Changes as Liberation: Music and Apocalypse
Thursday, Feb 23, 2023
13:15 p.m. - 16:00 p.m.
Apocalypse has two apparently opposed meanings: on the one hand it means catastrophe, on the other revelation. The apparent opposition can be resolved by interpreting the term in the sense that the old is declining and something new is coming up. In my talk I want to try to explain how these two moments stick together in a theoretical way and then I want to apply this theory to music. First by explaining how dodecaphonic composition came up out of tonality and then by actualizing it for nowadays music. This may give us the possibility to ask ourselves whether the changes constitute a liberation or not, whether we are in front of something catastrophic or if there is a revelation of something really new taking place.
Markus Ophalders
Markus Ophälders was born in the U.S.A from German parentage. He has studied Philosophy, Psychology and German Literature in Berlin, Milan and Bologna and since 2011, after teaching Aesthetics at the University of Milan, he teaches Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art and Music at the University of Verona, where he also coordinates the Research Centre ORFEO - Sound Image Writing.
His studies focus mainly on problems of aesthetic theory, philosophy of history and politics as well as philosophy of music and theories of experience in the German philosophical reflection of the nineteenth and twentieth century. One of the central issues concerns cultural studies and the changes in the structural and cultural aspects of society in the current conditions of power, masses, technology, alienation and reification.
He has published numerous essays dedicated to Romanticism and German Idealism as well as to the Frankfurt School and to specific problems in modern and contemporary literature and music.