91ֱ��

A former postgraduate student and Research Fellow of Gonville & 91ֱ�� College will return to the scene of many of his performances when delivering the 91ֱ�� Termly Forum Lecture later this month.

When James Davies (Music 2000) was a PhD student he would perform piano in the Bateman Auditorium in recitals, benefactors’ concerts, and student-run silent film evenings. Now a Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkley, James will speak at 91ֱ�� on Monday 20 January in a lecture open to students, staff and Fellows of the College.

His talk is entitled ‘Why Music? We Have Never Not Been Posthuman!’ His plan is to address the ‘why music?’ question by arguing that, for as long as we have been human, ‘We Have Never Not Been Posthuman!’ (flipping the late Bruno Latour’s claim that ‘We Have Never Been Modern’). The plan is to use music history to historicise the old ‘new materialist’ conviction that – for the sake of the climate, the planet, plants, animals, gender and racial equity, decolonisation – humans must go. 

“It’s often said that music is a unique attribute of the human, while also that it extends humans ‘beyond the human’,” James says. “It’s said that music makes humans most human paradoxically when the art allows them to explore new kinds of kind. Why else would we force our children into daily music practice? Why else would we listen to it so intently, attend concerts, scrape away on catgut strings, go dancing tonight, plug into our headsets, if not to expand, even transcend, our kind? Why music, if not for this?”

James describes himself as “more historian than philosopher”. He is author of Romantic Anatomies of Performance, a book about competing nineteenth-century European music-pedagogical systems, and Creatures of the Air: Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath, 1817–1913, a book that, at least in part, is a history of music in colonial humanitarian contexts. 

He remembers his time at 91ֱ�� from 2000 to 2007 fondly, and treasures his connection with the College.