Performative Evidence: Philosophy, Criticism, and the Musical Public Sphere
Jonathan A. Neufelds project aims to show that philosophies of music that are to explain actual practices of music must take fine-grained characteristics of individual performances seriously as evidence for their explanations of the nature of music. To engage individual performances in detail is just to engage in a form of music criticism, so it would seem that a critically engaged philosophy is a part of the musical public sphere that it set out to explain. The goal of the project is to demonstrate, both performatively and by looking at influential music critics from history, the effects of this philosophical participation in the musical public sphere.
Jonathan A. Neufeld was Visiting Scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a music critic and plays the viola. He is currently working on a book entitled Listeners, Critics and Judges that suggests that there is a striking parallel between constitutional legal interpretation and the performance interpretations of musical works in the western classical tradition that illuminates the workings of both modern democracy and music.
Selected publications: Music in Public: How Performance Shapes Democracy (under contract, Oxford University Press); Living the Work: Meditations on a Lark, in: Journal of Aesthetic Education, 45.1, Spring 2011; with Robert Talisse, Scott Aikin, Michael Harbour, Epistemic Martyrs and Epistemic Converts (forthcoming), in: Logos and Episteme, vol. 1 no. 2, 2010; Musical Formalism and Political Performance (= Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 7, 2009).
Jonathan A. Neufeld spricht über die gegenseitige Beeinflussung von musikalischer Öffentlichkeit und Philosophie. Er untersucht diese Einflussnahme sowohl historisch als auch gegenwärtig.