Music, Meaning and Emotion

Tuesday 23rd March 2010 7:00pm

Three talks about what music 'means', and how and why it affects us so profoundly.

Programme:

Kalu Singh
Affects on the track: How do we find words for the meaning of music?
Almost everybody learns some basic terms to appraise literature. So why so few, for most of us, about music? Is it impossible to get past the fundamental fact that instrumental music has no nameable referent, and the emotional puzzle this generates?

Sebastian Skeaping
Music and emotion: A personal inheritance
Do you have to 'know' about music to really appreciate it? What is the importance of musical heritage in musical appreciation? Do words constrict musical feeling?

Roddy Skeaping
Music, Meaning and Emotion .... For People with Dementia
What are the 'affective meanings' and 'meaningful affects' that music articulates and evokes? How does music orchestrate emotions and sediment memories?

Presenters:
Kalu Singh is a former university counsellor: now a civil-servant and freelance writer. His first book Guilt (Icon Ideas in Psychoanalysis) was a Guardian Book of the Year. Innovative essays on Shakespeare, Keats, Dante, Solaris & Gradiva appear on his website: www.philosophykal.co.uk. Over the past decade, he has helped coordinate Freud Museum Conferences on Crying, Midwifery, The Therapist's Body, and on Matte Blanco. He joined the Talking Bob Dylan Society, Cambridge in 1986.

Sebastian Skeaping was born into a family with a rich musical heritage (Roddy Skeaping is his uncle). He obtained a PhD at Cambridge University in 2003 and now runs Thornhill Pianos. His work has taken him to all the major recording studios, concert venues and opera houses in London.

Roddy Skeaping is a performer, instrumental teacher, composer and Nordoff-Robbins music therapist currently working with people with dementia.

Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.

Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk