Lecture Series in Musicology: Arved Ashby (Ohio State University)

"Mahler's 'new mode of musical perception, tightly wound around itself.'" Arved Ashby is Professor of Music at Ohio State University. His work focuses on 20th- and 21st-century art music within broader contexts of cultural history, critical theory, post-Marxist aesthetics, and media and communications. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University with a dissertation on Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, and received the prestigious Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society for an article on Berg's methodological connections with his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. He has also published articles on Frank Zappa and Benjamin Britten, and designed and edited the collection "The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology" (University of Rochester Press, 2004). With his monograph "Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction" (University of California Press, 2010), Ashby asked how media and technology have helped uncover the "truth" embodied in great music and aided our understanding of it. He has pursued other issues of music and media in the compendium "Popular Music and the Post-Music-Video Auteur" (OUP, 2013). This book asks basic and pressing questions about the pop song's importance for our increasingly cinematic sensibilities.