decision-
making process of writing lyrics in Cantopop in the Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities. Her MPhil
thesis concerns the relationship between speech tones and melody in Cantopop. In 2015, she presented in
the Annual Meeting of the Society of Ethnomusicology on Hong Kong protest music.
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Annabel COLAS
Institute of Philosophy, University of Bern, SWITZERLAND

Is there such a Thing as a Perfect Performance of a Musical Work?

The purpose of this talk is to answer the following question: is there such a thing as a perfect performance of a
musical work?
I will assess two opposite views:
- The monist view, stating that only one sort of performance can be perfect, ideal or optimal.
- The plurality view of musical performance, asserting that there are many sorts of performances that are equally
good while being artistically distinct. Thus, some are in fact better than others, some of equal merit but we
appreciate one arrangement of a work for some features and another performance for others.
The plurality view is the one I intend to defend by examining the following questions:
- How can the composer's intention be preserved according to performance pluralists (if it has to be preserved, an
assumption one might want to discuss)?
- If relevant features of performances have no corresponding features in the score, how do these features relate to
the original work?
The answer I endorse is that the performance’s features are the original musical work’s features, even though
these features are not explicitly nor implicitly indicated in the score. If this is true, then the performer is not merely
producing the sounds specified in the score, he is interpreting the score and is animated by a musical intention that
may either harmonize or compete with the composer’s intention, giving rise to a work distinct from the original work.
Thus, I will conclude that, even in performance pluralism, considerable latitude in performance is permitted without
changing the identity of the musical work. And without falling into relativism.

Annabel Colas is a PhD student following the project Ontology of Musical works and Analysis of Musical
Practices at the University of Bern (Switzerland), under the supervision of Prof. Dale Jacquette. She
graduated from Philosophy at the University of Rennes 1 (France). She also has a Bachelor's degree in
History of Arts (University of Paris X, France). Her research is mainly focusing on the identity conditions for
musical works, and on how this matter relates to the plurality of musical practices. She also has strong
interest in music performance studies.
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Jan CZARNECKI
University of Padua, ITALY

Music Beyond Music? Remarks on the Essence of Music in the Light of its Intermedial Realizations

Can the philosophical quest for the essence of music be informed by the transgressive attempts to make music
within the means traditionally proper to other temporal arts, such as literature? What can we learn about the
essence of music from such hybrids? And are they hybrids at all? Can musical novels and short stories be
legitimate objects of scrutiny for the philosopher of music, alongside with symphonies, Lieder, popular songs and
jazz standards? Can they count as (qualified, perhaps) instantiations of the musical art, rather than mere
representations and descriptions thereof? In my attempt to address these questions in the lights of the
contemporary Philosophy of Music on one hand and the Word and Music Studies on the other I interpret Antoni
Libera’s 2012 short story Toccata in C Major as a work of textual music. I comment on some heuristic advantages
of such well-defended inclusion for the philosophical study of the essence of music.

Jan Czarnecki is a PhD Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Padua (Italy). He graduated summa cum
laude in Philosophy (BA, MA) from the College of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities (MISH),
University of Warsaw. He obtained his diploma with honours from the F. Chopin State Music School in
Warsaw. He has been an associated researcher at the University of Lille-3 (France) and a visiting
postgraduate research student at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). An active singer, he performs in
Italy and Poland as a soloist and as a member of the Concentus Musicus Patavinus chamber choir. Editor at
Universa. Recensioni di filosofia, and publishes in Ruch muzyczny.
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Per DAHL
Stavanger Music Conservatoire, NORWAY

Where is the Essence of a Musical Work?

As humans, we live in a context where we predict a coherent world of symbols, meanings and ideas from single
impressions. In the communicative chain of music, three human roles are important. Taken Stephen Davies’s
distinction between thick and thin works, I will include ideas/cognition, humans and objects, and by that point to six
miscellaneous discourses illuminating some differences between essence and context of a musical work.

The classical composer’s musical ideas had to be transformed to a score and the notated musical work is the thin
element that needs to be interpreted, i.e. given (musical/essential) meaning by adding properties that render
possible meanings different from those intended by the composer. An interpretation is based on the performer’s
horizon of knowledge (not restricted to music/sound/notation) and his performance skills. The sounded musical
work is thinner (has fewer properties) than the performer’s concept of the interpreted musical work. The listener will
interpret the performance in accordance with his/her expectations and horizon of knowledge (not restricted to
music). His/her utterances in a discussion will be thinner than the musical experience. The traditional discourse in
music analysis tends to disregard the performer and jump directly from a listening perspective to the score (the
context) searching for the composer’s intentions (the essence). Studies on performance practices focus on
composer and performer, using new knowledge about the transition of the composer’s idea to the score (the
notation practice) to guide the interpretation. Artistic research use the performer as a lens/catalyst for
understanding the various thick/thin-relations, indicating a relational contextual essence in a musical work.

Prof. Dr. Per Dahl (b. 1952) studied at the University of Trondheim, Norway (musicology, philosophy and
psychology), and has been working in Stavanger since 1979 (Music Conservatoire, now Department of
Music and Dance). He is consultant to the Norwegian Institute of Recorded Sound, opened in Stavanger in
1985. He was rector at Stavanger University College (2000–2003). After finishing his dissertation at the
University of Stavanger in 2006 (title: Jeg elsker Dig! Lytterens argument. Grammofoninnspillinger av Edvard
Griegs opus 5 nr.3 / I love You! The listener’s argument. Recordings of Grieg, Op. 5 No. 3) he has written
two books: Anvendt musikkestetikk. En innføring (Applied Music Aesthetics, 2008) and Verkanalysen som
fortolkningsarena (Music Analysis as an Arena of Interpretation, 2011) and given several public lectures and
courses on music listening/appreciation. He is the leader of a new researcher group focusing on Practitioner
Knowledge in Music and Dance at the University of Stavanger, Norway. He is member of IMS Directorium.
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Guy DAMMANN
University of Uppsala, SWEDEN

Absolute Listening: Hanslick’s Idea of Musical Essence as Meta-programme

In this paper I analyse Eduard Hanslick’s well-known definition of musical beauty as consisting “simply and solely of
tones and their artistic combination”. First I investigate the extent to which the proposition should be understood as
a claim about the essence of music. Second I explore the relation between Hanslick’s proposition and some earlier
definitions of music, arguing that the formulation only counts as saying something distinct when it is understood as
being a normative claim about musical essence. Third I investigate more closely two of the key terms in Hanslick’s
formulation – “beauty” and “artistic”. I argue that to arrange something according to “artistic” precepts consists in
employing knowledge and sensibility about what is beautiful. Hanslick’s formulation is thus circular.
The original formulation can thus be split into two parts, a descriptive and a normative part: that (i) music consists
(simply and solely) of arranged tones; and that (ii) the tones should be arranged in such a way to arouse and
sustain our interest. Both the normative and descriptive parts of the definition are necessary for it count as a
statement about the essence of music. This is because pieces of music only exist as they do because of normative
desires which are themselves shaped by ideas of what arouses and sustains our interest.
In the final part of the paper, I show that Hanslick’s conception of music actually took the form of a meta-
programme for listening to music for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, it still persists today.
The underlying claim, expressed in the terms of the conference theme, is thus that that the context in which music
is heard and in which it acquires meaning should be understood as being part of its essence. Hanslick’s proposition
provides an interesting example of how this is true both in theory and practice.

Guy Dammann is Research Fellow at the University of Uppsala, and, since 2009, the chief music and opera
critic of the Times Literary Supplement. After completing his doctorate at King’s College, London, in 2005, he
has worked as a journalist and critic, writing music criticism for the Guardian, Economist, Financial Times,
Spectator and other UK and international media. He lectured on aesthetics at the Guildhall School of Music
and Drama from 2009 to 2014. His current work concerns the philosophy of criticism and the relation
between music, metaphor and emotion.
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William DRUMMOND
Oxford University, UNITED KINGDOM

Ambiguities of Listening: Essence and Context in the Arrangements of Gérard Pesson

According to Roger Scruton, musical arrangements are attempts to realize the “musical essence” of an original
work in a new medium, and “promote our sense that harmony, melody, and movement belong to the essence of
music – while instrumentation is accidental.” This notion is widespread in philosophical, musicological, and popular
discourses, and supports a metaphor of depth: we are encouraged to listen ‘through’ the musical surface to an
essence beyond it, the “original” work. Peter Szendy has characterized arrangement differently, as an “oscillated,
divided listening”, by which we are “torn between two parallel lines, one present and the other ghostly or spectral:
our listening is… stretched to breaking point like a rubber band, between the transcription and the original.” Such a
view decentres the now oft-deconstructed work concept, but maintains a productive asymmetry in the play of
essence and context at stake in musical arrangements.
This paper uses arrangements by the French composer Gérard Pesson (born 1958) to rethink our encounter with
such music, asking whether source works are heard as the essence of his recompositions or as a context by which
they might be understood. Pesson’s use of noise-inflected instrumental timbres draws attention to the “grain” of the
musical surface rather than encouraging listeners to hear through it to an “essence” beneath. Nevertheless, this
use of distorting and often extremely soft timbres is perhaps a challenge to strain the ears and hear the canonical
works Pesson adapts. These examples both reflect and rework the structures of their sources, relying on but also
destabilizing listeners’ conception and perception of the prior composition and its relationship with the arrangement.
Through such listening, the differentiation between essential and contextual features becomes increasingly fraught:
traditional notions of arrangement, surface and depth, and structural listening are apparently problematized by the
very means by which they are simultaneously reinforced.

William Drummond holds BA Durham and MSt Oxford and is a doctoral candidate in musicology at the
Oxford University, where he holds the Christ Church Stone Scholarship. Previously he has studied the use of
pre-existing material in the music of Luciano Berio. His current doctoral research focuses on arrangement,
transcription, recomposition, and related practices in the music of Gérard Pesson (born 1958), specifically
the modes of listening and presence they afford and with which they engage.
______________________________________

Lilija DUOBLIENĖ
Vilnius University, LITHUANIA
Music Artist, Artisan and Teacher: Towards Repetition and Affect in Deleuzean Perspective

Deleuzean music philosophy emphasizes the specific style of the author of great masterpieces. Artist is a creator
thought modern artist as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Thousand Plateaus state is rather artisan; he is in the
middle of universal and singular, trying to actualize creative forces of chaos, to express what is unrepresentative.
The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. In order to follow the flow of matter he needs intuition in action.
Teacher in Deleuzeoguattarian philosophy is a person of power. A teacher is a function, a profession, and a type of
person behaving according to prescribed rules. The projection of teacher can be reconstructed from Deleuzean
thoughts in Negotiations, where he shares his experience and treats his university course on philosophy as music:
“A course is a kind of Sprechgesang, closer to music than to theatre”. Is music a field of art, which can extend the
profession of teacher or lecturer? How not easily representable music coincides with the teacher’s function to
present the content?
In Negotiations it is stated that in lectures affects are as important as percepts. Using Deleuzeoguattarian concepts
of affects and percepts, described in What is philosophy?, we are going to discuss the question of music artist’s
and teacher’s situation of being in affect, the process of creation within compositional territory and in the process of
deterritorialization, as well as the role of repetition and refrain. To what extent music artist is a teacher and a
teacher is a music artist? Deleuzean response to this question would be that both of them must be artisans. Few
examples on affects from interviews with great jazz musician (K. Jarrett) and Lithuanian experimental artist (A.
Sarapovas) as well as teachers from Lithuanian music schools will be presented and interpreted.

References:
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990) Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (2012) Derybos. Vilnius: Baltos lankos.

Lilija Duoblienė is professor and head of Educational Department at Faculty of Philosophy, University of
Vilnius, Lithuania. Her research topics are in philosophy and ideology of education, creativity and cultural
encountering. Her works are based on theories of Foucault, de Certeau, Dewey, and Deleuze. The recent
few years she is working on Deleuze’s philosophy, applying it to educational field and music. She is an
author of many articles and monographs, among them articles developing Deleuze’s philosophy in the field
of creativity in music and education, and recently she is involved into the research project Gilles Deleuze:
Philosophy and Art.
______________________________________

Charris EFTHIMIOU
University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, AUSTRIA

The Various Instrumentations of Reoccurring Motifs. A Musical Essence?

