Freud, Adler, and the Second Viennese School:

Correlations and Collisions between Psychoanalysis and Music in Early 20th Century Vienna

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Donnerstag, 31.5.2012, 20 Uhr

Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, 1090 Wien

Eintritt frei, Anmeldung erbeten: office@freud-museum.at

Einleitung: Dr. Christian Meyer, Direktor Arnold Schönberg Center

Abstract

This lecture offers a re-consideration of the intersection of modern music and psychoanalysis in Vienna in the early decades of the 20th century.  While Sigmund Freud and the composer Arnold Schoenberg are often linked as epochal figures who profoundly shaped fin de siècle Vienna’s cultural and intellectual history, the actual connections between them—both manifest and latent—are seldom critically addressed.  Moreover, it is rarely noted that Alban Berg and Anton Webern—pupils of Schoenberg and influential modern composers in their own right—had direct and sustained contact, both personal and professional, with Freud and Alfred Adler before and after the First World War.  This was a period in which Vienna’s musical culture underwent a revolutionary transformation; in this lecture, it is argued that, in order to better understand this transformation, the hitherto aloof histories of modern music and psychoanalysis in early 20^th century Vienna are in fact complimentary, with correlations that warrant closer examination.  

Biography

Dr. Alexander Carpenter is an associate professor of music at the University of Alberta, Augustana campus. A musicologist and music critic, his research interests include the music of Arnold Schoenberg, music and psychoanalysis, music and film, and popular music.  Dr. Carpenter’s research has been published in a number of scholarly journals, including Musical Quarterly, Studia Musicologica, Psychoanalysis and History, Popular Music and Society, Notes, and Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music.  He has been interviewed several times on Canada’s national radio service, the CBC, and on National Public Radio in the United States, on topics ranging from classical music to popular music and popular culture. 

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