CPCT Research Seminar 2025/2026
Music and Philosophy
Time: Wednesdays, 4:00-6:00pm, UK time
Venue: RHB 139 (Goldsmiths) and online
The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London cordially invites you to join us at this year’s Research Seminar: ‘Music and Philosophy.’
About the seminar
CPCT’s annual research seminar meets on a bi-weekly basis and is open to centre members, graduate affiliates, and other interested staff and students as well as the general public. It aims to serve as a forum for philosophical work and dialogue at Goldsmiths.
How does philosophy listen to music? How has music influenced philosophy’s self-understanding or begotten critical thought? Does philosophical modernity resound in musical modernism? Why has philosophical thought sought recourse in musical figures such as prelude and overture? How might music’s ineffability expand philosophy’s expressive capacity, and its objectlessness attune us to the environment? Inspired by these questions and the ‘acoustic turn’ in critical thought, this seminar will explore the relationship between philosophy and music as it has unfolded throughout the twentieth century. Guided by the twin premises that music can be understood as a mode of thinking and that philosophy is an activity of listening, the series explores not only how philosophy has reflected on music but also how music has affected philosophical self-consciousness in tandem with their respective, sometimes harmonizing and sometimes discordant modernities. Listening in on conversations both between philosophers and music and between musicians and philosophy, the seminar will explore, inter alia, relations and tensions between musical style and historical process; work, performance, and normativity; serialism and structuralism; expression and anti-hermeneutics; and noise and sound. The seminar’s final third, in the summer term, will home in on plural facets of philosophy’s relationship with opera, interrogating how it has come to be a privileged locus for critical inquiries into the voice as a dimension of subjectivity – across feminist, psychoanalytic and post-analytic perspectives – as well as a testing ground for probing the relationship between Black radical thought and critical theory.
Convened by Jeremy Larkins, Julia Ng, Alberto Toscano, Bradley Rogers, and Svenja Bromberg.
This year’s sessions will be hybrid; to participate online, please register at the links below each session on the detailed session plan at https://cpct.uk/2025-26/. Free and open to the public.
OVERVIEW
Autumn ‘25
8 October — Introduction to the seminar; Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening [Jeremy Larkins]
22 October — Ernst Bloch, ‘The Philosophy of Music,’ in The Spirit of Utopia [Alberto Toscano]
12 November — Theodor Adorno, ‘Schoenberg and Progress,’ in Philosophy of New Music [Julia Ng]
26 November — Jacques Attali, ‘Listening’ and ‘Sacrificing,’ in Noise: The Political Economy of Music; Arun Saldanha, ‘Psychedelics under catastrophe: reflections on the October 7 rave massacre’ [Arun Saldanha]
10 December — Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music [Bradley Rogers]
Spring ‘26
21 January — Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Overture’, The Raw and the Cooked [Svenja Bromberg]
4 February — Pierre Boulez, ‘Sonata que me veux tu?’, ‘Constructing and Improvisation’, ‘Pli selon Pli’, ‘Sound, Word, Synthesis’ & ‘Poetry – Centre and Absence – Music’, in Orientations – Collected Writings. Faber and Faber 1998 [Jeremy Larkins]
25 February — Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Musique et l’Ineffable (1961; trans. EN 2003) [Bradley Rogers]
11 March — Lawrence Kramer, ‘The Ineffable and How (Not) to Say It,’ in The Thought of Music (University of California Press, 2016) and Lawrence Kramer, Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (University of California Press, 2012) [Jeremy Larkins]
25 March — Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (FR 1998; EN 2016) [Andres Saenz de Sicilia]
Summer ‘26 — On Opera
6 May — Danielle Cohen-Lévinas, “Des formes lyriques au XXe siècle: fissure et utopie du Gesamtkunstwerk“; L’Opéra et son double (Vrin 2013) [Jeremy Larkins]
20 May — Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005) [Julia Ng]
3 June — Mladen Dolar, ‘If Music Be the Food of Love’, in Opera’s Second Death (Routledge, 2002); Stanley Cavell, ‘Opera and the Lease of Voice,’ in A Pitch of Philosophy (1994) [tba]
17 June — Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) and ‘The Phonographic Mise-en-scéne’, Black and Blur [Alberto Toscano]
