Keynote speakers: George Benjamin, John Deathridge, Deirdre Gribbin, Jerrold Levinson, Susan McClary, Roger Scruton
Convenor: Guy Dammann, Institute of Musical Research
Musical experience plays a prominent and important part in our lives. While our musical tastes seem to attach themselves strongly to our individual sense of identity (to a greater degree, even, than in other artforms), our musical encounters also appear greatly to deepen our emotional relationship with others. However, the question of whether our musical experience bears relation to our existence as moral agents, and to our conception of morality more broadly, remains wide open. Should - and perhaps must - musical experience have a moral dimension?
Within Western traditions of thinking about music and art during the last century or so, the answer to this question was by and large a strongly negative one. For much of Western history, however, the link between morality and the arts was widely construed as strong, and, at times, even as necessary. Eighteenth-century thinkers and philosophers, such as Kant, Schiller and Rousseau conceived of powerful links between beauty, aesthetic value in general, and the moral sphere. Moreover, in the classical world, not only was a strong connection between the arts and morality widely assumed, but of all the arts, music was held to be the most morally powerfully of all.
During recent years the relation between art and morality has again come under critical and philosophical scrutiny, perhaps in answer to a pervasive social re-evaluation of the meaning of artistic experience and practice. But while musicology has seen a huge increase in emphasis on the social and cultural aspects of music and its making, and philosophers have reassessed notions of the moral content of the literary and pictorial arts, the precise question of music’s moral value has yet to be adequately posed.
The conference intends to offer a comparative examination of this subject by bringing together academics and scholars from within musicology, philosophy, and neighbouring disciplines to explore the relation between music and morality, from a variety of historical, interpretative and analytical perspectives.
