New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Mariusz Kozak

What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener, created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities. Author Mariusz Kozak describes musical time as something that emerges when the listener enacts her implicit knowledge about “how music goes,” from deliberate inactivity, to such simple actions as tapping her foot in time with the beat, to dancing in a way that engages her entire body.

Kozak explores this idea in the context of modernist and postmodernist musical styles, where composers create unfamiliar and idiosyncratic temporal experiences, blur the line between spectatorship and participation, and challenge conventional notions of form. Basing his discussion on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and on the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, Kozak examines different aspects of musical structure through the lens of embodied cognition and what phenomenologists call “lived time.” A bold new theory derived from an unprecedented fusion of research perspectives, Enacting Musical Time will engage scholars across a range of disciplines, from music theory, music cognition, cognitive science, continental philosophy, and social anthropology.

About the Author:

Mariusz Kozak is Assistant Professor of Music, Music Theory at Columbia University. He is the author of Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music, among other publications.

About the Speakers:

Elizabeth Margulis is Professor of Music at Princeton University. Her published works include On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind and The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction. 

George Lewis is Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Composition and Historical Musicology at Columbia University. He has composed the opera Afterword, among other compositions. His published works include A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.

Patricia Dailey is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts, among other publications.

Ana M. Ochoa Gautier is Professor of Music, Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Her published works include Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización, and Entre los Deseos y los Derechos: Un Ensayo Crítico sobre Políticas Culturales.











When: Wed., Feb. 19, 2020 at 6:15 pm
Where: Columbia University
116th St. & Broadway
212-854-1754
Price: Free
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What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener, created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities. Author Mariusz Kozak describes musical time as something that emerges when the listener enacts her implicit knowledge about “how music goes,” from deliberate inactivity, to such simple actions as tapping her foot in time with the beat, to dancing in a way that engages her entire body.

Kozak explores this idea in the context of modernist and postmodernist musical styles, where composers create unfamiliar and idiosyncratic temporal experiences, blur the line between spectatorship and participation, and challenge conventional notions of form. Basing his discussion on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and on the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, Kozak examines different aspects of musical structure through the lens of embodied cognition and what phenomenologists call “lived time.” A bold new theory derived from an unprecedented fusion of research perspectives, Enacting Musical Time will engage scholars across a range of disciplines, from music theory, music cognition, cognitive science, continental philosophy, and social anthropology.

About the Author:

Mariusz Kozak is Assistant Professor of Music, Music Theory at Columbia University. He is the author of Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music, among other publications.

About the Speakers:

Elizabeth Margulis is Professor of Music at Princeton University. Her published works include On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind and The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction. 

George Lewis is Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Composition and Historical Musicology at Columbia University. He has composed the opera Afterword, among other compositions. His published works include A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.

Patricia Dailey is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts, among other publications.

Ana M. Ochoa Gautier is Professor of Music, Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Her published works include Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización, and Entre los Deseos y los Derechos: Un Ensayo Crítico sobre Políticas Culturales.

Buy tickets/get more info now