20 mei 2010

Henkjan Honing and Sander van Maas: Special Debate on Conceptions of Listening

Henkjan Honing (1959) is affiliated with the Department of Musicology, the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), and the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA) of the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA). He was recently awarded a honorary KNAW-Muller Chair in Music Cognition, endowed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (as of Sept. 1, 2010).

Dr Honing's research focusses on the temporal aspects of music (such as rhythm, timing, and tempo) using theoretical, empirical and computational methods. Recent topics are concerned with the role of perception, attention, and memory in music listening, as well as the role of these cognitive mechanisms in the origins of music.

The research is currently supported by grants from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) and the European Commission (Sixth Framework IST programme) both in the field of music cognition.

Sander van Maas is Buma Professor of Dutch Contemporary Music at Utrecht University and Assistant Professor of Contemporary Music at the University of Amsterdam. His work focuses on the philosophy and criticism of twentieth and twenty-first century music. Key themes in his work are theories of listenership and musical postmetaphysics and religion. His publications include The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) and his inaugural lecture at Utrecht University, Wat is een luisteraar? Reflectie, interpellatie en dorsaliteit in hedendaagse muziek (2009, forthcoming in English). His current research focuses on the constitutionof the listener in recent musical history and he is preparing a new book on Messiaen. Van Maas is Chairman of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics and founding editor of Esthetica: Tijdschrift voor Kunst en Filosofie.