All appearances of the opening motif in Beethoven’s Eroica have a different instrumentation. This applies also for
the reoccurring motifs (motifs which appear often in a movement) of the first movements of the symphonies of
Mozart. In Sibelius’ symphonic poem En Saga, there are some themes which appear very often which vary from
one another in tone-color; this is usual, but the fact that all the appearances of each theme are different (from a
tone-colour perspective), is astounding. In Janacek’s later chamber music works, there are recurrent motifs but are
almost every time otherwise structured. The themes in Henze’s oratorio Das Floss Der Medusa, are structured in a
similar way as the ones in Sibelius’ En Saga. Heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, Slayer and Night wish, organize
their sound in the same manner as the above mentioned composers, always considering the instrumentation of
reoccurring motifs.
Obviously, Steve Harris, founder and bassist of Iron Maiden, did not know the music of Henze, Janacek and
Sibelius. There exists also no proof that, on the one hand, Mozart’s early symphonies influenced the young
Sibelius, and, on the other hand, that Beethoven’s Eroica was an example for Janacek’s later chamber music
works. It is, however, a fact that composers, independently from one another, from different eras and styles, make
the same decisions on the instrumentation of reoccurring motifs and themes.
There are many analytical studies which deal with the formal, harmonic, aesthetic and interdisciplinary aspects of
the above mentioned composers’ music. However, there are almost no treaties which aim at researching the
instrumentation and texture of reoccurring motifs or themes. Is this a musical essence which was not yet deeply
researched by musicologists? Why do the composers of different eras and styles make the same decisions? The
goal of this paper is to give answers to these questions.
 Charris Efthimiou, master in composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (Austria);
PhD in Mozart’s Symphonies. Since 2012, is a senior lecturer on music history and music theory at the
University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. Since 2013, Post Doc (senior scientist) in J.I. Pleyel’s
Symphonies. He is the author of monographs on Metallica’s Riffs and Mozart’s symphonies. His publications
include topics on the symphonic works of Mozart (Mozartjahrbuch, 2016), Sibelius (Cambridge scholars
publishing), Myslivecek, Sorkocevic, Wagner, Krauss, Rolla, Honegger, Janacek, Mayr, the trio sonatas of
Krebs and on Heavy Metal. His scientific focus is on the symphonies of the last three centuries,
contemporary music after 1945 and the popular directions of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music.
______________________________________

Anna FORTUNOVA
Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media, GERMANY

Reflections About the Essence of Music in a Special Context: Music Reviews by Yuri Ofrosimov and
Ludmila Landau in Berlin in the 1920s

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote in his article “Art and Responsibility” (1919) about the essence of diverse phenomena (that
means, about the essence of music, too): “One calls the whole mechanical, if its elements are united just in space
and time though a superficial connection and are not imbued with an inner unity of sense. The parts of such a
whole, although they are situated next to each other and contiguous to each other, remain alien to each other.”
Three years later, the Russian émigré-writer Yuri Ofrosimov wrote in the Berlin Russian newspaper Rul in a music
review on the ballet From the Red Horror about (if we use Baktin’s terminology) the mechanical connection
between the essence of the music (compositions by Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Glinka) and the context in which this
music was set in that particular performance. This text was not an exception among Ofrosimov’s reviews: In his
other reviews in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s we can read about his disappointment and indignation
about the disconnection between the essence of the specific music pieces and the context of their performance. Is
Ofrosimov’s point of view an effect of the context in which he wrote his articles (i.e., his exile-situation)? Or
probably, if we take into consideration that other Russian music critics such as Ludmila Landau shared Ofrosimov’s
aesthetic views, is it due to his belonging to the Russian culture? What are the main ideas of these sources and
why is it so? What about them is typical of their time and what does not depend on it?
In this paper, some of the texts about music by Ofrosimov and Landau are going to be analyzed from the point of
their topicality for contemporary humanities.

Anna Fortunova studied musicology, art journalism and musical dramaturgy in the state academy of music
and marketing at Nizhny Novgorod’s state university (Russia). From 2004 to 2007, she worked on her
dissertation on Dmitri Shostakovich’s ballets as a cultural phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s. As a
graduate and post-graduate student, she received various grants and awards. In the fall term 2008, she was
a lecturer for historical musicology at the state university for pedagogy in Nizhny Novgorod. From 2009 to
2011, she was a fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Foundation. Within the framework of this project, she
conducted research on the topic of Russian music in 1920s Berlin at the Hanover University of Music,
Drama, and Media (HMTMH). In early 2012, she was a scholarship holder of the MarianSteegmann-
Foundation at the HMTMH, before becoming a research associate in the DFGproject Russisch-deutsche
Musikbegenungen 1917-1933: Analyse und Dokumentation at the same university. Since May 2014 till
February 2016, Anna Fortunova worked as a research fellow at HMTMH and since March 2016 she works as
a lecture for historical musicology at the same University.
______________________________________

Vita GRUODYTĖ
Klaipėda University, LITHUANIA

The Distance of Presque-rien Between Musicology and the Philosophy of Music (In reference to Vladimir
Jankélévitch)

When discussing the topic of music and philosophy as a musicologist, we cross a threshold and take another
direction. Limited by a musicological perspective, we are often tempted to have a reductionist attitude, leaning
towards synthesis and simplification. Crossing this threshold to reach the philosophy of music, we head for the
quest of the nature of the work and of our own musical experience, in which explanations not only do not reduce
the thought, but may continue, at least theoretically, to infinity.
This impulse however is very quickly stopped by the unprovable, the unspeakable or, according to French
philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, by “something that does not exist and yet is the most important thing of all the
important things, the only one that is worth saying and the only one that in fact we can’t say!” (Vladimir
Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien. La manière et l’occasion, Seuil, 1980, p. 11). The philosophy of
music allows us to seek this presque-rien which precisely separates musicology from the philosophy of music, and
which immerses us in the search for the deeper meaning of the work, faced with which we are like Giacinto Scelsi
at his piano, stubbornly hitting a key and waiting for the quintessence of its essence or the meaning of meaning to
appear.
Musicology, by saying Presque-tout, can never cross the threshold of this Presque-rien which is missing in the
ultimate understanding of a work, can never elucidate the mystery, the charm which emanates from a musical work
and which, in fact, affects us first.
Vladimir Jankélévitch himself, who was both a practitioner of music and a philosopher, has followed through his
writings the path between the grammarian and the philosopher, in other words, has covered this long distance of
Presque-rien.

Vita Gruodytė is a researcher at the University of Klaipėda (Lithuania). She holds a PhD in musicology from
the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, with a doctoral thesis entitled The Phenomena of Space in
the Music of the 20th Century. She regularly contributes to the cultural magazine Kultūros Barai (Vilnius).
She is a member of the Lithuanian Composers’ Union. Her research focuses on cultural and political
influences in contemporary music, and in particular, on the emergence of a national identity in Lithuanian
music.
______________________________________

Solomon GUHL-MILLER
Rutgers University, Temple University, USA

Essence as Form: The Sublime and the Beautiful as Tools for Interpreting Form in a 19th-Century Context

Analyses of music which focus on the sublime have appeared infrequently in recent years for essentially the same
reason analyses examining music for its essence or its truth content are infrequent – different ages have different
“horizons of expectations” and what may appear true or self-evident about a work in one age may not be so in
another. The term “sublime” offers added challenges because not only are there multiple contradictory definitions of
what constitutes the sublime – including very beautiful, ugly, jarring, and surprising – what constitutes an ugly or
beautiful sound is subjective and varies depending on taste and when the piece was written, leaving absolute
judgments on the role of the sublime in a particular piece seemingly untenable. But there are certain contexts or
“horizons of expectations” which lend themselves to analyses with absolutes, particularly the 19th century, and
especially in the writings of Wagner on music. This study approaches the sublime of the early 19th century, based
on Kant and expanded upon by Schiller and Schelling, namely the sublime as a process of aesthetic education by
which the observer’s previous conceptions of beauty are shattered and rebuilt, and outlines how this essence was
used by Wagner to explain musical form. Taking examples from Hoffmann, Wagner, and Hanslick on beauty and
sublimity in music, this study finds that both terms imply specific formal readings. Beauty seems to imply a form in
which the musical ideas of the work stem from a single idea, while sublimity seems to imply a division of musical
ideas stemming from contrasting musical themes at the end of which one primary theme dominates the other.
These two terms may be employed in characterizing a range of musical forms not just as a purely subjective
aesthetic judgment, but as an objective analytical tool.

Dr. Solomon Guhl-Miller, PhD in musicology at the Rutgers University (2012, doctoral thesis The Path of
Wagner's Wotan: German Idealism, Wagner's Prose Writings, and the Idea of Moral Progress). Since 2003,
Instructor at the Rutgers University; since 2012, Instructor at the Temple University. Among his relevant
publications: “Literary Influences in the Sketches and Drafts of Wagner’s Ring,” (2014, in: Forum for Modern
Language Studies 50, no. 4: 482–500), “Towards a New Understand of the Wanderer in Siegfried Act III:
Wotan’s Voluntary Moral Step Backwards” (2015, in: Context 39: 23-32) and the forthcoming article “Richard
on Richard: Wagner’s Reception and Changing Views of his Zurich-Period Writings Presented to the German
and French Publics” (in: Nineteenth-Century Music).
______________________________________

Hyun HÖCHSMANN
East China Normal University, Shanghai, CHINA

Process of Becoming and Dialectical Temporality in Nono and Adorno

Essence and Process

“Above all, the work of art is processual in so far as it is a relation between a whole and its parts… this relation itself
is a process of becoming.” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory)
Adorno’s conception of the work of art as a process presents a possibility of bridging the gulf between essence and
context. The essence of music is its internal organization, which is identified as the continuous process of
transformation among the constituent parts. The internal features establish the ‘autonomy’ of music. Adorno
emphasizes the processual nature of art in contrast to notions of essences as static formal structures or a
composite of discrete attributes: “The work of art is not a totality in the sense of a structure integrating the parts:
once objectified, the work keeps on producing itself in response to the tendencies at work in it.” (Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory)
When situated or “objectified” in the context of historical, social and cultural settings, music “produces itself” in
accordance with its essence, “the tendencies at work within it.” Essence and context of music can be configured in
terms of dialectical temporality.
Dialectical temporality
Dialectical temporality is the interweaving of subjective and objective dimensions of temporality distinguished by
Adorno in two “modes of listening.” The “expressive-dynamic mode” “transforms the heterogeneous course of time
into the force of the musical process” in creative subjective freedom. The “rhythmic-spatial mode” is an “articulation
of time through the division into equal measures” in a “spatialized” objective context.
Luigi Nono’s realization of “musical space” in Prometeo, Tragedia dell’ascolto confirms Adorno’s belief that “the
idea of great music consists in a mutual penetration of both modes of listening.”

Time continuum of permanence’ and ‘musical progress of time

“[T]he dialectical confrontation with the musical progress of time… is the basis of all great music.” (Adorno,
Philosophy of Modern Music)
Affirming “the time continuum of permanence” and “musical progress of time,” Nono’s Prometeo, exemplifies the
conception of music as a process of dialectical temporality.

Hyun Höchsmann is a visiting professor at the Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University,
Shanghai. She has studied philosophy, art history and literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in
Munich, the Sorbonne and the University of London (PhD, Philosophy of Language and Logic). She has
taught at the Juilliard School of Music, the American University in Cairo and at Brandeis University. Her
teaching and research interests include Greek philosophy, philosophy of music, critical theory comparative
literature, and Eastern philosophy. Her current research focuses on comparative philosophy of music. Her
publications include ‘Bridging the Gulf between Nature and Freedom in Kant and Zhuangzi’, ‘Cosmology,
psyche and ātman in the Timaeus, the Ṛgveda and the Upaniṣads’, ‘Porphyry’s Extension and Restriction of
Plato’s Views on Justice’ (forthcoming, 2016), Zhuangzi, On Philosophy in China, and On Chuang Tzu.
______________________________________

Ronald HÜNNEMAN
David LAMAIN
University of Groningen, THE NETHERLANDS

Taking Notes. How Media Shape Our Conception of Musical Essences

For the Greek sophists spoken words were fleeting, situated instruments used to convince an audience. To writing
philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, however, words did appear as everlasting and universal, as written words are.
Plato’s dialogues signify this transition, as his Socrates searches in dialogues for the essential meaning of terms
like justice, love and beauty. Knowledge came to be regarded as a reminiscence of an Eternal World filled with
Ideas or Essences.
At the end of the 18th century, the technological refinement of printing led to sheet music being the prime medium
for the distribution of music. This changed the way in which the creations of composers were regarded. Instead of a
deficient account of a musical event, sheet music was considered as a gateway to the essences the composer had
in mind. Parallel to the transformation of Plato’s writings on Socrates from a journalistic account to a fixed
designation of essences, standardized sheet music generated the idea of essences designated by notes.
Essentialistic ideas brought about a formalistic science of music in which scientists mainly study the paper legacies
of composers. Such a formalistic science of music will derail, however, the moment it studies types of music that
shirk the regime of paper, ink and standardized notes. Such as is the case with the dynamic medium of Electronic
Dance Music (EDM). In EDM there is a complex, situated dialogue between DJ, spatial environment and a dancing
audience. Trying to understand EDM through essences can only degenerate into a tour de force in which fleeting
sounds are pressed into an inappropriate terminological mould.
The philosophy of nominalism combined with enactivism can capture and enlighten the dynamical aspects EDM
though. It will also show that contemporary types of music have a closer kinship to pre-Socratic, anti-essentialistic
dialogues than to post-Renaissance compositions.

