Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Anne Holzmüller

States of musical immersion and strategies to evoke them are a topic currently popular in Sound Studies. Although they are mostly investigated in regard to contemporary media technologies they can also be traced in music history. In this talk, I want to discuss two different ways to approach musical immersion in ‘non-mediated‘ contexts methodologically. My first focus will lie on the historic discourse on listening in the late eighteenth century that accounts for an increasing fascination for immersive modes of experiencing. In a next step, I want to explore if and how the phenomenality of musical immersion can be addressed – complementary and closely related to its discoursive construction – from a more systematical perspective. Taking different aspects of ‘musical space‘ as points of departure I want to discuss specific examples from both late Renaissance a cappella style and contemporary pop music.