Nicholas Mathew, professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, presents "The Post-humanization of Sound (between Paris and California," in the first presentation of the 2025-26 THEME lecture Series.
Abstract
This talk begins in 1972, at the intermission of a concert in Berkeley, California, when the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar -- a veteran of twenties theosophical experimentation and sixties counterculture -- took to the stage and delivered a wide-ranging lecture entitled "The Transforming Power of Tone." Following the musical ideas and buried institutional histories in this lecture, we will head all the way back to pre-war France -- and all the way forward to the vibrational ontologies of sound art and the cyber-mysticism of 90s tech utopians. On the journey with us, it turns out, is none other than Claude Debussy -- a marginal yet constant presence in the twentieth-century Euro-American fantasy of pure sound and vibrational oneness. I will tell this eccentric story of Debussy reception with two questions in mind. (1) When and how is music audible as sound? And (2) when and why was sound associated with the non- or post-human? Trying to answer these questions, I will suggest, helps us to clarify the (frequently submerged) cultural politics of present-day philosophies of sound and vibration.
Biography
Nicholas Mathew is Professor of Music and Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the books Political Beethoven and The Haydn Economy, as well as many articles on musical aesthetics, politics, and performance. He is also a keyboardist, and his album of Haitian classical music from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, with the baritone Jean-Bernard Cerin, will be released this Fall.
Series Background
THEME: A colloquium of UW faculty and students of Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education held on select Friday afternoons during the academic year.