3 - 4 pm (CET)

Venue:

Einstein Center Chronoi

Otto-von-Simson-Straße 7, 14195 Berlin

Prof. em. Dr. Andreas Haug

During the period of his fellowship at the Einstein Center Chronoi, Andreas Haug is investigating a remarkable, yet underexplored episode in Western music history: the almost one-thousand-year-long absence of rhythm from musical discourse, musical composition, performance, and, once it had been introduced, musical notation from the 4th to the 13th century CE in the Latin West. This long-lasting abandonment of such a cardinal and, one would think, indispensable component of music has not yet been explicitly problematized by music historians. In a forthcoming essay he puts forward an account of the historical preconditions for the disappearance of rhythm and its reappearance; of the conditions prevailing during the centuries of its absence; and of the long-term impact of the interruption of the rhythmic tradition on the emergence of Western music as a Zeitkunst, a ‘temporal art’ in the emphatic sense. For such an account to have explanatory value, however, one would first need to answer the question that Andreas Haug would like to address in his talk: What exactly is claimed to have disappeared when ancient Greek rhythm was abandoned, Greek rhythmic theory sank into incomprehension, and the Greek notion of ‘rhythm’ suffered a semantic distortion that altered it beyond recognition and from which the musicological use of the term has not recovered to this day?

Participants can join the online Chronoi Talk by clicking on the following link:

https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=m57a9cc4559c73bd3558eccad3c69ed04

The conference room can be accessed using the following methods:

• Joining directly in your browser; simply click the link above, and look for a button with this option near the bottom of the webpage.

• Downloading the program to your computer (instructions can be found by following the meeting link)

• Using the smartphone app called "Cisco Webex Meetings."

You are welcome to enter the online conference room up to 15 minutes in advance of the start time.