News
The Sound of Beauty
Dr Elizabeth Eva Leach will be giving a lecture next month on the topic of 'The Sound of Beauty' in the distinguished Darwin College Cambridge lecture series.
These Cambridge lectures, which are usually attended by over 600 people, are all on the theme of beauty. The series is opened by a lecture from Professor Lord Robert May of Oxford on 'Beauty and Truth'.
Dr Leach writes:
'A strong strand in narratives of sonic beauty in Western music history warns of the power of beautiful sound - frequently figured as female singing - to overcome reason, to enchant, to beguile. Such singing can lead its listeners astray, ultimately even to their deaths. A complementary set of stories, however, relies on the idea that the beauty of sound was guaranteed by its reflection of the harmonic ratios of the universe. The sound of beauty thus represented something uniquely rational and divine. "The Sound of Beauty" explores both negative and positive understandings of the beauty of sound from antiquity to the present. What emerges is a history of varied human judgments of music, arguments over the ethics of music’s power, and disagreements over music’s proper place in defining individual humanity.'
Dr Leach is the author of Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell, 2007), and has broad interests in song, music, music theory, and literature. Her monograph entitled Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician will be published later this year by Cornell University Press. A pre-lecture interview with Dr Leach can be viewed on 'Cambridge University TV' below.