Event details

The Musicology Colloquium presents a talk by Lydia Goehr.

Abstract

From extended metaphors, we get the wit of extension: e-wit. Extension cords, like extended chords, may be elastic or exact in reaching a breaking point. Extended tonalities, extended techniques, and extended play: each stretches a norm without quite breaking it – until it does. This lecture seeks the e-wit on display in the Metropolitan Museum's currently running exhibition: “Musical Bodies” (2026). Comprising 130 pieces, the bodies affirm a great accumulation of cultural capital. The advertising says that the musical bodies have been collected “to illuminate how we express who we are, what we value, and what we believe.” The exhibition affirms a universal “we” premised on humanity’s “innate musicality and shared heritage of harmony.” If humanity shares one thing, and the thing is worth putting on view, then that thing is a dynamic musical body. What is musical is drawn out not through the world of sound but through the many sorts of resemblances that extend a human body first to every sort of musical instrument, be it of string, wind, or percussion, and then on to the many modern music boxes of advanced mechanism. The list of “instruments, paintings, sculptures, drawings, and more” brings “the more” to the question of extension – to the e-wit that wants to know how embodied human minds extend into complex worlds of morality and sociality by musical means. In this show, humanity is the origin for the musical body or the musical way of being in the world, the plug in every sense for everything musical even when the thing seems to be only a mechanical box. What sort of e-wit is at stake when a museum of extraordinary collection becomes an imaginary museum of extraordinary extension?

Biography

Lydia Goehr is Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1992/2007 with a new essay); The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy [essays on Richard Wagner] (1998); Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (2008, essays on Adorno and Danto); Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread. A Philosophical Detective Story (2021); David Lean (Filmmaker and Philosopher) (2025). Her current projects include Furniture-Art: Essays on Objects and Objections; and Violin Lessons: Notes toward a Philosophy of Practice. She is co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment. Essays on the legacy of an Opera (2006), and co-editor with Jonathan Gilmore of Blackwell's A Companion to Arthur C. Danto (2022).

Tickets

Free, Unticketed