Department of Music Lecture: Eric Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Oxford

Title

Entangled. An Ecological Perspective on Being-with-Music

Abstract

From music and empathy, to the togetherness of musical ensembles, the emotional contagion of collective musicking, and the importance of music for people in distress and isolation, music’s capacity to connect is increasingly recognised and celebrated. And equally, as demonstrated by the burgeoning literature on music and subjectivity, music and emotion, and ‘strong experiences’ with music, music has long been recognised as affording intense, focused and apparently private experiences. Within what kind of conceptual framework might we understand these various manifestations of the connectedness of musicking? How can the intensely solitary form of connection that headphone listening in a darkened room seems to represent be reconciled with the manifestly socially connected musicking of festivals, clubs, orchestras, choirs and bands? Starting from a broad perspective on organisms and their environments I make the case for understanding being-with-music in terms of entanglement, and for the various kinds of productive and problematic entanglements that music affords. With mycelial webs in mind I join the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the musician Björk, and the biologist Merlin Sheldrake in considering what might be learned from fungi, and what entanglement might afford conceptually.

Biography

Eric Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and an Emeritus  Fellow of Wadham College. He studied music at the University of Sussex and completed a PhD in psychology at the University of Exeter. He held posts at City University, London, and at the University of Sheffield, and was Heather Professor of Music at Oxford until 2022. He has published on various topics in the psychology of music, including ecological approaches to music perception, expressive performance, musical meaning, music and consciousness, and musical creativity. Books include Ways of Listening (OUP 2005) and Music and Mind in Everyday Life (with Dibben and Pitts; OUP 2009), Music and Consciousness (with David Clarke; OUP 2011), Distributed Creativity (with Doffman; OUP 2018), and Practice in Context (with Holden and Ponchione-Bailey; OUP 2025). He is a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the British Academy, and is active as an amateur violin and viola player.