Department of Music Colloquium

Benjamin Steege (Columbia University)
Friday, October 9, 2020 | 4:00 p.m.

Dr. Benjamin Steege (Columbia University)

"Musical Listening and the Phenomenon of Shame"

Music Colloquia provide a weekly forum for presentation and discussion of recent research by distinguished visitors and Case Western Reserve University faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education. All Colloquia begin at 4:00 p.m. (Eastern Time) and will be offered virtually through the Fall 2020 semester.

Members of the CWRU and wider Cleveland community are heartily welcome, as are students and colleagues at other institutions. For Zoom links to individual presentations, please contact Francesca Brittan, fmb22@case.edu.


About Dr. Steege:
Benjamin Steege is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University. He studies theoretical discourses around music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to problems in the history of listening, intersections with the history of science, and more recently, music phenomenology. Steege’s first book, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge University Press, 2012), assesses the collision between orthodox music-theoretical knowledge and experimental modes of observation developed in the new laboratory environments of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. His second book, An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2021), asks what it meant for musical thinkers, pedagogues, and practitioners to adopt a skeptical stance toward the authority of natural science, in the context of the Weimar Republic and its legacy. He is currently working on two new projects: a translation of the complete music-philosophical writings of Günther Anders; and The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, which he is co-editing with Jonathan De Souza and Jessica Wiskus. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

About Dr. Steege's talk:
"Shame" is a major theme in mid-twentieth century existential philosophy, figuring centrally in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. As a matter of lived experience, shame is the recurring situation in which one encounters oneself as one is seen by others and must therefore confront the reality of a dimension of oneself that is not wholly one's own. An important precursor to this literature may be found in the lesser known thought of the German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders. Anders's mid-1930's analysis of shame as a defining feature of selfhood not only laid theoretical groundwork for these later writings, but also intersected in fascinating ways with his own contemporaneous work in the philosophy of music. This talk explores that surprising conjunction and evaluates some of the key claims that link Anders's reflections on shame with his reflections on music. In particular, his thesis that shame--the inescapable "non-identity of myself with myself"--is constitutive of personhood turns out to recast itself in an aesthetic direction with his parallel thesis that musical listening is a situation of being at once "detached" from oneself and yet also "transformed" into one of "one's own possibilities."

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