IDEA Lecture with Anne Holzmüller

© Gabriele Neumann

While music is often considered the immersive medium par excellence (Dyson 2010), it is not at all clear what exactly this attribution means or what it refers to. What we call ‘immersive’ is highly contingent on the respective set of epistemic premises we apply. In art theory, immersion has been conceptualized in multiple different ways. Objects and art works have been described as immersive based on different parameters such as narrativity, realism or spatiality, the immersive experience itself has been specified as transportation, shift of attention or re-centering of the perceiving subject. In my talk, I discuss some of these approaches in order to demonstrate the range of the field within which the immersive experience can–and has to be–theorized. Its scope ranges from the object’s properties and aesthetic strategies to the subject’s perceptive processes and imaginative activities, on the object’s part from very dense to rather reduced informational contents, on the subject’s part from sensually overwhelming astonishment to intellectually animated contemplation.

In a second step, I focus on the specific musical capacity for immersion. Traditionally, music’s sonic materiality with its spatially enveloping properties and its emphasis on the embodied presence in time is regarded as a hallmark of its immersive potential. However, it is particularly in musical situations that we can observe a certain layering of the immersive space which refers not only to a materially created aesthetic surrounding (e.g., envelopment in a sonic space) but also invokes a space of symbolic order. This symbolic layer, that is to say, where immersion takes us, transports us to or recenters in, is mostly defined by cultural, historical or individual knowledge. Therefore, it can be predicted to some extent and, even more importantly, aesthetically manipulated. Finally, based on several examples taken from my own research on musical immersion in historical listening situations, I demonstrate how the means to interpret and define this symbolic space have been used as powerful aesthetic and also ideological tools.

The lecture will be held in English.

If you would like to join the event please contact  sek.musik@ae.mpg.de

Anne Holzmüller

Anne Holzmüller (Dr. phil., Freiburg University) is tenure track professor at the Music Department, Marburg University. Her research interests include the history of musical listening, eighteenth-century music and aesthetics, and the Lied. She has done extensive research on musical immersion as part of the Collaborative Research Center on ‘Leisure’ in Freiburg (SFB 1015) funded by the DFG. Her current work is mostly concerned with the history of acousmatic listening and devisualized sound. With Christian Thorau (Potsdam) and Hansjakob Ziemer (MPI Berlin) she is currently conducting the research project “Music listening and music seeing. Historical reciprocities between the 17th and the 21st Centuries” (DFG). Recent publications include: Dunkelbruckner. Anton Bruckner in den Dunkelkonzerten der Wiener Symphoniker 1939 bis 1944(Diergarten 2024); „Töne aus einer unsichtbaren Region“. Zur protestantischen Rezeption römisch-katholischer Klangarchitektur 1600–1830 (Weißmann, Pietschmann 2024); Schönberg in den Gassen. Ansätze zu einer Geschichte des musikalischen Hörens, (Mörchen, Seiffarth 2022).

IDEA Lectures

The IDEA Lectures (Interdisciplinary Debates on the Empirical Aesthetics of Music) aim at bringing together internationally well-known researchers who discuss questions that relate to the production and reception of music from various perspectives. Musicologists from all branches of their discipline take part as do musicians, psychologists, cognitive scientists, sociologists, philosophers and ethnologists.