Abstract
Since Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 the populist attitudes summarised under the heading of “post-truth” have become more and more dominant in many Western societies. Reliance on gut feeling over rational assessment, the recent “moral turn”, yet also the way in which the digital revolution is changing the way in which we think and act are all hallmarks of this approach. Yet it doesn’t just undermine the coherence of our societies, it also threatens to pull the rug from under everything universities have been standing for at least since the age of enlightenment.
All university disciplines are called upon to tackle this danger – including music, and particularly musicology. This presentation will summarise three chapters of a monograph entitled Truth, Post-Truth and Music which I am currently co-authoring with Alexandra Monchick (California State University, Northridge). These chapters focus on the nature(s) or truth, the clash of reason and the unconscious, and the dangers of polarisation. They relate philosophical, sociological and psychological concepts to musical examples and argue that music is a particularly suitable subject to address the dangers of post-truth. The presentation will conclude by proposing a new set of “epistemological ethics” that should accompany our teaching of critical thinking which has turned out to be not sufficient in itself in the face of post-truth.
Wolfgang Marx lectures in Historical Musicology at University College Dublin. His main research interests include post-truth and music, György Ligeti, the representation of death in music, and the theory of musical genres. Recent publications include the edited volumes “I don’t belong anywhere.” György Ligeti at 100 (Brepols, 2022) and Music and Death. Funeral Music, Memory and Re-Evaluating Life (Boydell & Brewer, 2023); he is also a general editor of Brill’s new series Death in History, Culture, and Society.