Music Lecture: Naomi Waltham-Smith (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

*Lecture takes place in the Music Library Seminar Room in the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building.* "Beethoven's Blush"-- Naomi Waltham-Smith's research sits at the intersection of music theory and Continental philosophy. She is interested in how the critical resources of recent French and Italian thought might be deployed to interrogate the ethical significance of the processes and structures of music and listening. Her works engages with the thought of Aristotle, Heidegger, Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, and Nancy among others. She is currently writing a book on "Music and Belonging Between Restoration and Revolution." Construing the twin notions of belonging as ownership and as inclusion in a community as a binary system for constructing an ontology both of humanity and of German instrumental music, this project explores how the stylistic and structural characteristics of the Classical style register a crisis of belonging in modernity and at times threaten to halt the workings of this binary machine.