Ruth HaCohen
Compassion from a Musical Point of Hearing
The paper discusses stylistic strategies of music (especially in the west) that have been used for evoking sympathetic or alienating environments responsive to different political and cultural agendas. Among these strategies are those related to harmoniousness, emotionalism, and exoticism. A special emphasis is given to music’s “nomadic” nature and its potential to open new modes of “feeling with” (Mitgefühl), overcoming barriers of otherness.
Ruth HaCohen is a Senior Lecturer of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She studied at the Hebrew University Musicology and Jewish Thought and earned her doctorate in 1992. She received the Bernhard Bloomfield Award for her dissertation. Since 1992 she has been a lecturer at the Hebrew University. From 1992 until 1994, she was a member of the Board of the Israeli Musicological Society, and in 1996/97 she was a Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College in Oxford. Between 2001-2004 she was the chairperson of the Department of Musicology at the Hebrew University. She is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Since 2001 she is co-chairperson of Ha’Atelier Collegium in Berlin.
Selected Publications: Tuning the Mind: Connecting Aesthetic Theory to Cognitive Science, New Brunswick (NJ) 2003 (with Ruth Katz); The Arts in Mind: Pioneering Texts of a Coterie of British Men of Letters, New Brunswick (NJ) 2003 (with Ruth Katz); “The Music of Sympathy in the Arts of the Baroque: Or the Use of Difference to Overcome Indifference”, Poetics Today 22:3, Fall 2001: 607-650.