Aesthetics WorkGroup 23-24
Stoic Musical Impressions the Aliens with Ears May Hear
The Aesthetics WorkGroup (AWG) is an interdisciplinary group of professors and students who meet periodically to discuss theoretical works about and in the arts. The work is often works in progress by members of AWG, but we also read current articles and books that are relevant to the interests of the group. AWG also co-sponsors visits by distinguished scholars from other institutions. Topics in the past have included participatory art (visiting faculty), aesthetic disobedience (faculty), the politics of form in Tibetan poetry (student), the “suburban sublime” in the art of Lisa Sanditz (faculty), cover records as social commentary (visiting faculty), metaphor and metaphysics in Zhuangzi (student), ethical and emotional expression in music (faculty), social ontology and art (student), affects and interpretation in performance (faculty), environmental aesthetics (visiting faculty), and the transgender gaze in film (faculty). AWG is led by the Department of Philosophy chair, Jonathan Neufeld, and is regularly attended by students and faculty from German, English, Religious Studies, Music, Art, Art History, Political Science, and Psychology.
Stoic and Neostoic Musical Impressions with Dr. Melinda Latour
Dr. Melinda Latour giving a talk at CofC. Photo credit Priscilla Thomas.
In September 2023, AWG welcomed Dr. Melinda Latour (Tufts University) for her guest lecture, “Musical Impressions: The Uses of Beauty in Stoic & Neostoic Therapy.” The lecture’s abstract: The use of musical sound as a remedy for physical and mental suffering was a through-line in the European cultural tradition–––offering miraculous and mundane treatments for everything from lovesickness to widespread civil discord. The most influential source of these views was the Pythagorean/Platonic lineage. However, a related therapy tradition with clear musical applications gained traction with the revival of Stoicism between the 1580s and the 1630s in French lands fractured by the Wars of Religion. The composer Paschal de L’Estocart offered early musico-poetic examples of this fascinating Stoic resurgence, for his music collections published in 1582 feature richly illustrated musical and visual settings of Stoic and Neostoic texts. The laudatory poetry and other liminal materials prefacing these prints offer insights into how these musical settings modeled an aesthetically-driven mode of therapy for moderating destructive emotions and restoring harmony in the individual soul and the state.
The Discovery of Voyager with Dr. Dan Sharp
In the spring, AWG hosted Dr. Dan Sharp (Tulane University) to discuss a work in progress entitled “Playfully Imagining Alien Ears in The Discovery of Voyager: A Performance in a New Orleans Sonic Sculpture Garden.”
The abstract read: Over the course of an evening in 2017, a group of over thirty musicians interpreted the tracks that NASA engraved onto the Golden Record, an interstellar mixtape launched into space on two NASA Voyager probes forty years earlier in 1977. The performance, titled The Discovery of Voyager, was more than just a straightforward concert of the music on the record. Instead, it was an ingenious, speculative performance imagining a scenario in which the record crash landed on another planet, and its inhabitants listened to it for the first time.
Alongside the musicians, dancers exuberantly portrayed the inhabitants hearing earth’s music for the first time, revealing the hubris (or, from another angle, the poignant optimism) of imagining direct communication with another world. The disc had been flung out into space in a gesture of intergalactic goodwill that blithely assumed that its extraterrestrial listeners would have ears. Not only would they have ears, but they would also hear the same frequencies most humans can. The Discovery of Voyager considers questions like those that cultural theorist of science Donna Haraway asked while walking her dogs and wondering how beings with different structured senses take in their worlds so differently.
Thanks to the Aesthetics WorkGroup Fund, the department can support these guest speakers presenting for the benefit of students and the community. Please reach out if you’re a philosophy student interested in the Aesthetics WorkGroup or would like to learn more about how you, can help support AWG’s mission.