Ronald Hünneman studied philosophy at the University of Groningen, and is a lecturer and PhD-student at
the department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Department of Human Movement of the University of
Groningen. He also lectures on ethics and social philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He
published previously on the topic of enactivism and arts, and on the dynamics of social cognition.

David Lamain is a musician. He studied Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen, and is
currently employed in the creative industry.
______________________________________
Maria KARACHEVSKAYA
Moscow State P. Tchaikovsky Conservatory, RUSSIA

Mikhail Gnessin on the Essence of Russian Music

The works of composer and musicologist Mikhail Gnessin (1883–1957) are not as well known today. However,
interest in his work in the past two decades has increased significantly. His musical compositions have appeared in
concert programs, but the scientific and critical legacy almost never investigated. Nevertheless Gnessin is one of
the prominent Soviet musicologists, PhD, author of nearly 200 articles and scientific papers dealing with different
problems of art.
The report focuses on an unknown and some unpublished musical-philosophical Gnessin’s articles: “Music As a
Way of Thought and Speech”, “On the Nature of Russian Art and Russian Music”, “On the “Plastic Beginning” in the
Musical Creative Imagination” and others.
The ideas expressed in these articles have never been the subject of serious scientific discussion. According
Gnessin’s contemporaries these articles contain truly innovative ideas about the essence and nature of the music
and they are of great scientific interest. The paper is expected to consider the following abstracts of Gnessin’s
articles:
• Gnessin’s philosophical interpretation of music as a ‘plastic art’;
• The connection between the way of composer’s thinking and the elected method of forming (Tchaikovsky’s
‘synthetic’ symphonic style or 'analytical' symphonic style of ‘The Mighty Handful’ composers);
• ‘Primary’ and ‘secondary’ (‘extreme’) properties of musical art;
• Two types of composers: ‘constructivists’ composers and ‘emotional’ composers.

Maria Karachevskaya, musicologist, PhD. In 2006 she graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, in 2009
finished postgraduate studies (Ph.D. thesis Features of Mikhail Gnessin’s composer style on the example of
his vocal art’. From 2004 to 2012 – Research Fellow at the Shostakovich archive. Since 2005 – Executive
editor of the official website of the Moscow Conservatory and the site of the Dmitry Shostakovich; Deputy
Director of the Department of Computer Technology and Information Security of the Moscow Conservatory.
Her main field of research are the works of Mikhail Gnessin and Shostakovich. She is an author of a number
of articles and publications of archival documents (letters, memoirs, description of autographs of Gnessin
and Shostakovich). From 2004 to 2012 she participated in the preparation of the Chronicle of Shostakovich
From 2010 she has worked among authors on the New Edition of Collected Works of Dmitry Shostakovich
(DSCH Publishers).
______________________________________

Karolina KOLINEK-SIECHOWICZ
University of Warsaw, POLAND

The Essence of Changeability – Performance as the Crucial Issue of Discourse About Music

We are used to think about essence as something constant, unchangeable, possible to grasp as the common
property of many tokens. The most widespread view in philosophy of music treats the performances as the tokens
of the type which is considered as the work of music. The work of music would be then a kind of resultant of
different interpretations which should fulfill some conditions. However, the question is how can we reach the work
of music itself? Are there any other ways than performing it (assuming that reading of the score is also kind of
mental performance) or listening to it? The problem gets even more complicated when it comes to early music
when the paradigm of work-concept (as Lydia Goehr names it) was absent.
In opposition, I would like to present the essence of music as something constant at its changeability. In other
words, I will show that the only thing which is common to almost all musics across different cultures and historical
conditions is the performance – ontologically the most unappreciated aspect of music. I will follow Nicholas Cook’s
assumptions who puts the performance in the centre of his interests (i.e. in Beyond the Score. Music as
Performance, 2014).
My main field of considerations will be the problem of modern performances of early music, especially those
associated with prerogatives of HIP. I would examine the issue of authenticity which is utopian concept resulting
from prevalence of work-concept in contemporary aesthetics and prove that what is really essential is live
performance of music showing the originality and knowledge of the artist. This idea will be supported not only by
Cook’s musicological attempt but also by the philosophy of Gadamer and Steiner who underline the role of real
presence in the case of music.

Karolina Kolinek-Siechowicz graduated from the Institute of Musicology and the Institute of Philosophy at
the College of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities, University of Warsaw, Poland. She has
taken part in many international conferences (e.g. SysMus, 2013, Genova; The Music of Witold Lutosławski
on the Threshold of the 21th century, 2013, Warsaw; Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism, 2015, Lucca) and
published several articles and interviews in Ruch Muzyczny, Meakultura, Quarta, Dwutygodnik, and Scontri.
She received a scholarship from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. She is interested in
philosophy of music (especially narratives in music and authenticity) and historically informed performance.
She works as a music critic and editor of Ruch Muzyczny. She won the Grand Prix at the Polish Music
 Critics’ Competition KROPKA (2015). Currently she is PhD student at “Artes Liberales” Faculty (University of
Warsaw) and “Artes Liberales” Academy, preparing the thesis about modern reception of historically
informed performance.
______________________________________

Mei-Yen LEE
National Pingtung University, TAIWAN, REPUBLIC OF CHINA
“Is there an Essence in Guqin Music?”
Guqin music is related to the cultivation of personality, moral education and the transformation of social customs in
Chinese music culture. Such is the doctrine of “music cultural cultivation” in the view of ancient Chinese
Confucianism. Confucius thought that the player could be educated to be strictly moral through the essence of
“guqin music,” or “harmony” as Plato claimed music could do in Western culture.
This ideal influenced ancient Chinese musical culture spanning from the Pre-Chin to the Han dynasty (B.C. 220).
Hsi-Kang (223-262), who was also adept at guqin music, wrote a “Poetic Essay on the Lute”. He indicated that
there is an inherent essence in guqin music. The essence of music (harmony) is simply an abstract characteristic of
the cosmos, what the ancient Greeks called the “music of the spheres”. The acoustic characteristic of guqin music
enables players to release their intrinsic consciousness to be integrated into nature.
The viewpoint on the essence of guqin music (harmony) passed from Hsi-Kang’s “Poetic Essay on the Lute” to His-
Shan’s Epithets on Qin Music written by Hsu Hong, which integrates viewpoints of Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist
philosophy into a whole; during the Ming dynasty, it was the most important treatise on guqin music. Hsu Hong also
emphasized “harmony” as the essence of guqin music; however, we can find different ways by which “harmony” is
mediated and further unfolded in Hsu Hong’s essay.
This paper aims to discuss the question: “Is there an essence in guqin music?” in terms of Hsi-Kang’s “Poetic
Essay on the Lute” and Hsu Hong’s His-Shan’s Epithets on Qin Music. The findings of the research will reveal the
mode of thinking which differs from Western music-related philosophy, how there possibly is an essence inherent in
guqin music and what the unique characteristic of the essence of guqin music is. The author’s opinions are formed
not only by the review of musical contexts, but also by her experiences in playing guqin music and having studied
Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism for a long time.

Mei-Yen Lee is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at the National Pingtung
University, Taiwan, Republic of China, from 1999. She graduated from National Taiwan Normal University,
receiving the PhD of Chinese in 1993. She was a visiting professor of Hunan Normal University (China,
August-September, 2004), a visiting scholar & Guqin advisor of the museums of Hunan Province and Hubei
Province (China, August-September, 2005), an affiliated fellow of the International Institute for Asia Studies
(the Netherlands, September, 2006–March, 2007), and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Chinese Literature
and Philosophy of Academia Sinica (Taiwan, July-December, 2012), at the Yungang Grottoes Research
Institute (China, August-September, 2013) and at the Department of Music of Harvard University (USA,
February-July, 2015).
Her specialties include Chinese philosophy and Chinese musical aesthetic thoughts (especially in the
ancient Chinese Guqin musical instrument).
______________________________________

Ki Ki LEUNG
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

“Music Is Not to Be Decorative; It Is to Be True”: Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music as Symbolic Form

As Adorno has pointed out in Schoenberg and Progress (1949), many historically established functions and rules
concerning musical materials – including those of tonality, harmony and form – are contradictory to the actual
nature of these materials in terms of physics and the psychology of sound. By abandoning those conventions,
Schoenberg invents the twelve-tone composition method in the attempt to organize sound following the more
universal ontological laws. To Schoenberg, “a musical thinker’s representation of musical ideas […] correspond[s]
to the laws of human logic.” He believes that the world of feeling represented by a true artist is inseparable from the
world of intellect. With the new medium of organization, the avant-garde composer endeavors to present the true
expressive ability of musical elements.
The principle of twelve-tone music is largely in line with Ernst Cassirer’s notion of the “natural world concept.” In
this paper, I explain Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music as symbolic form, and form in turn as “truth”: form is the
stamp of the intellect on the phenomenal/sensuous, i.e., sound; and “truth” is the reality intellectually produced out
of sensory signs. According to Cassirer, all concept formation is ultimately oriented toward determination of the
unitary and comprehensive “absolute truth.” The knowledge of such truth is created by dint of conscious intellectual
effort. It is through the medium – the formation of a concept, or a symbol – that objective knowledge about the
world is made intelligible. Twelve-tone music serves as such medium for representing human feeling as reality. The
parallel between the theories of Schoenberg and Cassirer has not been widely made by the scholarship. By
building the connection between the two Jewish thinkers who both had to flee the Nazi Germany in the mid-
twentieth century, this paper aims at further exploring the possible influence of the shared political and historical
circumstances.

Ki Ki Leung is currently a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She
received her MPhil in Musicology from The University of Hong Kong, where she also did her undergraduate
studies, double majoring in Music and Comparative Literature. Her research interests include hermeneutics,
writings about music, reception history, and meanings of music. Prior to her academic pursuits, she has
worked at the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra as the Education and Outreach Officer. Her research
focus on the relationship between paratext, understanding and meanings of music stems from her
acquaintance with literary and cultural theories, as well as her work experience in audience education.
______________________________________

Helmut LOOS
Leipzig University, GERMANY

Leitfigur Beethoven – Thoughts on the Development of German Musicology in the Light of the 1968
Movement

In 1970, the International Musicological Congress in Bonn was hosted by the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung on
the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. The University of Bonn’s Institute of Musicology
intended to contribute to the world-wide commemoration from the composer’s birthplace. It was to be a memorable
year indeed – in the history of Beethoven reception, it marked the imminent end of the composer’s status as an
undisputed Leitfigur of society. In his TV production "Ludwig van", Mauricio Kagel provoked a scandal, while
Karlheinz Stockhausen snarkily combined Beethoven recordings with short waves. In doing so, both composers
abstracted Beethoven’s compositions in ways that would have been considered malicious and offensive at the time
when faithfulness to the original work was the highest aim. During that time, art music in the emphatic sense rose
to a societal position of Art-as-Religion in Modernity. In a thus unfinished chapter of music historiography, the
academic study of art in the emphatic sense was assigned the role of protector of the truth that was to make
decisions about good and evil, that is congregation of faith.

