About
SIAH: Public Life draws a range of leading intellectuals into conversation about what the ideal of the ‘public life’ can mean to Arts and Humanities researchers and disciplines in the twenty-first century.
Speaker biography:
Alexander Rehding is Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. Rehding’s research in music theory and history focuses on questions of music and identity, cultural transfer, historiography, as well as ecomusicology, media theory, sound studies, and digital humanities. In 2012 he founded Harvard’ Sound Lab. He has published on music ranging from ancient Egypt to the Eurovision Song contest, from Plato to neuroaesthetics, from Wagner to Chinese music. His monographs include Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003), Music and Monumentality (2011), Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 (2017), and Alien Listening (2021). He was editor for Acta musicologica (2006–2011), editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbooks Online series in Music (2011–2019), and series editor of the six-volume Cultural History of Western Music (2023). His contributions have been recognized with such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), the Edward Dent Medal (2015), and the Berlin Prize (2022). He is now working on two new books, one examining the role of instruments in the shaping of musical thought, and one on music and the Anthropocene.
Alexander will be in conversation with Professor Ryan Bishop, Winchester School of Art.
SIAH: Public Life (Series abstract)
Arts and Humanities have always been crucial to the idea of the ‘public life’: the public is valorised as the realm of collective debate and decision-making, of community and solidarity, of art and culture. Such concepts, of course, have always been contested and never more so than right now. The electronic capture of the commons, the removal of boundaries between work and home, the policing of public spaces, the onslaught of the culture wars, the hold of big data and surveillance, the spectacles of populist politics have all changed the meanings, the spaces and the limits of the public sphere.
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