What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener, created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities. Author Mariusz Kozak describes musical time as something that emerges when the listener enacts her implicit knowledge about "how music goes," from deliberate inactivity to such simple actions as tapping her foot in time with the beat, to dancing in a way that engages her entire body.
Kozak explores this idea in the context of modernist and postmodernist musical styles, where composers create unfamiliar and idiosyncratic temporal experiences, blur the line between spectatorship and participation, and challenge conventional notions of form. Basing his discussion on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and on the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, Kozak examines different aspects of musical structure through the lens of embodied cognition and what phenomenologists call "lived time." A bold new theory derived from an unprecedented fusion of research perspectives, Enacting Musical Time will engage scholars across a range of disciplines, from music theory, music cognition, cognitive science, continental philosophy, and social anthropology.
Speakers
Mariusz Kozak, Assistant Professor of Music and Music Theory, Columbia University.
Elizabeth Margulis, Professor of Music, Princeton University
George Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of Music, Columbia University
Patricia Dailey, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.
Ana M. Ochoa Gautier, Professor of Music; Chair, Department of Music, Columbia University
This event is free and open to the public; registration is not required. Seating is first-come-first-served.
This event is sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Office of the Divisional Deans in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Columbia University Department of Music.