Helmut Loos (b. 1950), studied music education in Bonn (state examination), followed by studies in
musicology, art history and philosophy at the University of Bonn; doctorate in 1980, senior doctorate (Dr.
Habil.) in 1989; in 1981–1989, research fellow at the University of Bonn Department of Musicology, 1989–
1993, director of the Institute of German Music in the Eastern Regions in Bergisch Gladbach, since 1993,
professor and Department Chair of historical musicology at the Chemnitz University of Technology, since
2001, professor and Department Chair at the Leipzig University. In 2003–2005, dean of the Department of
History, Art history and Oriental studies at the Leipzig University. Since 2005, honorary member of the
Gesellschaft fur deutsche Musikkultur im sudostlichen Europa (Society of German Musical Culture in
Southeast Europe) in Munich. In 2003, was appointed Professor honoris causa at the Lyssenko
Conservatory in Lviv, in 2014 – honorary doctor of the Universitatea Naţională de Muzică din Bucureşti; a
member of international editing councils for the periodicals Hudebni věda (Prag), Lietuvos muzikologija
(Vilnius), Menotyra. Studies in Art (Vilnius), Ars & Humanitas (Ljubljana), Musicology Today (Bukarest),
Muzica. Romanian Music Magazine (Bukarest) und Studies in Penderecki (Princeton, New Jersey).
______________________________________

Jonas LUNDBLAD
Uppsala University, SWEDEN

The Subjective Constitution of Music: Perspectives from Schelling

That notions of”essentialism” for decades has been viewed with great suspicion is both incontestable and, from
several aspects, understandable and fully justified. However, both in the case of aesthetics and other branches of
philosophy, the main problem to heed is arguably the ontological status and aims entailed in conceptual
constructions of essence. From a historiographical perspective, influential strands of far-reaching contextualism can
be perceived as a showdown with the – at least supposedly – contrary legacy of modernist idealism. This paper
actively heeds the historical background of the problem in an orientation towards the theoretical contributions of
Schelling’s Philosophy of Art. Although Schelling’s own terminology might in part seem metaphysically intimidating,
several vital points are helpful even to contemporary debates.
A highly relevant point is Schelling’s insistence on conceptual definitions of art as self-conscious philosophical
constructions. As a philosophical and formal concern, the definition of musical essence is liberated from intrinsic
bounds to specific empirical manifestations of music. As constructions – rather than mimetic representations –
determinations of essence are intimately interconnected with the active and creative role of subjectivity and serve
to provide orientation and guidance in the judgment of diverse empirical phenomena. In so far, subjectivity is a
methodological focal point that mediates and constantly renegotiates the boundaries between the inner essence
and external context of music. The tension between continuity and plurality within different musics becomes
resituated when the prime attention is refocused from the empirical elements of music to the active and constitutive
role of the subject. The determination of music is finally a formal business in so far as only the listening subject
holds the capacity to instill a unity out of interplay between different sounds. In this basic conception lies hidden a
great flexibility; what is heard as music is music.

Jonas Lundblad pursues a dual career in research and musical performance, primarily as an organ
recitalist. He has previously carried out research in theological aesthetics, specifically the aesthetics of
Friedrich Schleiermacher, at Lund University, Sweden. He is currently engaged in an artistic study of the
interplay between musical time, subjectivity and performance practices in Olivier Messiaen’s organ works
(Swedish Research Council). He is a visiting research fellow at Glasgow University and recently spent two
years as a visiting researcher at the Humboldt University, Berlin.
______________________________________

John MACAUSLAN
Independent Scholar, UNITED KINGDOM

Essence and ‘Geist’ in Musical Works

So what is essence, and what are its ontological commitments? I’ll sketch Aristotle’s concept from 330BCE
(‘τὸτίἦνεἶναι’, ‘what it is to be x’). This sees individual humans as examples of ‘what can be said to be in a primary
sense’; they are defined by a ‘psuche’ common to the human species as their essence, or what fixes their stable
reality (‘ousia’); in my reading, modern worries about whether ‘ousiai’ (‘substances’) are universals or individuals
miss Aristotle’s more nuanced point.
Then I’ll fast-forward two millennia to an 1830s idea from Schumann’s culture: ‘Geist’ (normally translated ‘spirit’;
better ‘musical conception’). Could this be parallel to Aristotelian ‘essence’? Awork’s ‘Geist’, its ‘musical
conception’, would be its essence, equivalent to ‘psuche’: its intrinsic, true and individuating nature, generating,
shaping and binding (all) its properties. In this sense, each musical work would be equivalent to a species in
Aristotle; and instantiations of the work (performances, for instance) would be individuals of that species, the
primary ‘substances’.
Fast-forward again to a philosophy of music in Vilnius now. Fruitful Aristotelian questions arise about the place of
‘Geist’ as essence:
 Is ‘Geist’ an entity of any sort?
 Does ‘Geist’ determine or explain a work’s properties, or assure its identity? Give it shape, energy, unity,
individuality? How many of the work’s properties are included in its ‘Geist’? Is it reducible to determinate qualities,
and what might count (line, tonality, formal function, Schenkerian analysis)? How do we decide?
 Does it define the work? Is it definable, or only perceptible and discussable, or wholly ineffable or inaccessible?
 Why should a ‘Geist’ not be culturally sensitive / dependent?
 How far is a work ontologically primary, how far its instantiations in sound? Is it necessarily instantiated in
sound, as a person is in a body?

John Macauslan is author of the book, Schumann’s Music and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fiction (Cambridge
University Press, 2016) that explores how four of Schumann’s masterpieces of the 1830s are connected to
literature, studies expressive musical patterns that give shape, energy and individuality to each work,
focuses on primary sources in a wide-ranging discussion of the broader intellectual and aesthetic contexts,
and touches on some concepts used by Schumann and his contemporaries that bear on the question of the
essence of individual works of art.
Macauslan is an independent scholar who worked in London for many years in HM Treasury, the National
Gallery and as a Civil Service Commissioner, followed by ongoing work for the NGO War Child, concurrently
with a PhD in music.
______________________________________

Fernando de Oliveira MAGRE

Silvia BERG
University of São Paulo, BRAZIL

The Essence and the Context in Blirium C-9 by Gilberto Mendes

Blirium C-9 (from 1965) is an aleatory piece by the Brazilian composer Gilberto Mendes (1922-2016) that opens to
a free choice of instrumentation. The score of Blirium C-9 is a script; it has a systematic part and another
completely aleatory governed by a clock-hand. The interpreter must follow it in order to create a performance.
Heidegger (1889–1976), in The Origin of the Work of Art explains the essence of art in terms of the concepts of
being and truth; the essence of art is the truth which is materialized through the work of art. Heidegger also brings
up the question of contemplation, stating that the work of art is something to be observed alien to its context,
because it extrapolates its historical framework.
According to Umberto Eco (1991), this kind of "unfinished" work is given by the author to the interpreter, so the
result is unknown, but whatever, it still is the work of the artist who conceived it. This leads us to believe that it is
possible to find the constituent essence of Blirium C-9, although it manifests itself in different ways in each
interpretation.
We can also infer that the work exists only by the artist's action. In this sense, it is composed by contexts, as each
situation will determine how it will sound, reaching maybe diametrically opposed results in every performance.
Accordingly, each performance "explains but not depletes" the piece that will remain incomplete "since" it does not
show simultaneously all the other results with the work could be identified" (ECO, 1991, p. 57).
Blirium C-9 rekindles the debate about the relationship between essence and context in a piece that has an
essence that validates its identity regardless of the version created.

Fernando de Oliveira Magre is a choral conductor, singer and flutist. He graduated in music education
(2012) and has a specialization course in choral conducting (2015) under the guidance of Lucy Schimiti from
the State University of Londrina. Currently, he is a Master degree student in Musicology at the University of
Sao Paulo (scholarship FAPESP), where he carries out a research about Gilberto Mendes’s music theatrre.
He is a founding member of “Entre Nós” vocal group, in which he operates as a singer and arranger. He also
participates as a singer in the Contemporary Choir of Campinas, conducted by Angelo Fernandes.

Silvia Berg has a degree in composition from the State University of São Paulo and received a scholarship
from the Grupo Ultragaz which allowed her studies in Norway. Living in Denmark from 1985 to 2008, she
was founder and conductor of the Ensemble Øresund. Until January 2008, she conducted the traditional
Københavns Kammerkor and AmaCantus Group. As a composer, her works have been performed regularly
in concerts and festivals in Europe, Latin America and USA. Particularly of note is her participation in the
ISCM in 37 Zagreb in 2005, the project Rumor de Páramo with the work Dobles del Páramo for solo piano,
commissioned by pianist Ana Cervantes, recorded on CD Solo Rumores, and Canto de la Monarca, with the
work El sueño el vuelo ..., and CD recording of her works for piano by pianist Valeria Zanini in 2008.
______________________________________

Stefano MENGOZZI
University of Michigan, USA

Essentially Agnostic: Toward a Rhetorical Approach to the History of Music Theory

It seems that music-theory has been churning out essences on an industrial scale since antiquity. What we have, in
the present state of musical research, is linguistic ontology run amok: generations of scholars have successfully
argued that, for instance, there were no “chords” and no “functional harmony” in Western music until the proper set
of linguistically formulated concepts underlying those musical entities became part of specialized musical
discourse. Definitions turn ipso facto into rigidly conceived essences. The result is a peculiarly ahistorical model of
music history, as the complex process by which musical concepts are created and accepted (or rejected) is rarely,
if ever, studied in depth. In its unique position as the “research lab” where the essence-carrying concepts are
fabricated and distributed, music theory plays a decisive and perhaps disproportionate role toward shaping musical
values, historiographic models, and modes of perception, at least in academic discourse.
Yet, as Lawrence Kramer has argued, musical essences are less fixed objects reducible to clear-cut categories,
and more like ontologically open “Odradeks” that are continuously redefined in response to changing cultural and
cognitive contexts. Thus, music-theoretical concepts are not the materializations of Platonic forms; rather, they are
best conceived as a product of rhetorical inventio that signifies essences from without, with only limited, if any,
involvement in their creation from within. Rhetoric, the pragmatic sister of philosophy, claims no direct access to
essences, privileging instead their myriad interactions with human cognition and experiences. An “essentially
agnostic” model of music theory, then, is a precondition for a truly pluralistic discipline, free from its commitment to
pursuing a totalizing notion of objectivity. In addition, by relinquishing such notion it accepts the possibility that
musical essences may be defined by use (habitus) and perception, rather than by concepts conveyed through
language.

Stefano Mengozzi – PhD at the University of Chicago (1998), an associate professor of music at the
University of Michigan. His research concentrates on the music theory of the Medieval and Renaissance
periods. He has authored The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory: Guido of Arezzo Between
Myth and History (Cambridge, 2010); other publications have appeared in several scholarly journals. An
article titled “Johannes Tinctoris, Rhetoric, and the Nature of Music Theory” is forthcoming in a collection of
essays on Johannes Tinctoris.
______________________________________

Malcolm MILLER
The Open University, UNITED KINGDOM

Essence, Context and Meaning in Versions of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder by Wagner, Mottl and Henze

Arrangements and reworkings of classical works, somewhat like ‘covers’ in popular music, are often evaluated on a
scale of fidelity to the original, radical transformation and referentiality. While on one hand comparative analysis
might posit a musical essence carried through in each transformation, on the other, one might focus on relational
contextual essence, meanings that arise from new contexts and through overt or hidden relationships to the original
version. 19th century arrangements generally encouraged translation across different media, modernism explored
stylistic reinterpretation with a concern for radical new meanings and post-modernist reworkings evoke concepts of
memory and identity through reference to past sources.
I illustrate the issue through an exploration of multiple versions of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, composed in
1857-8 originally for piano and voice and arranged for chamber ensemble by the composer, then recast within Acts
II and III of Tristan und Isolde. The five songs were arranged in 1893 as an orchestral song cycle by Felix Mottl
(1856–1911), the conductor-arranger who worked with Wagner in Bayreuth. In 1976 the German composer Hans
Werner Henze (1926–2012) made a version for alto and chamber orchestra; other versions exist including several
made for the 2013 Wagner bicentenary.
Mottl’s version reflects a post-Wagnerian aesthetic in a late 19th century social context; Henze’s more radical 20th
century approach to re-instrumentation intensifies the intimate response to Mathilde Wesendonck’s poetry, imbued
with new meanings due to Henze’s rapprochement to a post-war Germany he had initially rejected. Those layers of
meaning are further amplified in Henze’s later Wagner recompositions in Richard Wagnersche Klavierlieder (1998–
9). To what extent does the strongly specified nature, or “essence”, of the original songs affect the distinct yet
interrelated structures recreated within an evolving reception history? I aim to suggest that arrangements provide a
useful crucible for the exploration of the intertwining of essence and context to generate musical and social
meanings.

