Kane, Brian

Brian Kane, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Music

BA Philosophy (UC Berkeley 1996); MA Music (UC Berkeley 2002); Ph.D. Music (UC Berkeley 2006).

Brian Kane is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University. His compositional and theoretical interests are interdisciplinary in nature, centered upon issues of sound and signification, philosophical approaches to listening, and the tradition of skepticism. His dissertation investigated problems of intentionality and materiality in the aesthetics/composition of New Music, bringing together close readings of Pierre Schaeffer, Roger Scruton, Stanley Cavell and Ludwig Wittgenstein with analyses of Gérard Grisey, Steve Reich, Morton Feldman and Elliott Carter. Currently, he is early stages of a book-length project, on the acousmatic reduction and conceptualizations of listening.

As a composer, he has written solo pieces, chamber music, orchestral works, electro-acoustic compositions and sound installations, in addition to appearing on a number of recordings as a jazz guitarist and arranger.

Kane was a Townsend Center for the Humanities Fellow at UC Berkeley in 2005. He was twice awarded the Nicola De Lorenzo Prize in Music Composition, for Three Sonnets of George Santayana (2001) and Clarinet Quintet (2003). For more visit his website.

Selected Publications:

• "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, sound objects and the phenomenological reduction", Organised Sound, Volume 12, Number 1, April 2007, pp. 15-24
• "The Music of Skepticism: Intentionality, Materiality, Forms of Life", Dissertation, UC Berkeley (Fall 2006)
• "The Elusive Elementary Atom of Music", Qui Parle, Volume 14, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2004, pp. 117-143.
• "The Cost of Affordance: A Review of Tia DeNora's After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology," In Qui Parle 15:1 (Fall/Winter 2004)

Selected Compositions:

• another cascando (...face in the mud...that's what counts...), for piano and electronics (2007)
• Anaphora, for string orchestra, harp, and piano (2005-6)
• neither superidealized guidance nor caprice, for five players with live electronics (2005)
• Figura, for piano (2004)
• Measure Is the Heaven of Desire, for solo violin (2002-3)
• Melodrama, nach Beethoven, for electronic medium (2003)

Undergraduate Courses Taught: C1123: Music Humanities