News
Eric Clarke to give British Library Lectures
Professor Clarke will deliver the distinguished Royal Holloway/British Library Lectures in Musicology 2008/9 on the topic of 'Musical Subjectivities'. The lectures will be given at the British Library at 6pm Monday 10 November, Wednesday 3 December (2008); Monday 19 January, Monday 16 February and Monday 16 March (2009). Admission is free without ticket.
Music has a powerful capacity to express, construct, project and represent human subjectivity. In doing so, it affords significant insights into other subjectivities - real or imagined - and it is in this respect, perhaps more than any other, that it has transformative potential. But what is the basis of music's engagement with subjectivity? What are the attributes of musical subjectivities? What are the limitations - conceptual and ideological - of the idea of subjectivity? And how is the concept of subjectivity in general - and its musical version in particular - situated in relation to notions of identity, consciousness, embodiment, the sense of self? This series of five lectures will attempt to situate musical subjectivity in a broadly philosophical and psychological field, and explore different attributes of musical subjectivities in some of the many circumstances in which music is made and used, concluding with some prospects for future research into music and subjectivity.