Malcolm Miller is a musicologist and pianist, Honorary Associate in Arts at the Open University and
Associate Fellow at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. He is Associate Lecturer at the
Open University in London and at Goldsmiths University of London. He is Editor of Arietta, Journal of the
Beethoven Piano Society of Europe, and a contributor to various academic publications. Recent chapters
include “Music as Memory: Émigré Composers in Britain” (The Impact of Nazism on Twentieth-Century
Music, Vienna, 2014) and “Ernest Bloch and Wagner” in Bloch Studies (CUP, forthcoming 2016) and “Peak
Experience in the Razumovsky Quartets Op. 59” (The String Quartets of Beethoven, University of Illinois
Press, 2006). His articles “Spinning the Yarn: Intertextuality in Wagner’s Use and Reuse of his Songs in his
Operas” and “This Round of Songs: Cyclic Coherence in the Wesendonck Lieder” appeared in The Wagner
Journal in July 2015 and November 2015 respectively. He is currently working on a book Wagner and Song
based on his doctoral study of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder.
______________________________________

Lina NAVICKAITĖ-MARTINELLI
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, LITHUANIA

Unveiling the Significations of Music Performance: An Application of Gino Stefani’s Theory of Musical
Competence

The performative dimension of music, perhaps mostly due to its ephemeral nature, has been traditionally situated
at the margins of academic research. Having recently gained room within various branches of musicology,
performance studies are yet often constrained to such an essential aspect of the art as interpreting the score. In an
attempt to expand and enrich the existing trends of musical performance studies, as well as exploit the potentials of
semiotic analysis, this paper offers a theoretical perspective that enables us analyze and unfold the multiple
(musical, cultural, social) meanings generated by and communicated through the performer’s art.
According to an Italian music semiotician Gino Stefani, musical competence exists at various levels, not only the
“strictly musical” or the “musical expert” ones, and it intervenes in the construction of any discourse around music:
from casual listening practices to professional composition. Hence, music should not be studied in se, but rather “in
the most comprehensible of ways, without excluding anything, and at the same time paying attention to the
heterogeneousness of the diverse musical experiences, practices and ideas. Given this assumption, the principle
is: the musical sense is extended over a space that goes from the most general human experience to the most
specifically artistic one.” It is possible to set a similar target with musical performance. The hypothesis here is that
performance is a coherent series of processes and gestures that covers the whole sphere of a musician’s
cognition, including aspects that transcend music as such.
Musical competence, argues Stefani, is articulated on five levels, i.e. the so-called general codes, social practices,
musical techniques, styles and works. In this paper, an attempt shall be made to illustrate Stefani’s model in
relation to the field of classical piano performance, as well as demonstrate its methodological potentials within the
music performance studies.

Lina Navickaitė-Martinelli is Associate Professor and Head of the Postgraduate Studies’ Office at the
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Helsinki.
She has edited several academic collections and has been a member of research projects in Finland and
Lithuania. Navickaitė-Martinelli has presented numerous conference papers and has published scientific
articles in international journals and article collections. Her books A Suite of Conversations: 32 Interviews
and Essays on the Art of Music Performance (2010) and Piano Performance in a Semiotic Key: Society,
Musical Canon and Novel Discourses (2014) have been awarded as the best Lithuanian musicological works
 of the respective years for innovative research into music performance. She focuses her research on various
aspects of the music performance phenomenon. Navickaitė-Martinelli is the founder and co-ordinator of the
LMTA Headquarters of Artistic Research and Performance Studies (HARPS). More information at
linamartinelli.wordpress.com.
______________________________________

Daniela Amaral Rodrigues NICOLETTI

Silvia BERG
University of São Paulo, BRAZIL

From Schiller to Dalcroze: the Aesthetical Musical Game as a Way to Freedom and a Comprehensive
Human Development

The goal of this paper is to promote the discussion and reflexion about the real aims and potentialities of Dalcroze’s
Eurhythmics as a philosophical approach to the Musical Pedagogy and to its meaning to human life, further than a
method for teaching technical features. The main interest of our research is to understand the outlines of its
author's thought in order to change the traditional, hegemonic academic system of education started between the
19th and 20th centuries. Such thought, on the contrary, implies the conception of music as a way to self-
consciousness and self-expression. It is supposed to expand the perception and the understanding through the
sensitive experience of corporal movement and gestures, integrating hearing and body reaction before intellectual
analyses. Dalcroze intended also to overcome the limits between the different forms of arts, towards the
intersections among music, dance, theatre and plastic arts.
Dalcroze’s ideas about playing with music remembers Friedrich Schiller’s philosophical thought concerning the
“state of game” in Letters for Human aesthetic education. He considered the special disposition excited by the
artistic and aesthetical experience as primordial for the satisfaction of the individual need of self-determination,
favouring the identification of personal characteristics among the diversity of states of each human being in
transformation. The experience with arts, which does not require a utilitarian justification and is essentially free,
could propitiate the harmonic interaction between the two basic and complementary impulses of human nature: the
impulses of shape and of matter, reason and sensitivity.
From this point of view, Dalcroze’s most important legacy lies in that, as a musician, he transposed such
understanding of the game´s formative relevance – with its freedom, pleasure, creativity and experience of
wholeness – into musical education, considered as a preparation to the “more difficult art of living” and to
happiness.

Daniela Amaral Rodrigues Nicoletti graduated in conducting and composition by the State University of
São Paulo and certified in lyrical singing by the Arts Foundation of São Caetano do Sul, is currently a
graduate student at the University of São Paulo. Her three main interests are singing, conducting and
musical education. Working as a musical educator since 2004, she has promoted several workshops on
lyrical choir, commissioned by the São Paulo City’s Department of Culture and by SESC (Trade's Social
Service). Former coordinator and educator of the Programme of Children’s Introduction into Arts (Acronym
PIÁ – São Paulo City Government) she also founded the Alliance Française’s Patois Choir (2010), taking
charge of its conduction and vocal preparation until 2014, the same tasks performed until 2015 for the Choir
of the City of Guarujá. She has also taken part in several musical ensembles.

Silvia Berg has a degree in composition from the State University of São Paulo and received a scholarship
from the Grupo Ultragaz which allowed her studies in Norway. Living in Denmark from 1985 to 2008, she
was founder and conductor of the Ensemble Øresund. Until January 2008, she conducted the traditional
Københavns Kammerkor and AmaCantus Group. As a composer, her works have been performed regularly
in concerts and festivals in Europe, Latin America and USA. Particularly of note is her participation in the
ISCM in 37 Zagreb in 2005, the project Rumor de Páramo with the work Dobles del Páramo for solo piano,
commissioned by pianist Ana Cervantes, recorded on CD Solo Rumores, and Canto de la Monarca, with the
work El sueño el vuelo ..., and CD recording of her works for piano by pianist Valeria Zanini in 2008.
______________________________________

Ivana PERKOVIĆ
University of Arts, Belgrade, SERBIA

Singing with Mind, Singing with Heart. Music and Metaphor in Serbian Medieval Literature

The aim of this paper is to explore metaphors involving music in Serbian Orthodox literature of the medieval period.
“Close reading” of hymns, lives of saints, eulogies and other literature genres shows that intrinsic nature of music is
understood as deeply integrated in the religious context. Whether musical metaphors are used in heuristic manner,
in clarifying the points that in other respect might not have been fully understood, or treated as figures of speech,
they (subtly or more obviously) derive from the writer’s religious, theological, historical, aesthetic, ideological
affiliation. In the absence of other medieval sources, theories and concepts that are set in writing (as a result of
aesthetic attitudes that find its most suitable expressive forms in liturgy and liturgical arts) metaphors involving
music are very important source of our knowledge on Serbian music of that period.
The unique nature of music and its’ power to influence the mind and emotions at the same time, to bring together
theory and practice, has been well recognized by Serbian medieval writers. Their repeated pleas for grace to sing
with mind or to sing with heart reflect, at some level, two ways of knowing God, apophatic and kataphatic. Singing
is seen as something that “transcends” ordinary language: the act of singing itself is something deeper, more
sublime and more important than ordinary words.

Ivana Perković, musicologist, PhD, associate professor, currently vice dean at the Faculty of Music,
University of Arts, Belgrade. The main subject of her research is Serbian Orthodox church music. Author of
two books: on Serbian Oktoechos and on Serbian choral church music in the period of Romanticism. Her
new book on musical references in Serbian sacred literature is being prepared for publishing.
Perković participated in numerous conferences in Serbia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Greece,
Finland, France, etc., and published studies in Serbian, English and German. She has received research
grants for her projects in Sofia and Vienna. Currently participant of the research project supported by the
Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological development, and Jean Monnet module supported
by the Erasmus + programme. She is a member of the International musicological society, Serbian
musicological society, International Society for Orthodox Church Music and the Editorial board of the Matica
Srpska Journal of Stage Arts and Music.
______________________________________

Piotr PODLIPNIAK
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, POLAND

The Biological Constraints on Musical Structure as the Foundations of Musical Essence

The diversity of musical phenomena across cultures and throughout history seems to prove that the answer to the
question, “what is music?” depends solely on cultural choice. In other words, music can be anything that a
particular group of people decide it to be. Such an open definition of music stands in stark contrast to the fact that
all known cultures use sounds, either as the building blocks of natural speech or music, depending on the
interpretation of these sounds by the human nervous system. However, this interpretation does not just seem to be
an arbitrary choice. As some research suggests newborn babies’ brains show right-hemispheric dominance in the
processing of simple tonal melodies but not in the processing of structurally distorted versions of these same
melodies. These results suggest that humans are predisposed to interpret some sounds in a ‘music’ specific way
from the very beginning of life. Although musical structure is influenced by the culture-specific characteristics of
musical idioms it seems that certain properties of human experience such as pitch classes or musical pulse are
music specific phenomena. Moreover, these properties are perceptually organized into cognitive categories which
differ from other perceptive interpretations of sounds such as speech or environmental noise. It is proposed that
musical essence is based on a kind of perceptive bias that is a result of the evolution of Homo sapiens. Just like
songbirds that are unquestionably tied to their songs, humans love music and spare no effort to listen to it.
However, the specificity of songbirds’ songs and human music differ because of differences in bird and human
brains. Therefore, musical essence lies in the specific organization of human brains rather than any physical
substance independent of human perception.

Piotr Podlipniak is an assistant professor at the Department of Musicology of Adam Mickiewicz University in
Poznań. His main areas of interest are the cognitive musicology, biological sources of human musicality,
psychology of music and methodology of musicology. He is author of two books: Uniwersalia muzyczne
[Musical universals, Poznań, 2007] and Instynkt tonalny. Koncepcja ewolucyjnego pochodzenia tonalności
muzycznej [Tonality Instinct: The Concept Behind the Evolutionary Origin of Musical Tonality, Poznań, 2015],
and the numbers of articles. In his musicological research, he refers to such academic disciplines as
cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and cultural anthropology. He is an editorial secretary of the
journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology and a member of Society of Interdisciplinary Musicology.
______________________________________

Brandon POLITE
Knox College, USA

“Musical Kinds as Social Kinds: Or, There’s More Than One Way to Rock”

In this paper, I examine the nature of musical kinds, limiting my focus to rock music for illustrative purposes. One
intuitively appealing view is that pieces of music are of the same kind (genre, subgenre, sub-subgenre, etc.) only if
they sound like other pieces of that kind and thus possess properties essential to music of that kind. But qualitative
similarity can be misleading. Two pieces of music may sound very similar despite belonging to distinct musical
kinds – e.g., Frank Zappa’s music often sounds like jazz but is really experimental rock. Moreover, two pieces that
sound almost nothing alike can belong to the same musical kind – e.g., noise rock bears little resemblance to
rockabilly, but both are kinds of rock music.
Against this sort of essentialism, I defend an account of musical kinds that parallels the prevailing view of species
within the philosophy of biology. I argue that, similar to the organisms of a species, pieces of music belong to a
particular musical kind because they are parts of a single evolving lineage. A musical lineage is best understood in
the way that Timothy Williamson understands philosophical ones: namely, as “a broad, loose tradition held together
by an intricate network of causal ties of influence and communication, not by shared essential properties.” The
relationship between pieces of music of the same kind, therefore, is causal-historical and not qualitative. That
musical groups within the same subgenre share similar influences, as well as influence each other, accounts for
the qualitative similarities of the music they produce. Moreover, noise rock and rockabilly groups all make rock
music, despite their qualitative dissimilarities, because they are parts of the same lineage. Musical kinds are thus
social kinds. We cannot understand pieces of music separately from the contexts within which they are produced
and enjoyed.

