Name: Experimental Music and Japanese Philosophies: The Aesthetics of Silence and Nature
Start: 2025-10-06T13:15:00+01:00
End: 2025-10-06T15:30:00+01:00
Location: G.06, 50 George Square

Experimental Music and Japanese Philosophies: The Aesthetics of Silence and Nature

Edinburgh World Philosophies Lecture Series is back!
Mon 6th Oct 13:15pm - 15:30pm in G.06, 50 George Square.
Daryl Jamieson (Ritsumeikan University) will talk will introduce some of the main themes and ideas in his forthcoming book (to be published in 2026). The book’s key question is, why (other than escapism) would anyone devote their time to experimental, obscure art music or sound art amidst a society which seems to be collapsing under its economic, political, and especially environmental contradictions. The answer he will explore (he won’t claim it is the only answer) involves a recovery of aesthetic and philosophical ideas from the non-Western world (i.e., Japan) from a period prior to Westernisation (i.e., the introduction of Modernity and capitalism in the 19th century), and applying them to music-making and -listening practices today.
He will introduce the aesthetics of poetry and nō in relation to Buddhist and other philosophies prevalent in mediaeval Japan. It will use these pre-Modern ideas from Japanese art and philosophy to reinterpret the meaning and purpose of listening to, composing, and performing experimental music amidst the present-day polycrisis. In particular, we will focus on nō theorist Konparu Zenchiku’s artistic, intellectual, and spiritual milieu, and provide examples of experimental music from Japan and elsewhere that afford being productively read through these lenses.
The talk will conclude with an overview of the Japanese mediaeval aesthetics of ‘nature’, and the soteriology of listening to and dialoguing with nonhuman voices, and how the common experimental music practice of soundwalking can which bring non-intentional and non-human sounds into the realm of what we might call ‘music’. Collectively, these ideas constitute my answer to the key question of why making experimental music and, especially, cultivating a practice of experimental listening is meaningful and ethical in our present era.
Further information
The purpose of this lecture series is to support scholars in the field of non-western philosophies, to create an environment in which world philosophies specialists can foster their joint research projects, and to transmit the research output of University of Edinburgh scholars worldwide. We believe that this lecture series will also contribute to the process of decolonising the philosophy program at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.