After Idealism: Sound as Matter and Medium in the 19th Century

– 17 March 2017 – 18 March 2017, University of Cambridge –

Session 1: Histories of 19th-century Sound

Alexander Rehding (Musicology / Harvard University)
Beethoven’s Ninth for a New Millennium

Roger Moseley (Musicology / Cornell University)
Return to Sender: The Recursive Transmissions of Die schöne Müllerin

Viktoria Tkaczyk (History and Philosophy of Science / Max Planck Institute, Berlin)
Matter and Auditory Memory: Paris, 1880–1900

David Trippett (Musicology / University of Cambridge)
Permutations of the Material in Sound: Debates ca. 1870

Session 2: Technics of 19th-century Sound

Rebecca Wolf (Musicology / German Museum, Munich)
‘Materia Musica’: The Tools and Techniques of Music Making

Melissa van Drie (Theatre Studies / University of Cambridge)
Experiencing Extreme Listening in an Age of Deafness

Nikita Braguinski (Media Theory / Humboldt Universität, Berlin)
From Ideal Proportion to the Materiality of Musical Practice. Eduard Grell’s System of ‘Just Intonation’

John Durham Peters (Communication Studies / Yale University)
The Nineteenth-Century Quest for Vowels

Session 3: Mind, Method and Matter

Sybille Krämer (Media Philosophy / Freie Universität, Berlin)
Nietzsche or: Sound that Matters!

Abigail Fine (Musicology, University of Chicago)
Sounding the Composer’s Body: Objects, Traces, Spaces
– no audio available –

Alexandra Hui (History of Science / Mississippi State University)
‘The Ripening Harvest of Comparative Musical Science’: Representative Tonometrics and Mental Measurement in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century

Peter Pesic (History and Philosophy of Science / St John’s College, Santa Fe)
Idée Fixe: Music and the Prehistory of Monomania

Session 4: Acoustics & Sensation

Julia Kursell (Musicology & History of Science / University of Amsterdam)
Exploring the Limits of Music – Helmholtz, Stumpf and Psycho-physiological Experimentation

Edward Gillin (History of Architecture / University of Cambridge)
Vision and Vibration: Faraday, Wheatstone, and the Centrality of Sound in London’s Experimental Culture, 1818-1833

Melle Kromhout (Musicology / University of Cambridge)
Tones That Have Lasted for Eternities: The Ideal Sine Wave between Symbol and Signal

Peter McMurray (Musicology / Harvard University)
Discourse Networks 1214/1318 A.H.