Eric F. Clarke, FBA (University of Oxford)
„Entangled. Being-with-music“

From music and empathy, to the togetherness and 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 indicated by the extensive 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. But within what kind of conceptual framework might we understand these various manifestations of the connectedness of musicking? How might the intensely solitary form of connection that headphone listening in a darkened room represents be reconciled with the manifestly socially connected musicking of festivals, clubs, orchestras, choirs and bands? And is solitary listening really solitary? 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. Entanglement seems to be 'in the air' at the moment - from quantum physics and biology to aesthetics - and there are undoubtedly some pitfalls to avoid in distinguishing between more technical and more metaphorical uses of the term. But with that risk in mind I join the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the musician Björk, and the biologist Merlin Sheldrake in considering what entanglement might afford conceptually, and what might be learned from fungi.

Eric Clarke went to the University of Sussex to read for a degree in neurobiology and graduated with a degree in music. After an MA in music, he was awarded a PhD in psychology from the University of Exeter, and became lecturer in music at City University in London in 1981. He was appointed as James Rossiter Hoyle Professor of Music at Sheffield in 1993, and took up the post of Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford in October 2007. Professor Clarke is an Associate Editor of the journals Music Perception and Musicae Scientiae, is on the editorial boards of Empirical Musicology Review, Radical Musicology, and Per Musi; and is a consulting editor for Psychology of Music. He was an Associate Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council´s Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) from 2004-2007, and of the AHRC Phase II Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP, 2009-2014)), was elected to membership of the Academia Europaea in 2009, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2010.