KOLLOQUIUM MUSIKTHEORIE / MUSIC THEORY COLLOQUIA
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Dr. Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman (University of Witten/Herdecke, Germany):
"Cross-Disciplinary Borrowings in Late Rameau: Explaining Musical Behavior without Human Agency"
Drawing on conceptual history and analytic philosophy of science, this talk will explore the origins of the concepts that appear in Rameau's writings after 1750 and examine their explanatory structure. While Rameau had long adapted his ideas to prevailing intellectual fashions, his late work makes use of eclectic terminology borrowed from fields as diverse as theology, physics, logic, causation theory, or colonial governance. Even more striking is the shift in focus: whereas his earlier works centred on the basse fondamentale-a creative imaginative power of the musical mind-his later speculative treatises depict tonal structures as emerging independently of human will. I propose two explanations for this shift: first, Rameau sought to respond to new empirical evidence challenging some tenets of his earlier theory; second, he reacted against the rise of Empfindsamkeit, which framed music as spontaneous, subjective expression and threatened the classicist aesthetics.
Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman has been a research fellow at the University of Witten/Herdecke (Germany) since 2013. His articles have appeared (or are forthcoming) in journals such as Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, History of Education, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Configurations and Journal for Interdisciplinary Music Studies. His research interests are musical thought in the early modern Western Europe and musical discourse in the Cold War Eastern Europe. A particular focus is on the theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau, on which he has presented at international conferences in Canterbury, Cottbus, Cremona, Geneva, London, Paris, and Saarbrücken. An accomplished pianist, Jakobidze-Gitman is also giving lecture-recitals on topics such as "Scenes of Nature Conveyed by Sound Imagery" or "Music in late Stalinism." In 2017, he has been a research fellow at the University of Sheffield.
The evenings are moderated by Prof. Dr. Jan Philipp Sprick and Roberta Vidic, who both teach in the Music Theory Department at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater.
Eintritt frei
Free admission
Contact and Zoom sign-up: roberta.vidic@hfmt-hamburg.de
Overview:
19.5.: Dr. Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman
26.5.: Prof. Dr. Bella Brover-Lubovsky
23.6.: Ass.-Prof. Dr. Nathan J. Martin