ResearchWorks: Contemporary Music, Philosophy, and Neoliberal Reason

(Image Above by Vysotsky - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77220755)

What does it mean to write contemporary classical and experimental music during neoliberalism? Samuel J. Wilson will suggest that contemporary music can be understood as both an embodiment of neoliberal forms of thought and practice, and as a potential contestation of these. To do this, Wilson will draw on Theodor W. Adorno’s proposal that music is informed by a kind of “reason”, that is determined by the society in which it is embedded. Crucially this will bring this insight into conversation with recent political theory and philosophy that draws on the work of Michel Foucault, in particular the idea that neoliberalism is ‘a specific and normative mode of reason’ (Wendy Brown). This critical attention to music’s formal, aesthetic register enables Wilson to add something to more well-established (though nonetheless valuable) frameworks for discussing music and neoliberalism, which focus on music’s relation to labour conditions and creative industries. Using a range of musical examples, Wilson will suggest that features such as the characteristic flexibility and productivity of the neoliberal life play out within the processes and practices of contemporary music – yet that we need new philosophical and interpretative tools to best make sense of how this happens and what this means. Put different, Wilson will ask: how must we reformulate Adorno’s influential aesthetics of music and critique, in an age of neoliberal reason?

Speaker

Samuel J. Wilson is a lecturer and researcher based in London. He likes to talk and think with others about situations of music, the arts, and experience in contemporary life. He teaches music aesthetics at Guildhall School of Music and Drama and critical performance theory at London Contemporary Dance School. His publications on contemporary music, sound art, and critical theory include New Music and the Crises of Materiality: Sounding Bodies and Objects in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2021), Music—Psychoanalysis—Musicology (Routledge, 2018), a co-edited special issue of Contemporary Music Review (‘Musical Materialisms’, 2020), as well as chapters on topics such as musical temporality, process music and Slavoj Žižek, and articles in journals including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Music and Letters, and Twentieth-Century Music (in press). He is a founding member of the organising collective of the London Conference in Critical Thought, and is Events Coordinator for the Royal Musical Association’s Music and Philosophy Study Group. More details: https://www.samueljwilson.com/

Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the School and its guests with students, staff and the public.