Faculty Fellows Lecture: August Sheehy on “Liberal Fantasies, Musical Forms”

Recent calls for humanities scholars to account for disciplinary complicity in unjust structures of power have left music theorists-whose concerns are generally formalist-at something of an impasse. Turning to the foundational work of nineteenth-century German-Jewish music critic and “founding father of the theory of form [Formenlehre],” Adolf Bernhard Marx, this talk proposes that the problematization of musical form itself responded to political exigencies-namely, those encapsulated in the so-called Jewish question that preoccupied the German political class in the years leading to 1848. This history prompts an attempt to reimagine a theory of musical form along the lines suggested by new formalists such as Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh.
Recorded on November 18th, 2020