Musicology Colloquium: Alexander Rehding, "Alien Ears"

“Alien Ears”: The Golden Record, which NASA shot into outer space in 1977 onboard the Voyager spacecraft, has been identified as both a mixtape and a message in bottle. It was sent out on its journey into the unknown in hopes that someone, somehow, at the other end would be able to listen to it and learn something about the earth dwellers that sent the message. But what does listening even mean in this extreme interstellar context?

Alexander Rehding is Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. He obtained a PhD from Cambridge University in 1998 and went on to postdoctoral fellowships at Cambridge, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton, before joining Harvard’s Music Department at Harvard in 2003. Rehding’s research in music theory and history focuses on questions of music and identity, cultural transfer, historiography, as well as ecomusicology, media theory, sound studies, and digital humanities. He has published on music ranging from ancient Egypt to the Eurovision Song contest, from Plato to neuroaesthetics, from Wagner to Chinese music. His monographs include Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003), Music and Monumentality (2011), Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 (2017), and Alien Listening (2021). He was editor for Acta musicologica (2006–2011), editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbooks Online series in Music (2011–2019), and is currently series editor of the six-volume Cultural History of Western Music by Bloomsbury. His contributions have been recognized with such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association and the International Musicological Society. A 2018 conference was dedicated to his concept of “Music-Theoretical Instruments.” His interest in integrating digital technology into teaching and research led him to found Harvard’s Sound Lab in 2012. He recently completed a monograph on the Voyager Golden Record—a collection of world music—that NASA shot into outer space in 1977 and is now working on two new book projects, one examining the role of instruments in the shaping of musical thought, and one on music and the Anthropocene.

To attend this talk, email David Yearsley at dgy2@cornell.edu for the Zoom information.