‘“The song belongs not to the singer alone”: politics, historicism and the philosophy of music’  Seminar

A series of interventions in the philosophy of art, including books by Lydia Goehr and Aaron Ridley on the philosophy of music, have attempted to historicize and contextualize the discipline’s approach to its subject matter, affecting basic themes such as the nature of art and the essence of the musical work. Philosophical pronouncements on these themes now appear more as expressions of a certain cultural and historical context than as insights into the nature of music as such. With reference to ideas of aesthetic relativism and ‘musical politics’ in the thought of Paul Bekker and Rabindranath Tagore, this paper argues that the logical conclusion of this historicizing process is the dissolution of the philosophy of music as a distinct scholarly approach, and its absorption into a ‘relational musicology’ that explores philosophy’s performative effects on musical culture.