Dr. Brandon Polite is an assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Knox College, Galesburg, IL, USA. He
holds PhD in philosophy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (in 2010, dissertation A
Correspondence Theory of Musical Representation). His areas of specialization: aesthetics, philosophy of
music, value theory.
Among his recent publications: “The Varieties of Musical Experience,” Pragmatism Today, Vol. 5, no. 2
(Winter 2014), “Tortured Calculations: Body Economies in Shakespeare’s Cultures of Honor,” Selected
Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, Vol. 4 (January 2013). Among his recent presentations:
“Shared Musical Experiences” at the annual conference of the Royal Musical Association Music and
Philosophy Study Group, at King’s College in London, July 2015; “The Varieties of Musical Experience” at
the Aesthetic Experience and Somaesthetics Conference in Budapest, June 2014; and “Musical
Representation and Unexploited Content” at the annual meeting of Eastern Division American Society for
Aesthetics, in Philadelphia, March 2014.
______________________________________

Tijana POPOVIĆ MLADJENOVIĆ

University of Arts, Belgrade, SERBIA

‘In-between’ the Autonomous and Contingent Worlds of Music

“What is it we enjoy in listening to the formal and sensual properties of absolute music unfold in our listening
space?” (P. Kivy, 2002). “Why do we love (certain) music? Or, rather, what is the nature of this loving itself?” (M.
Minsky, 1981). “When music moves us, to what are we moved?” (L. Kramer, 2006).
Within the scope of these questions the concepts of Mary Louise Serafine (1988) and Lawrence Kramer (1990,
2002), cross each other – the concept of “strong” or extreme cognitivism on one side, and the concept of ‘new’
critical musicology on the other.
Serafine searches for “style” as a neutral concept (in terms of the essentialist determination of the lower limit), for
the set of the most elementary factors of musical expression, that is, for some kind of “musical thinking degree
zero”. On the other hand, “musical thinking degree zero”, according to Kramer, provides a basis for the
reconstruction of some basic discourse about music, which has relieved itself of the semantic and ideological
baggage of positivism, burden of formalism and all those theories which do not establish the mutual relations of
music and expression, sense, meaning and its cultural context.
The “dual”’ character of music, or its a priori ambiguity – purely musical and musically meaningful, purely existential
and contingently realized – has prompted Serafine to shift the focus of her research to the disguised and
overlooked generic, panstylistic processes, in full awareness of the contingency of music, which she primarily
relates to the variety of stylistically specific processes of musical thinking and its affiliation with a certain world,
participation in a certain Lebensform.
At the same time, Kramer shifts his attention to the “opposite” side, to a neglected and excommunicated
contingency of music, which he primarily links to its historical, ideological, cultural and functional imprint in the
network of the contingent requirements of Lebenswelt. In a word, he links the a priori ambiguity of music to the
articulation of one of the substantive states of subjectivity.
In my text, an answer is now sought in the area of intersection between the autonomous and contingent worlds of
music. The search for meaning takes place “in-between” such a dilemma, whereby it is emphasized that every act
of music creation, performance, listening, understanding and interpretation determines itself, embodying a personal
realization of mutual action of autonomy and contingency. Consequently, an analysis unfolds as the interpretation
of a work which, according to Paul Ricoeur (1975), causes the second-order denotation, which is distinctly
metaphoric (as tension, dynamism, expression, ambiguous reference – split reference, and metaphoric truth).

Tijana Popović Mladjenović, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Musicology of the
Faculty of Music, and at the Department of Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies at the University of Arts in
Belgrade. She specialized in contemporary French music at the University of Paris IV Sorbonne. Her main
research interests include the history of music of the fin de siècle, contemporary music, aesthetics and
philosophy of music, and issues concerning thinking in music. She is author of five books: Musical Writing
(1996 [2015]); E lucevan le stelle – Selected Fragments from the Italian and French Opera Tradition (1997);
Claude Debussy and His Time, 2008; Processes of Panstylistic Musical Thinking (2009); and
Interdisciplinary Approach to Music: Listening, Performing, Composing (2014). She participated in numerous
conferences in Serbia, France, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Lithuania, FBiH, Greece, Great Britain, Poland,
 Australia, Italy, etc., and has contributed to musicological journals and monographic publications. She is also
an editor of a number of musicological collections of papers, and peer reviewer of the scientific journals. She
contributed to the Grove, and the MGG.
______________________________________

Heli REIMANN
Sibelius Academy, University of Arts, FINLAND

Discovering the Cultural Meaning of Jazz: The Example of Soviet Estonia

Although the majority of professional historians tend to distrust or even dislike scholarly theorization, I think that
theoretical self- consciousness is an essential part of the “historian’s craft” (The term was initially used by Marc
Bloch: The Historian´s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) since all historical writing has an
inseparable linkage to epistemological decisions and ideological preferences. As an unresearched territory, jazz in
Soviet Estonia seems to need legitimization and comprehension provided by historical consciousness through
theorizing. I support the idea of Peter Burke who talks about cultural translation as an extremely useful concept,
drawing attention to the effort and skill, and also to the difficult decisions involved in the act of explaining cultures.
The controversial Soviet period is an often bewildering era, and the dialogic interaction with established scholarly
traditions assists in increasing its relevance as an academic subject and in translating it for a broader readership.
My theory orientated talk will present the theoretical framework for dismantling the meaning of Soviet Estonian jazz
culture. Emerging from the argument that the meaning of jazz was shaped as a product of the interplay between
Soviet socio-political forces, the traditions of jazz culture, and the actions of cultural agents, I will develop an
approach synthesizing existing methodologies associated with national, local or regional historiographies. It is an
amalgamation of Estonian, Soviet and jazz historiographical traditions. The methodologies this synthesizing
approach evokes originate from New Cultural History, transnational history and microhistory.

Heli Reimann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sibelius Academy, University of Arts in Helsinki. She holds
a PhD in musicology from the University of Helsinki (doctoral thesis Jazz in Soviet Estonia from 1944 to
1953: meanings, spaces and paradoxes). Her research activities lie in the interstices between jazz studies,
cultural studies, Soviet studies, cultural history and jazz education.
______________________________________

Nicolas ROYER-ARTUSO
University Laval, CANADA

Formulating the Essence All Together

“Heterophony” and heterophonic textures present puzzles at many level of analysis. The current definition (and
therefore analysis) of heterophony is more or less the following: “The use of slightly modified versions of the same
melody by two or more performers” (Bruno Nettl).
The main puzzle is an ontological one: what can it mean to be the same thing but at the same time to be variants of
the same thing? How can a melody that is changed in the process of interpretation be at the same time the
“original” one?
I have proposed a cognitively “Realist Approach to Heterophony” (Royer-Artuso 2012a) which consisted in showing
that heterophony is not only/mainly the simple superposition of different interpretations of the same melody by
different musicians, but the superposition of different (slightly) memorized versions of the same melody, something
that shouldn’t be surprising if we take into account the fact that this specific texture is mainly found in orally
transmitted musical traditions. I claimed that we ended up with the current analysis mainly because of a written
bias: Scores presuppose an ontology in which invariant essences exist and where deviation is to be attributed to
human intentionality or error.
I claimed that this bias was closely linked to an analogy involving copying (which can be done correctly or not)
instead of a better one: transcribing. When we transcribe heterophonic textures, a choice must be made, and the
essence of the melody is therefore subject to negotiations.
The aim of the talk will be to argue that heterophony is a forum where truth is to be found together in an infinite
(and impossible) search for the essence… if this process of variation is not stopped when institutions create the
tools to master diversity and the tools to impose what they consider as being the true essence (Royer-Artuso
2012b).

References
Nettl, Bruno. 1956. Music in primitive culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. But this is only one version of
many that mainly paraphrase each other, cf. Encyclopaedia Britannica online:
http://www.britannica.com/art/heterophony.
Royer-Artuso, Nicolas. 2012a. “Une approche réaliste du phénomène hétérophonique.” RTMMAM (Revue des
Traditions Musicales des Mondes Arabe et Méditerranéen) 6. 119-128.
Royer-Artuso, Nicolas. 2012b. “Rousseau, la République et l’esthétique musicale turque.” In: Ertem, C. (Ed.).
Numéro special Jean-Jacques Rousseau (numéro consacré au colloque international Rousseau et la Turquie).
Istanbul: Littera Edebiyat Yazilari. 113-123.

Nicolas Royer-Artuso holds diplomas in music, cognitive sciences and linguistics and is currently doing a
PhD in linguistics at the University Laval, Québec. He is a proficient musician specialized in Ottoman music
and related traditions (Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian, Rembetiko). He has published and presented works on
Ottoman music theory, on its politics and on contact phenomena between areal subgenres. He has also
published and talked on Turkish phonology and morphology. He has presented works dealing with metrics,
linguistics theory and language contact. He is currently working on the grammar of rhythm-free poetic vocal
improvisation (gazel) and textsetting in the Ottoman era.
______________________________________

Silvia ROSANI
Goldsmiths, University of London, UNITED KINGDOM

Who is There?

The Deleuzean replacement of essence with the idea of event makes perfectly sense in the musical field if one
acknowledges that sounds originate from actions. In my works the sources are human beings, whose voices, being
temporally and spatially displaced, confer an acousmatic quality to sounds. In the present paper I describe how my
use of models based on human voices indissolubly connects the ideas of essence and context. In particular, those
models and their varied repetitions are regarded as nodes of a rhizome, since they project their ramifications from a
music performance to the social plateau from which the voices have been extracted. The aura of the people, whose
utterances have been analyzed, is subsequently reconstructed in the presence of an audience via the technique of
instrumental synthesis. The term aura is intended here as the presence/absence of those persons and the
perception of it widely varies according to the nature of the audience. In White Masks, a cycle I wrote for cello, live
electronics and resonating masks, the voices of African women in dialogue with the wife of former British governor
of Uganda in the 1960s are projected onto a new temporal plateau and the potentiality of this meeting finds a new
location in a concert hall, a museum or a community centre. A social context is, consequentially, identified by the
kind of audience or by the identity of the voice, which, even if not specified, discloses an accent, semantic content,
or the trace of a trauma. In the second composition of the cycle, the live electronics transforms a strictly European
instrument into a mbira, while the improvisation-based structure relates to a non-European oral traditions. There is
no distinction between essence and context, when sounds stem from an action which also determines its own
context.

Silvia Rosani studied composition in Italy and Austria and further specialized with Klaus Huber, Beat Furrer
and Salvatore Sciarrino. Her music is performed by ensembles such as the ÖENM, Zahir Ensemble and
Platypus Ensemble. Silvia’s composition La nube e Issione won the first prize at the Vocal Arts Composition
Competition and was performed at Biennale Salzburg 2010, while in 2013 she was awarded the Bernhard
Paumgartner Medal and, more recently, the Francis Chagrin Award for White Masks. Silvia also graduated in
Electronic Engineering and works with software for live electronics and sound analysis. While in residence at
Akademie Schloss Solitude, she worked at T-O, for five voices, which the Neue Vocalsolisten premiered at
ECLAT Festival 2014 and which, since then, the group has been touring around Europe and the US. Silvia is
currently studying for a PhD in Composition at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also works as
Associate Lecturer.
______________________________________

John RUNDELL
University of Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Chromaticism and Polyvocality

The problem of the issue of essence in music has been explored in various ways by such philosophers as
Schopenhauer, Jankelevitch and Scruton. Whilst in favour of a “acousmatic” approach (Scruton), this paper
approaches the problem of musical essence from a slightly different direction that also opens onto the additional
issue addressed in the conference – the relation or otherwise between a possible musical essence and the plurality
of musical forms. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno makes the remark that chromaticism is “the principle par excellence
of dynamics, of unceasing transition, of going further” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 2002, p. 597). This paper wishes
to take up this idea and Adorno’s insight in two ways that also depart from his work. These two ways are what I will
term, chromatic dissonance and chromatic contemplation.
Chromatic dissonance will be used to draw out a modern social imaginary that is constituted in non-harmonic ways
that heightens the sense of poly-vocality that cannot be resolved to a harmonic centre. In this sense, and in
contrast to functional accounts, this paper argues that chromatic dissonance not so much “liberates” one from
harmony, but that it is the core to understanding modernity’s central impulse, aesthetic or otherwise. In the case the
musical form chromatic dissonance functions as the metaphor for a dynamic of experimentation and adventure that
has been set loose from at least the seventeenth century to the present, in which chromatic dissonance is
constitutive and gives rise to a “polyphonically through the simultaneity of independent voices” (Adorno) that is
neither decorative nor dysfunctional. In other words, I explore the idea of “dissonant musical modernity”, which can
be formulated as the co-existence of independent voices that cannot be resolved, yet co-exist in the same space.
Yet dissonance also disrupts another human need for quiet, rest where one can imagine something different
without interference, again in the spirit of Adorno’s work. Here one can go further, not in terms of a dissonance, but
rather in terms of a depth. The aspect of chromatic contemplation can be viewed as the need for a restful space for
a second order reflection, spatially once taken by churches, but is now also “inhabited” by other architectural
spaces and practices, such as museums, art galleries, concert halls and sound recordings. However, as a practice
it is not necessarily identified as a silence, or a withdrawal. It will be argued that contemplation in modernity is
“secularized” in post-religious modalities of increased reflection, which may go misleadingly under the title of
introspection or even self-suspension. In this sense, it is not an abandonment of subjectivity, but its increase. What
appears as increasingly abstract form as far as musical innovation goes, creates a space for, paradoxically, the
possibility of increased depth and hermeneutic openness, against the grain of Adorno’s critique of modern
subjectivism.

