On Music, Mind, and Meaning:
A Conversation with Fred Lerdahl
and Critical Friends
Friday, February 2, 2007
3pm to 4:30pm
Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall
Fred Lerdahl is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University and is the 2006-2007 MBB Faculty Fellow, currently being hosted by Harvard’s Music Department. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, at Columbia from 1979-85, and subsequently at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before returning to Columbia in 1991. He has received the Koussevitzky Composition Prize (1966), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974-75), two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1971, 1988), an NEH Fellowship (1991), as well as other awards, and many commissions for compositions. Professor Lerdahl is best known for his work on pitch space and cognitive constraints on compositional systems or "musical grammar, ” especially as covered in his books, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, co-written with linguist Ray Jackendoff (1983, second edition, 1996, MIT Press) and Tonal Pitch Space (2001, Oxford University Press). In addition, he has written numerous articles about computer-assisted composition, music cognition, and other topics for leading publications, and has been a consulting editor to Music Perception since 1983 and to Musicae Scientiae since 1999. He has been the American co-editor of Contemporary Music Review since 1986.
If you are interested in music and the mind, this conversation will highlight some of Professor Lerdahl’s earlier work in the field of music cognition, the importance of those theories, and the questions they raised for those studying in the fields of mind, brain, and behavior. For this conversation, Professor Lerdahl will be joined by Professor Mark Tramo, Director of The Institute for Music & Brain Science at Harvard Medical School, Professor Erin Hannon, Director of the Auditory Cognition and Development Lab within the Harvard Psychology Department, and Professor Andrew Nevins of the Department of Linguistics. Professor Marc Hauser, co-director of MBB, will moderate. Together they will examine some of the history of music cognition and musical grammar, but will also talk about the new challenges and issues being explored and pursued by those interested in the intersections between music, cognition, and neuroscience.
This event is open to the public.