Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Music and the Public Sphere

Workshop 2013/2014 | Fellow Forum

Music and the Public Sphere

23.–24. April 2014

The workshop is premised on the idea that music is a central feature of how modernity comes to be performed. Modernity rearranges the relationship between private and public realms, and in some instances even constitutes the distinction between such realms. New social arrangements gave rise to new forms of experience, whether collective or individualised. Experiencing music became an important part of what it meant to be a modern person. The increased availability of and access to music transformed the nature of public participation in culture-making, and indeed – one might argue – transformed people’s ‘taste’, whether for politics or culture, trade or pleasure. It could be a newly-classicized indigenous music, as in India, or Western genres like jazz in a number of Asian and African locations. It could be Italian music in England or the opera in Germany or France. The growth of urban centres in the metropolis as well as the colonies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, across a number of continents, ensured the formation of new markets and new structures of patronage, leading to the coming together of musicians and performers of various kinds.