Home / Events / Musicology Colloquium Series: Can Music Make a Difference to Climate Change?

Please consult our COVID-19 policies and resources for guidance on attending public performances.

Musicology Colloquium Series: Can Music Make a Difference to Climate Change?

Presented by Musicology Colloquium Series

Latest News

Announcing the 2024-2025 Concerto Competition Winners

Learn more

date & time

Fri, Oct 25, 2024
4:30 pm - 6:00 pm

location

First Floor Reading Room in Mendel Music Library

ticketing

Free, unticketed

  • This event has passed.

At a time when solutions for climate change are expected from scientists and engineers, the question about what music can contribute may seem startling. However, climate protection does not merely consist in innovative technologies but also in significant changes of behavior. And here music has a lot to offer: as an art form that shapes time, it can help us come to terms with the perfidious temporality of climate change—in which we need to act right now, while knowing full well that not acting will have no immediate palpable consequences. So how can we motivate collective action? The talk discusses several examples of music that hold important climate lessons for us.

Alexander Rehding is Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. His monographs include Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003), Music and Monumentality (2011), Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 (2017), and Alien Listening (2021). He was editor for Acta musicologica (2006–2011), editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbooks Online series in Music (2011–2019), and series editor of the six-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Western Music (2023). His contributions have been recognized with such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal and, most recently, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin. He is now working on two new books, one examining the role of instruments in the shaping of musical thought, and one on music and the Anthropocene.

4:30 Dr. Rehding’s Talk
5:30 Q and A
6:00 Reception in the Woolworth Lobby

« Back to events calendar

Alexander Rehding is Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. His monographs include Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003), Music and Monumentality (2011), Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 (2017), and Alien Listening (2021). He was editor for Acta musicologica (2006–2011), editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbooks Online series in Music (2011–2019), and series editor of the six-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Western Music (2023). His contributions have been recognized with such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal and, most recently, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin. He is now working on two new books, one examining the role of instruments in the shaping of musical thought, and one on music and the Anthropocene.

4:30 Dr. Rehding’s Talk
5:30 Q and A
6:00 Reception in the Woolworth Lobby

back to events calendar