Benjamin Steege is Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University. He completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2007 and was on the music faculty at Stony Brook University until 2011.
Steege studies theoretical discourses around music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to intersections with the history of science, as well as problems involved in the historicization of hearing and listening. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2010–11), the National Endowment for the Humanities (2014–15), and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2014–15). His monograph, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (2012), thematized the collision between orthodox music-theoretical knowledge and the experimental modes of observation developed in new laboratory environments of the mid-nineteenth century. It won the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2014. He is currently working on a book, Music and the Limits of Psychology, 1910–1960, which asks what it meant for musical thinkers, pedagogues and practitioners to adopt a skeptical stance toward the ascendant authority of psychological knowledge, especially in the context of the Weimar Republic and its legacies.
Projekte
Music and the Limits of Psychology, 1910–1960
Selected Publications
Steege, B. A. (2017). Antipsychologism in interwar musical thought: two ways of hearing debussy. Music & Letters, 98(1), 74-103. doi:10.1093/ml/gcx011.
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Steege, B. A. (2011). Janáček's chronoscope. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64(3), 647-687. doi:10.1525/jams.2011.64.3.647.
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Steege, B. A. (2012). Helmholtz and the modern listener. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Steege, B. A. (2015). Acoustics. In D. Novak, & M. Sakakeeny (
Read MoreEds. ), Keywords in Sound (pp. 22-23).
Past Events
Kolloquium
The Unnatural Attitude in Weimar Musical Thought
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