User:Kevin Gorman/goehr

Lydia Goehr is a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Besides for her permanent appointment at Columbia, Goehr has also accepted a number of visiting appointments, including a position as Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor at UC Berkeley's music department in 1997, as the visiting Aby Warburg Professor in Hamburg in 2002-2003, as a Visiting Professor at the FreieUniversität in Berlin in 2008, and as a visiting professor in the Fu-Berlin SFB Theater und Fest in 2009.

Goehr's work focuses on the history of aesthetic theory, attempting to understand the relational nature of norms and power dynamics with the structure that confines them and regulates their practice. Most of her work has focused on the musical arts, and some of it has explored the complicated and often hostile relationship between the various arts, and between the arts and philosophy and religion. She has also engaged with ideas about the legitimacy of war from a critical theory standpoint, although not an explicitly feminist one.

Publications
Goehr has written a large number of refereed publications, as well as three standalone volumes. In Goehr's first book, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, she examines the fundamentals behind the practice of classical music during the nineteenth century, and argues that they differ in meaningful ways from the fundamentals of the practice of classical music as found in previous centuries.

Goehr's second book, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, serves as an effort to reshape the concepts of formalism and musical autonomy as they are currently understood, in large through the examination of the work of Wagner and German Romanticism. The book also attempts to deal with the boundary problem, trying to refine the musical versus the extra musical.

Goehr's third book, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory, is a series of essays examining the work of Theodor Adorno. Although the book has been criticized for repetitiveness and lack of tightness, Goehr declares that she "does not engage in theory production," but only maps "a history of their reception, and thereby of the complex adaptations, and retrievals ofsome of the most dominant philosophical and aesthetic theses of modern times." Although all peripherally related to Adorno, the essays range across a broad array of related topics, including the concept of musicality, experimentalism, the musicality of the film movement, and more. Elective Affinities is not an introductory text, and to fully comprehend the book, the reader must be familiar with a large number of previous musical theorists, philosophers, authors, and film theorists.