Timbre eternal

In this talk, I first reflect on the “timbral litany” in today’s scholarship: timbre has no standardized language; it lacks a systematic theory; timbre is defined negatively, and so forth. In particular, I focus on the tension between the many claims of timbre’s central important to musical experience, on the one hand, with the reality that we often, on the other hand, talk over and past timbre, abstracting music from timbre’s specificities.