John Frederick Rundell is an associate Professor and Principal Honorary (Social Theory) at the School of
Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne.
______________________________________

Kamilė RUPEIKAITĖ
Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, LITHUANIA

Musical Images in the Tanakh: Between Their Essence, Context and Interpretation

In ancient Hebrew history God appeared as Voice. Hebrew culture, being the culture of voice and sound,
determined the exceptional function of music, of instruments and their timbres. The rich world of musical imagery,
recorded in the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is of great importance for the many-sided expression of biblical thought.
Voice and sound appears between visible and invisible. Owing to ritual instruments which serve as mediators
between material and non-material spheres, the texts of the Tanakh develop aspects of the cognition as well as
those of the theory of existence by blending religious experience and the resulting strict logic of life principles.
Without any doubt, musical images in the Tanakh have to be analyzed and perceived within the many-layer
context. One may presume that the context becomes the essence of significance of biblical musical images, and
that history of interpretation reveals that essence and context can co-exist, and that there is no need to prove the
priority of one above the other.
The canonization of the Tanakh brought to light two main problems that encouraged its dynamic interpretation – the
complexity of the inner thought of the original text, and ways of conveying that text into other languages. Lasting
history of the existence of the Tanakh serves as an illustration of a paradoxical phenomenon: though translations
are “enemies” of the original thought, by reflecting “linguistic exegesis” (Emanuel Tov), they encourage biblical
texts to preserve the character of a living and ever-widening tradition as well as creating a multitude of
interpretations which incorporate elements of different cultures. Through translations, or semantic interpretations,
the musical images in the Tanakh became “own” to respectively local cultures, being reflected in visual and literary
arts, architecture, in folk and professional music history.
In the paper, biblical concepts of kol (Hebr. kol – a “voice”), of visible sound, of ethical music will be discussed, as
well as some examples of reflection of biblical musical images in the history of European music and its aesthetics.

Dr. Kamilė Rupeikaitė completed her doctoral thesis on semantics of musical instruments in the Bible at the
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2006. Since 2009, she works as Deputy Director of the Vilna
Gaon State Jewish Museum, since 2010 – an Associate Professor of music history at the Lithuanian
Academy of Music and Theatre. She also is the researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. In
2004–2005, Rupeikaitė studied at the European Institute for Jewish Studies Paideia in Stockholm; in 1998–
2001, was an editor for the classical music programme on Lithuanian State Radio; in 2007–2011, an editor of
musical column at the cultural weekly 7 Days of Arts [7 meno dienos]. Rupeikaitė’s scientific research
includes music in the Bible, symbolism of musical instruments in different cultures, use of biblical motives in
professional music, multicultural contexts. She has delivered papers at the international conferences held in
Israel, Finland, Russia, Great Britain, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Slovenia. Her scientific articles have
been published in peer reviewed journals Lithuanian Musicology [Lietuvos muzikologija], Studies in Art
[Menotyra] and other editions.
______________________________________

Svetlana SAVENKO
Moscow State P. Tchaikovsky Conservatory, RUSSIA

Some Thoughts on Verbal Models in Music

According to the conventional point of view one of the most important ontological characteristics of music as an art
form is non-verbal way of communication which inherent in it. Although the European musicological tradition
generally accepted the word-phrase “musical language”, it means principally by default a special phenomenon,
namely, the language of acoustic substance. On the other hand, the structures of this strictly conditional musical
language have often something in common with models of verbal language. We can see here the formal
(syntactical) analogies without lexical contents. In other words, music speaks according to the same laws as a
literature or, say, a philosophy; but what it says exactly, we cannot adequately express in words. Moreover, it is this
feature makes adequate perception and understanding of music.
In my paper, I propose to present the results of observations on the influence of verbal models in musical
structures. We will start with the main laws and with the unique examples in the past; and then we turn to the new
styles, such as minimal music and neo-canonical genre.
We will discuss the phenomenon of structural correspondences that are based on the general laws of human
thought.

Svetlana Savenko is professor of Russian Music at the Moscow State P. Tchaikovsky Conservatory,
leading researcher at the State Institute for Art Studies; author of more than 100 publications (including
several books) in Russian, English, and German. The major fields of her specialization are Russian
music, music of the 20th century including avant-garde and contemporary music. Among her books are
Stravinsky’s biography (ARKAIM, Chel’abinsk, 2004), a monograph Mir Stravinskogo (2001; German
edition under the title Igor Strawinsky. Physiognomie eines Komponisten, Verlag Ernst Kuhn, Berlin,
2014), and the Russian publication of Chronique de ma vie and Poétique musicale of Stravinsky with
commentary (ROSSPEN, Moscow, 2004; second edition Moscow – St. Petersburg, 2012).
______________________________________

Eric SCHNEEMAN
University of Texas at San Antonio, USA

Ritter Gluck and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Search for the Essence of Music

Appearing in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1809, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Ritter Gluck depicts the
18th-century composer Christoph von Gluck as a ghost wandering the streets of 19th-century Berlin. Using the
work of Ian Bent, Lydia Goehr, and Jerrold Levinson, my paper contextualizes Hoffmann’s novella within the
neoplatonic revival of the early Romantic movement and the musical culture of 19th-century Berlin. In particular,
Hoffmann proposes that music derives from a single essence that exists in a metaphysical world. Therefore a
composer must manipulate these ideal sounds in order to create his own compositions. As tokens of this
metaphysical realm, compositions provide listeners with a whisper of the ideal and a transformative experience.
But, according to Hoffmann, Berlin musical institutions altered and changed a composer’s score to the point that
their connection to the ideal is lost and noise is all that remains. Ultimately this practice creates a doppelgänger
effect in which audiences think they are hearing the original work when in fact they are experiencing a falsification
of the original. For Hoffmann and his contemporaries, audiences could only grasp the essence of music when
performers remained true to the composer’s original score. By providing a contextual analysis of Hoffmann’s Ritter
Gluck, my research demonstrates the manner in which these 19th-century Romantic views of composer
intentionality and of the Werktreue ideal still overshadow our current investigation of the essence of music.

Eric Schneeman, PhD in musicology at the University of Southern California, 2013; MM at the University of
Texas, Austin, 2005; and BA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 2002. Since 2014, he is a lecturer at
the University of Texas at San Antonio, and since 2010, an adjunct professor at the Northeast Lakeview
College. He was awarded the University of Southern California Fellowship, in 2011–2012, and Deutscher
Akademischer Austauschdienst, Research Grant, in 2010. Among selected publications: “Perceptions of
Musical Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Europe: The Case of Christoph Gluck and
Giacomo Meyerbeer” (Oxford Handbook Online, 2015); “Finding Euridice’s Voice: Staging Gluck’s Orfeo ed
Euridice in London, Munich, and Berlin,” (Eighteenth-Century Music in Context, ed. M. S. Marrow, 2015);
“Gluck, Christoph Willibald von” (Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. N.Vazsonyi, 2013); and “‘Gluck in
Paris’: Johann Peter Burmeister-Lyser and the Reception History of Christoph Gluck in the Biedermeier
Period” (Musicorum 9, 2011). He has presented papers at the national meetings of German Studies
Association (Washington, D.C., 2015) and American Musicological Society (Milwaukee, WI, 2014).
______________________________________

Vytis SILIUS
Vilnius University, LITHUANIA

Origins of Music and Its Influence to Ethical Life in Early Confucian Texts

The idea of importance of music (yue樂) for early Confucians is definitely not a new one. Many authors from
Warring States (5–3 c. BCE) up to 21st century have noticed that music accompanies rituals (li禮), and ritual is
undoubtedly one of the key concepts in Confucian ethics. Confucius’ personal interest in music is also evident from
the Analects, the collection of his sayings. However, in most of the cases the relation between musical and ethical
spheres in Confucianism is interpreted by the scholars as being only formal and extrinsic.
I will be taking a closer look at Confucian fascination with music. For this purpose, I intend (1) to look at how some
early Confucian texts explain the origins of music, and (2) how, for early Confucians, music relates to ethics.
Finally, I will suggest (3) looking at early Confucians as if they have conflated the musical and ethical domains.
Maybe, even, consider the idea that for them music and ethics were never separated.
I hope that this cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and somewhat different look at the phenomena of music will provide
a unique, but relevant context from which questions of the essence of music can be asked.

Vytis Silius, PhD, lecturer of Chinese Studies at the Centre of Oriental Studies, Vilnius University. In 2015,
he was awarded a laureate diploma of the Best Dissertation of 2014 Award in humanities and social
sciences (Lithuanian Society of Young Researchers) and honorable mention as one of 5 best dissertations in
humanities and social sciences in 2014 (Lithuanian Academy of Science). In 2012–2013, he was awarded a
Chiang Ching-kuo (Taiwan) Foundation fellowship; in 2011–2012, he was a Fulbright fellow at the University
of Hawaii (USA). His interests lie in early Chinese philosophy, and its relevance to the contemporary
discourse of moral philosophy. My research aims at developing a critical interpretation of the dominant
Western moral theories, their philosophical notions and presuppositions. Recently I have been investigating
relation between ethical and aesthetical domains.
______________________________________

Martina STRATILKOVÁ
Palacký University Olomouc, CZECH REPUBLIC

Music and Sense in Jan Patočka’s Philosophy

Since its very beginnings phenomenology has contributed to the discourse on art theory problems, including
musicological issues. During the twentieth century a whole movement of phenomenological approaches developed,
which produced quite differing interpretations of the original philosophical position. Jan Patočka continued
philosophizing in the vein of his teacher, Edmund Husserl, adding at the same time directions toward the meaning
of things in the context of the world. The paper deals with music as a sphere of sensory experience and at the
same time as bearing a spiritual sense. Patočka’s concept of spatial potentialities and qualities inherent in
individual sense fields joins the sensory meaning of art to its role of expressing man’s relation to the world, which
seems to belong among the essential features of music. We can still see Patočka thinking about the cultural or
historical background connected with individual arts or artists (composers). Thus the issue is whether there is any
possibility of reconciling these stances. The paper presents a discussion testing whether Hegelian motifs provide a
tool for such a rendering, viewing the perceptual presence of music alongside assigning a historical situatedness to
musical creativity.

Martina Stratilková studied musicology (Ph.D., 2011) and psychology (MA, 2010) at the Faculty of Arts at
Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. From 2004 she worked as an assistant and since 2010 she
has been an assistant professor in the Department of Musicology. In 2011–2013, she also taught music
aesthetics, psychology and pedagogy at a conservatory. Her research interests are the problems of
systematic musicology. She is mainly engaged in music aesthetics and the philosophy of music, where her
favourite issues follow phenomenological impulses in musicology, developed mainly in music aesthetics and
analysis. She is further concerned with research in music psychology and with music theory. In addition to
various articles, she is the author of the book entitled Vývoj fenomenologického myšlení o hudbě [The
Development of Phenomenological Thinking about Music].
______________________________________

Temina Cadi SULUMUNA

F. Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, POLAND

Essence and Context – Exploring the Links between Music and Philosophy in the Light of Henriette Renié’s
Reflections

Could the many facets of music emerged in various historical and cultural contexts mirror one essence? The author
of the paper considers this issue against the background of a very long and mature process in Henriette Renié’s
reflections. For years, Henriette Renié (1875–1956) – an outstanding French virtuoso harpist, composer and
pedagogue of international repute of her time – had consistently studied and applied to her concepts on the
essence and the context of music, the teachings of well-known philosophers and theologians, among others Plato,
Saint Augustine, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Auguste Joseph Alphonse Gratry. Renié would systematically write
down her reflections in her diaries, separately entitled notebooks, as well as on loose sheets of paper. On some
occasions, she used to define the essence of the music by drawing on philosophical analyses, also in her letters to
her eminent harp students or to her goddaughter Françoise des Varennes, a recognized poet and playwright.
In the paper, the author analyses Renié’s process of defining the elements constituting the essence of the music,
thus explaining why Renié was inclined to believe that the anti-essentialism could harm the music, and lead – as
she would say – to composing and performing a kind of music that blindly follows the fashion and, as a
consequence, passes as quickly as it sets in. In the paper, the author examines why Renié came to the conclusion
that the many musics manifested in different historical contexts (e.g. Renié’s thoughts on Jean-Philippe Rameau’s
and Ludwig van Beethoven’s creative output) and cultural contexts (e.g. Renié’s thoughts on the Malagasy
religious music) could, to some extent, manifest one essence or at least have a lot in common.
The paper is based on thoroughly examined source materials gathered in the course of extensive research carried
out by the author in USA in 2012 and in France in 2013 and 2015.

