What constitutes music?

Organisers: Dr Deborah Lee (Information Studies), Dr Nicolas Gold (Computer Science), Prof. Jane Gilbert (SELCS-CMII)

Music is constituted by its formal/structural qualities, its rhythms, its melodies, its emotional impacts, and more. We must also include music-related objects, music’s production techniques and methods, its connections to texts, and its various functions. The people involved with music are also constitutive elements, whether playing, singing, listening, or dancing; and more broadly, so are the cultures that music represents. With such a wealth of different kinds of information involved, it is clear that those researching music from different disciplines will have different approaches, and will treat music in different ways.

This in-person workshop will explore the challenging question of what constitutes music, bringing together researchers from different disciplines to discuss and compare their approaches to researching music and the questions they ask of it. It will engender a deliberately provocative and interdisciplinary discussion about music as it is seen by the different scholarly traditions and disciplines at UCL, and begin articulating a collective understanding. The intention is to provoke a multi- and inter-disciplinary response to the question, and in doing so begin to articulate ‘music’ at UCL in more unified way.