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Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical [Table Of Contents], Roger Mathew Grant

Philosophy & Theory

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to …

Nietzsche And Darwin, Babette Babich

Working Papers

Abstract

I argue against the popular view of Nietzsche as Darwinist and I concur with other Nietzsche scholars who have also noted that other authors worked in Nietzsche’s thinking in association with Darwin, not only Spencer and Malthus but also Roux and Haeckel among others which also for Nietzsche included Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche offers plain condemnation of Darwin’s views but he is also often associated with Darwin owing to Darwin’s racism and his own vision of rank-order. I conclude with an emphasis on style and Nietzsche’s reading of antiquity to highlight the distinction he sought to make …

Postmodern Musicology, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

The discipline of musicology is a rather specificially 20th century institution growing out of a disparate range of 19th century studies of music theory, history, composition, etc. The OED edition extant at the time of the writing of this article dates the term musicology itself to 1909 or later. Although there are indeed practitioners throughout the world, most theorists are Anglo-American, with echoes in the French tradition of musicologie and German Musikwissenschaft. As a still-modern project, postmodern musicology derives from a predominantly Austro-German generation of scholars who translated an originally European tradition of analysis (Heinrich Schenker and -- in …