This conference brings together scholars from music history, ethnomusicology, history, German studies, philosophy, and history of science for a weekend-long exploration of the 18th-century thinker Johann Gottfried Herder. In addition to four sessions of papers and two keynote lectures, this conference will feature two concerts of late 18th- and early 19th-century music.

Our protagonist may seem at first an unlikely candidate for a music-centric conference. Indeed, Herder occupies a somewhat marginal position in the humanities as a whole. Scholars have habitually portrayed him as the progenitor of ideas that became important only in the work of his successors—
a thinker who nourished ideas as if only in their infancy. It was Herder who introduced the idea of history and culture to Kantian critical philosophy before Hegel; who theorized national sentiment before the era of German nationalism; who gathered and composed popular songs and stories before the age of the great German folksong compilers. Furthermore, while Herder has acquired some passionate advocates such as Isaiah Berlin, most disciplines remain reluctant or unable to claim his extraordinarily diverse and rhapsodic writings, which appear to mix what one might consider philosophy, theology, literature and criticism. Only truly interdisciplinary study can do justice to Herder’s output.

The central premise of this conference is that Herder should be of particular importance to music historians—and, conversely, music to the study of Herder. While the idea of folksong has long been associated with Herder, his contribution to music aesthetics more broadly has received less attention. Music historians have missed an opportunity here: rather than draw on one of music’s most ardent champions, they find themselves struggling to reconcile the intellectually vibrant reality of late eighteenth-century musical practice with a Kantian philosophical framework that is famously dubious about the value of music. Musicologists look to the Critique of Judgment even as Herder’s Kalligone provides them with a counterbalance to the potential formalism and visual bias of Kantian aesthetics—a defense of music that points the way to its later nineteenth-century status as the very paradigm of Romantic art. It is hardly surprising that Haydn and Beethoven were avid readers of Herder, and set his poems and translations to music.

The conference also explores how Herder’s preoccupation with music as both a language of human sensation and the sonic expression of human cultures places him in a distinctly anti-Enlightenment tradition extending even into the twentieth century.  Herder’s unusual historical position—at once central and marginal—provokes fascinating questions about how we do history, and how we use philosophy and philosophers to understand the culture from which they sprang. Herder’s thought demands new ways of understanding mediation and reception; consequently, any re-imagining of the importance of Herder must be more than a project to revive him as a neglected Great Man.

This event is free and open to the public.