Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress 7 Rūta Stanevičiūtė Nick Zangwill Rima Povilionienė Editors Of Essence and Context Between Music and Philosophy Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress Volume 7 Series Editor Dario Martinelli, Faculty of Creative Industries, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius, Lithuania [email protected] The series originates from the need to create a more proactive platform in the form of monographs and edited volumes in thematic collections, to discuss the current crisis of the humanities and its possible solutions, in a spirit that should be both critical and self-critical. “Numanities” (New Humanities) aim to unify the various approaches and potentials of the humanities in the context, dynamics and problems of current societies, and in the attempt to overcome the crisis. The series is intended to target an academic audience interested in the following areas: – Traditional fields of humanities whose research paths are focused on issues of current concern; – New fields of humanities emerged to meet the demands of societal changes; – Multi/Inter/Cross/Transdisciplinary dialogues between humanities and social and/or natural sciences; – Humanities “in disguise”, that is, those fields (currently belonging to other spheres), that remain rooted in a humanistic vision of the world; – Forms of investigations and reflections, in which the humanities monitor and critically assess their scientific status and social condition; – Forms of research animated by creative and innovative humanities-based approaches; – Applied humanities More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14105 [email protected] Rūta Stanevičiūtė • Nick Zangwill • Rima Povilionienė Editors Of Essence and Context Between Music and Philosophy 123 [email protected] Editors Rūta Stanevičiūtė Nick Zangwill Department of Music History University of Hull Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre Kingston upon Hull, UK Vilnius, Lithuania Rima Povilionienė Department of Music Theory Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre Vilnius, Lithuania ISSN 2510-442X ISSN 2510-4438 (electronic) Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress ISBN 978-3-030-14470-8 ISBN 978-3-030-14471-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14471-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933196 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland [email protected] Preface The chapters in this volume, by music scholars and philosophers, examine the ideas of the essence and context as they apply to music. In philosophy, the notion of essence has seen a renaissance in the last twenty years, while in many disciplines of the humanities the notion is still viewed with suspicion. A common worry with thinking of music in terms of essence is about the plurality of music. The many kinds of music seem too diverse to be the manifestation of one essence. There is also the worry that thinking in terms of essence is an overly conservative way of imposing fixity on something that evolves. The appeal to essence in the cultural sphere is supposed to be fraught with the danger of imposing a normative straightjacket over divergent and dynamic phenomena. Many musicologists think that we must appeal to the varying historical and cultural contexts of music, and the idea of an essence of music is therefore misguided. But if we despair of finding something in common in the many kinds of music, are we really left with a chaos of completely different phenomena with nothing at all in common? Why then speak of ‘music’ in all the cases that we do across many different historical and cultural contexts? Perhaps, we can be more careful about the kind of essences we affirm—ones that lack the nor- mative consequences that some fear. Furthermore, anti-essentialism may also have its own dangers. The urge to understand music politically can lead to its own kind of rigid fixity, whereby music forms are tied to political categories. Apparently, anti-essentialist contextualism can in fact turn into a kind of reductive musical essentialism, whereby sonic forms are thought of as coded politically in terms of ethnicity, gender and so on. Or can we transcend the opposition of essence and context? Is there really a tension between the context of music and it having some essence? Perhaps, one is part of the explanation of the other. Given the current interest in the notion of essence in philosophy, and given that exhaustively contextual approaches to music are now less dominant than they used to be in both musicology and philosophy, this is a good time to reconsider these notions and the relations between them as they bear on music and musical phenomena. v [email protected] vi Preface The disciplines of musicology and philosophy have recently been reaching out to each other in an attempt to overcome the specific interests and intellectual styles of the respective disciplines. The Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group founded in 2010 (of which one of the editors of this volume was a founder member) has played an important role in this—providing a forum at the London conferences where each discipline can learn from the other and at the same time a place where differences can be frankly aired and learned from. The Vilnius conference in 2016, from which the chapters in this volume derive, proceeded in the same spirit. Sometimes, there may be a glorious synthesis between disciplines. But interdisciplinary engagement should never be too glib and easy. If it seems so, something has probably gone wrong. Heat should sometimes be generated. And heat often generates light. The conference, Essence and Context: A Conference Between Music and Philosophy, took place in the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (Vilnius), from the 31 August to 3 September 2016. The idea to organize a scholarly gathering in Vilnius arose at a lunch meeting of musicologist Rūta Stanevičiūtė and philosopher Nick Zangwill in Vilnius. Programmed in collaboration with a large network of scholars from Europe, North and South America, the conference was the first conference at the interface between music and philosophy featuring scholars from the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe. Keynote speakers included: Paul Boghossian (New York University), Vytautas Landsbergis (Lithuania), Jerrold Levinson (University of Maryland), Tamara Levitz (UCLA, Los Angeles) and Richard Taruskin (University of California, Berkeley). Plenary panellists were: John Deathridge (King’s College London), Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman (University of Arts in Belgrade), Mario Videira (University of São Paulo) and Nick Zangwill (University of Hull). The Programme Committee consisted of: John Deathridge (King’s College London); Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota); Rūta Stanevičiūtė (Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre); Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman (University of Arts in Belgrade); Mario Videira (University of São Paulo); Nick Zangwill (University of Hull); and AudronėŽukauskaitė (Lithuanian Philosophical Association). Financial support was gratefully received from: Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Musicological Section of Lithuanian Composers’ Union, Research Council of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Council for Culture. The conference was organized in partnership with the Lithuanian Philosophical Association and the American Musicological Society’s Music and Philosophy Study Group (in partic- ular, thanks to Michael Gallope). The revised and extended keynote lectures and papers selected for the inclusion in this volume are structured into four parts, each containing chapters ranging from theory to practice in various music cultures. The book reflects a diversity of issues and approaches addressing music concepts and practices negotiating between essentialist and contextualist traditions. The first part “Interrogating Essence” begins with an exchange between Richard Taruskin and Nick Zangwill confronting essentialist and contextualist positions that represent key motifs of both the con- ference and the volume. The discussion is continued in the chapters of this part by [email protected] Preface vii Jonas Lundblad, John MacAuslan,