The 116th ICREA Colloquium ‘European Music and the Global Enlightenment’

ABSTRACT

David Irving and Joan Pau Rubiés

The age of Enlightenment was a period of profound philosophical transition in Europe. Writers and scholars discussed and promoted within a transnational Republic of Letters knowledge and ideas that were often radical for the time, challenging prevailing political and economic assumptions, and questioning the theological basis of many epistemological frameworks. This culture also extended the horizons of anthropological knowledge, through travel writing, natural history, and ethnographic data that circulated across the world at an unprecedented rate, prompting new scholarly perspectives. The first questions we will ask in this colloquium are: how European was the European Enlightenment, and can these global interactions be separated from colonial realities?

We will also explore these questions through music, whose importance in this context has often been neglected. Diverse kinds of music were described and theorised by Europeans in diverse ways, with varying levels of reliability. This comparison contributed to the cultural self-fashioning of European identity. In fact, the term and concept of ‘European music’, often thought to be an age-old concept, had its birth in this period. We will therefore explore this phenomenon by explaining how new definitions of ‘Europe’ as a distinct cultural identity were constructed, against a complex backdrop of philosophy, colonialism, scientific research, and ethnographic thought. The implications were, in fact, far-reaching, and remain with us.