Abstract: My lecture will counterpoint three forms of analysis that emerged around 1900 and which long dominated thereafter as music analysis, logical analysis, and psychoanalysis. Each mode of analysis addresses a pursuit of meaning as a breaking down or as a break down, but to what end? I draw on an historical triad of wit that has long worked through subtle differentiations of mistakes, errors, and accidents. I ask of each whether it could yield something that an analysis really wants to find. So what role has the accident or accidental played in the history of music and what could it mean to rest for a perfect moment on a mistake? The lecture asks after the relevance of analysis today—and on what terms.
Biography: Lydia Goehr is Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is currently chair of the Department of Philosophy. Her university awards include: Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award (2009/2010); The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)'s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA) (2007/8), and Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching (2005). She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. In 2024 and 2025, she was a VIsiting Professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 2022-23, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute (Empirical Aesthetics) in Frankfurt and taught at the Courtauld Institute, London. in 2020, she was a Mellon fellow at the Tate Museum in London and, in 2019, a Visiting Professor at the University of Torino. In 2008, she was Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin (Cluster: "The Language of Emotions") and, in 2009, for the FU Berlin SFB Theater und Fest. In 2005-6, she delivered the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology in London and the Wort Lectures at Cambridge University. In 2002-3, she was the Aby Warburg Professor in Hamburg and 2000-2001, Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. In 2012, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for an article on Wagner's Die Meistersinger.
