It is with pleasure that I report on the recent conference of the RMA’s Music and Philosophy Study Group, convened on 9^th and 10^th July 2026. This tenth instalment of the MPSG’s biennial series of summer conferences occasioned a first outing beyond King’s College London, beyond even the United Kingdom, to Dublin City University.

I begin by making the customary apology that I was unable to attend all sessions, lacking, as I do, the talent for ubiquity displayed by Gianni Infantino at this summer’s FIFA World Cup. I focus, therefore, on the keynote presentations, which all delegates attended. I will say, though, that the very fact that four parallel sessions were filled throughout the conference speaks to the large volume of high-quality scholarship at the intersection of music studies and philosophy at the present moment. Furthermore, the broad range of subject matters, philosophical perspectives, historical periods, and geographical regions under examination indicates the good health of this sub-discipline of music studies.

In the first keynote, Nicole Grimes (Trinity College Dublin) challenged the long-standing assumption that music by nineteenth-century women composers is not ‘philosophically formative’. Drawing on Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Grimes questioned the German concept of Bildung, which has been used to underwrite claims for philosophical music, and its exclusive application to works by male composers. Through an alternative historiography, supported by detailed musical analysis, Grimes argued that a fully-fledged philosophical impulse is evident at the level of musical form in nineteenth-century works by women composers. Her case studies were Hélène de Montgeroult’s arrangements of and elaborations on Viotti’s violin concertos, and Emilie Mayer’s Third Symphony.

In the second keynote, Simone Mahrenholz (University of Manitoba) addressed the construction of musical ‘profundity’ in absolute music. She took as her starting point Peter Kivy’s trilemma: 1) absolute music can be profound; 2) profundity requires aboutness; 3) absolute music lacks aboutness. Mahrenholz approached the problem through the physical properties of sound as waveform, arguing that in certain circumstances musical sound can be psycho-acoustically affective and, thus, profound. Her examples were for the most part experiences of very low sounds at the edge of human hearing, such as the lowest registers of a cathedral organ, where pitch begins to dissolve into rhythm and the listener becomes aware of the periodicity and harmonic partials of which a tone is made. She then related these ideas to philosophical primary sources in Schopenhauer, among others. It seemed to me, however, that if profundity lies in the physical constitution of sound, then all music is profound, which makes ‘profound’, thus defined, an empty signifier when applied to music.

In the final keynote, Salomé Voegelin (University of the Arts London) made a provocative case for the possibility of anti-fascist music, in a presentation that had many of the characteristics of live theatre. Four texts were read at four stations around the room, punctuated by experimental recorder interludes played by Voegelin. She argued that expectations of virtuosity, of form and of metrical or harmonic systems are characteristic of authoritarian aesthetics, and that we must instead ‘play bad music together’ – with no recourse to history, quality, tuning, harmony, or melody – to create anti-fascist music. The music she advocated privileges the materiality of sound, a level at which no trace of hierarchy or authoritarian artifice would seem to remain. The political urgency of the presentation was unmistakable, yet the historical record complicates her argument somewhat. The pairing of a repudiation of history with an idealisation of raw sound has a well-known precedent in Italian Futurism. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909) called for the destruction of museums and libraries, and Luigi Russolo’s associated manifesto The Art of Noises (1913) championed noise over the conventions of tuned music. A decade after his manifesto, Marinetti co-authored the San Sepolcro Programme: the founding articles of Italian Fascism. No one would conclude from this that Voegelin’s preferred music is fascistic. But the same reasoning cannot show that virtuosic music is fascistic either: that an authoritarian aesthetic valued a quality does not make the quality authoritarian.

Taken together, the keynotes reflected the range of the Music and Philosophy Study Group’s concerns and prompted lively discussion. Thanks are due to the organising committee and to Dublin City University for hosting the MPSG’s first conference outside London so ably.

Mike Mitchell (Durham University)