Temina Cadi Sulumuna, PhD in music arts (2015). She completed her Master’s studies at the Fryderyk
Chopin University of Music in Warsaw obtaining her graduation diploma in harp under Prof. Urszula
Mazurek, with the grade ”excellent”, in 2010. She did her artistic training in harp at the same University under
Prof. Mazurek, in 2012. In 2014, she completed her PhD Studies at the University in harp and in music
theory. She delivered speeches at music conferences: at the National Scientific and Artistic Conference for
Doctoral Students of Musical Academies in Warsaw (2012 and 2013); at the 43rd Musicological Conference
organized by the Association of Polish Composers in Bydgoszcz (2014); at the Ninth Biennial International
Conference on Music Since 1900 in Glasgow (2015); at the Virtuosity – an Interdisciplinary Symposium in
Budapest (2016). She was a harp professor, among others at the Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewiczowie
Academy of Music in Łódź, and at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. She is a concert
harpist and a laureate of music competitions and auditions (in Paris, Drozdowo, Warsaw, Radziejowice).
______________________________________

Edvardas ŠUMILA
Vytautas Magnus University, LITHUANIA

Neoliberal Aesthetics: Music as Social and Political Critique

The paper examines the relation between aesthetics and politics, using the approach by Theodor W. Adorno, and
his definitions of “culture industry” and “committed art”. What Adorno had to say in the 60s however, must be
updated to the development in politics of the last decades. Especially during the 90s, the world has leaned towards
all-appropriating ideology of neoliberalism, defined by Michel Foucault in his lectures on biopolitics. According to
him: “The general form of the market becomes an instrument, a tool of discrimination in the debate with the
administration” (Foucault, Lectures on Biopolitics). In this discourse there is no possibility of talking about issues of
neoliberalism without being part of it. The peculiar example in the field of art and music is “Charts music”, a piece
by a German composer Johannes Kreidler. He takes declining stock charts and accompanying statistics of the
crisis in 2008 to make them into a musical piece, produced using ridiculously childish music production software by
Microsoft.
This paper has two principal aims. First one is an attempt to articulate Adorno’s definition of aesthetics in the
context of “committed art”. To analyze the piece in a manner that fits the above mentioned questions, we must look
into the connection between art and neoliberalism. This connection leads to the analysis of above mentioned work,
which is directly posed as a critique of neoliberal policy and its result – crash of global economies in 2008. The
definition of “neoliberal aesthetics” has already been attempted by Walter Benn Michaels in 2011, according to him
“the crisis in absorption produced an aesthetics that proved to be deeply compatible with the changes in capitalism”
(Michaels, Neoliberal Aesthetics). We are then left with a question – how is critique of political system possible in
the artwork, if it is immanent to the conditions of neoliberal discourse?

Edvardas Šumila has studied musicology in Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (Vilnius, 2011-2014)
and social and political critique (critical theory and political philosophy) in Vytautas Magnus University
(Kaunas, 2014-2016). In 2015 he studied in University of Helsinki as an exchange student. His scholarly
publications were published in scientific journals Ars et praxis (Vilnius), Lietuvos muzikologija (Vilnius) and
Opera musicologica (St. Petersburg). In 2013 Edvardas won the first prize in an international musicology
competition Interdisciplinary Studies in Music (Vilnius), organized by International Musicological Society
among other institutions (jury: Lydia Goehr (chair), Boris Gasparov et al.). Edvardas is also one of the
founders and organizers of electronic music festival ‘Ahead‘ (the festival is held since 2013), since 2015 he is
also co-director of international festival Druskomanija. His research interests lay in aesthetics, philosophy of
music, critical theory, interdisciplinary studies in art.
______________________________________

Małgorzata A. SZYSZKOWSKA
University of Warsaw, POLAND

Musical Essences: The Experience of Music As a Process of [Self] Development

The author begins by pointing out that the question of possible explanations of the essence or essential features of
music could best be explained by turning to Aristotelian tradition. The tradition that perceives essential meaning of
any phenomena in the world in their being [theological] processes and which sees both the ergon and energeia in
the world of phenomena. The author would like to start from this tradition to affirm the processual – if not
theological - character of music and whence the experience of music. Music as perception and creation is
processual in nature. Its nature is development, succession, dialogical processes of reaching out and harmonizing.
Not one process, in fact, but many. Among these processes that make music, the author would like to focus on a
very specific process of human self development which occurs during listening to music (in any music experience).
The entanglement of different ways, in which musical processes appear in the world, the author feels, suggest
reaching out for Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of chiasm and the phenomenological tradition. Finding a
possibility of resolving the seemingly chaotic image of music lies in proceeding gradually along the way of one of
the processes while acknowledging at the same time the chiasmatic character of multiple experienced processes.
In the course of the paper author stresses that the understanding of music as a process addresses both creative
and receptive [aesthetic] experiences of music, and more specifically the process of [self] development, that can be
found in both of these experiences. The process of changing through knowledge and growing through building an
imaginary society; through reaching out to the other and explaining oneself in a process of self presentation but
most importantly through listening-in to the world around.

Małgorzata A. Szyszkowska, PhD in philosophy in 2000 at the University of Warsaw (thesis Philosophical
Aspects of the Category of Expression in the Contemporary Music Aesthetics); in 1996, MA in philosophy at
the same university (thesis Aesthetic Experience of Musical Work in the Post-modern Era). She is a lecturer
of Aesthetic Section, Institute of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of
Warsaw. In 2001–2003, she was a research fellow at the AHRB Polish Project The Dark Decade: Struggle
for Music in Poland 1945-55 (Central European Music Research Centre, Department of Music, Cardiff
University, Wales UK), in 1998–1999, a visiting researcher at the University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, USA (Fulbright Junior Scholarship Program), in 1997, a visiting researcher at the Institute for
Eskimology, Copenhagen University. Currently, she is a member of the project The New Humanities in
Research of the University California Irvine (Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education National
Programme for Development of Humanities); in 1997, she participated in the project Greenland Art and Its
Recognition in Danish Society (Danish Government Scholarship, Institute for Eskimology, Copenhagen
University). Her areas of specialization: aesthetics, music aesthetics, philosophy of music, phenomenology of
music, Polish school of aesthetics, pragmatist aesthetics, 20-century American and British analytic traditions
in aesthetics. She is an author of numerous publications and has presented her reports at various
conferences in Poland, UK and Japan.
______________________________________

David TRIPPETT
University of Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM

Jacob von Uexküll, a Third Ear, and the Limits of Sensation

Can music have an essence if it is, in part, inaudible? Certain post-tonal works have notated pitches that exceed
the ordinary range of human hearing; others explicitly play with the threshold of our auditory system (cf.
Schoenberg, Per Nørgård, and Salvatore Sciarrino). This paper asks what kind of listener such works imply. In the
context of existing moves towards an ecological approach to listening (Clarke 2005), and with concern for a non-
anthropocentric framework for perception (Tomlinson 2015), it presents a theory of Umwelt by the Baltic German
biologist Jacob von Uexküll, in which individuals ‘create’ the bubble of their perceivable environment according to
the limited sensory capacities of their bodies. The complexity of this perceived environment is multiplied by the
multiform complexity of each organism, Uexküll argues. I investigate the anchoring role of sound and auditory
perception in Uexküll’s formulation of the concept, along with his numerous musical and musicological references,
conceived during the early decades of the twentieth century.
By contrast, and against Uexküll’s acceptance of biological limits, I counterpoint the case study of the Cypriot
performance artist Stelarc, whose prosthetic Third Ear, grafted onto the inside of his left forearm in 2007, putatively
expands his capacity for auditory communication. In addition to engaging the discourse of disability studies, this act
broaches a “posthuman” worldview in which technologies – genetic, wearable, and implantable – will allegedly
expedite biological evolution. Such ‘morphological freedom – the right to modify and enhance one’s body’ (Bostrum
2009) already includes Stelarc’s augmentation of the auditory system, and I suggest there may be potential for
existing technologies in clinical audiology to grant access to otherwise supra-audible frequencies.
This context of posthuman themes and ‘threshold’ works within existing Western music points to the relevance of
posthumanist discourse for current musical and philosophical thinking (van Maas 2015). It raises the question of
how identity – ours as well as that of musical works – might be affected by ‘morphological freedom,’ the extent to
which autonomy becomes the lost referential when agency is distributed between biological and non-biological
parts, and it asks what new intellectual vistas emerge when performance is conceived in material terms as
communication between bodies that may be amenable to technological change.

Dr. David Trippett holds PhD in historical musicology, Harvard (2009). He is a senior lecturer in music at the
University of Cambridge. Formerly, he was a reader in music at the University of Bristol. Trippett’s research
focuses on the nineteenth-century intellectual history, Richard Wagner, and the philosophy of technology. He
is the author of Wagner’s Melodies (CUP, 2013); editor and translator of Carl Stump’s The Origins of Music
(OUP, 2012). Trippett is the principal investigator for research project ‘Sound and Materialism in the 19th
Century,’ funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. This examines how a scientific-
 materialist conception of sound was formed alongside a dominant culture of romantic idealism. He is a
recipient of major scholarly prizes, including: Philip Leverhulme Prize (2014); Alfred Einstein (2009) and
Lewis Lockwood (2014) awards of the American Musicological Society; ASCAP Deems Taylor award (2013);
Bruno Nettl Prize (2013) of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
______________________________________

Roberto ZANETTI
University of Turin, ITALY

What is a Musical Act? Understanding Improvisation through Artefact and Performance

Since its birth in the mid-fifties of the 20th century, musical ontology faced serious difficulties in articulating the
relationship between the artistic process of giving rise to a work of music and the final product of such an activity.
This could be explained if we consider that musical ontology always aimed at investigating what kind of properties
we need to identify works of music, leaving aside – or, at least, putting in the background – the modes of reception
and production that influence and determine the emergence of such properties. The so called “practice turn” in
music analysis played a great role in highlighting these aspects, but committed the mistake to neglect the product
again.
With my contribution I would like to move from the process/product dichotomy to provide a general outline of
improvisational phenomena, in which most of musical ontology’s assumptions – the duality between work and
performance, creation and rendition, essence and context – seem to be flawed. To do this, I will focus on the
notions of artefact and performance, seeing them as complementary counterparts in what I would call musical act.
If we intend artefact as “an object that has been intentionally made or produced for a certain purpose” (Hilpinen
2011), and performance as an action that implies “some kind of achievement” (Dutton 1979), we can argue that
artefacts have been conceived for being recognized into a public – i.e., performative – sphere. Consequently,
improvisation could be seen as the ideal paradigm in which performance conditions enter directly into the
constitution of an aesthetic artefact, and, hence, a musical act takes place.
This could significantly reorient the contemporary debate about ontology of music towards a detailed analysis of
artefacts as “social objects” (Ferraris 2009) acquiring their status not through abstract metaphysical properties,
rather through publicly performed acts of inscription.

References
Arbo, A. (2010): Qu’est-ce qu’un «object musical»?, «Les cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg», pp. 225-247.
Davies, D. (2004): Art as Performance, Blackwell, Malden.
Dutton, D. (1979): Artistic Crimes: The Problem of Forgery in the Arts, «British Journal of Aesthetics», 19/4, pp.
304-314.
Ferraris, M. (2009): Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciare tracce, Laterza, Roma-Bari.
Hilpinen, R. (2011): Artifact, url: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artifact/.

Roberto Zanetti is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Turin, where he carries out a project
Improvisation in music. Artistic practices and ontological issues. He earned the master degree at the same
University, with a thesis on the concept of Schein in T.W. Adorno. His research interests include ontology of
music, analytical aesthetics and continental philosophy of art (in particular authors such as Adorno,
Gadamer, Jankélévitch). He just won a four-months DAAD scholarship at Free University in Berlin.