The Sound of Beauty

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Dr Elizabeth Eva Leach, University of Oxford
• Friday 11 February 2011, 17:30-18:30
• LMH, Lady Mitchell Hall.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Janet Gibson.

Biography

Elizabeth Eva Leach is University Lecturer in Music at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. She is the author of Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell, 2007), and has broad interests in song, music, music theory, and literature. Her monograph entitled Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician will be published by Cornell University Press in 2011.

Abstract

A strong strand in narratives of sonic beauty in Western music history warns of the power of beautiful sound—frequently figured as female singing—to overcome reason, to enchant, to beguile. Such singing can lead its listeners astray, ultimately even to their deaths. A complementary set of stories, however, relies on the idea that the beauty of sound was guaranteed by its reflection of the harmonic ratios of the universe. The sound of beauty thus represented something uniquely rational and divine. “The Sound of Beauty” explores both negative and positive understandings of the beauty of sound from antiquity to the present. What emerges is a history of varied human judgments of music, arguments over the ethics of music’s power, and disagreements over music’s proper place in defining individual humanity.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Lecture Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Annual Food Agenda
• Cambridge Infectious Diseases
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Chris Davis' list
• Darwin College Lecture Series
• Darwin Lectures and Seminars
• DevBio
• Featured lists
• Featured talks
• Graduate-Seminars
• Guy Emerson's list
• Hanchen DaDaDash
• History and Philosophy of Science long list
• Humanitas and General Science
• Inference Group Summary
• LMH, Lady Mitchell Hall
• Major Public Lectures in Cambridge
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• Talks related to sustainability and the environment
• custom
• history
• personal list

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.