Edgardo Salinas, PhD,
Columbia University, Department of Music
 

Edgardo Salinas received his PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University in 2010. A native of Argentina, he studied at the School of Music of Universidad Nacional de Rosario, where he got a "Licenciatura" in Piano Performance. He first came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship to complete master's degrees in Piano Performance and Music History at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. His research explores the intricate mediations always at work among musical practice, literary discourse, and philosophical critique in the context of the material conditions that shaped Western modernity. He has received awards from the Fulbright Program, LASPAU, the DAAD, the Whiting Foundation, and the ACLS.

His current book project traces socio-historical connections between the literary critique inaugurated by the Jena Romantics and the new paradigms for musical form and subjective experience that emerge through Beethoven's early piano sonatas around 1800. Dr. Salinas's book reappraises a key moment in the genealogy of modernist aesthetics insofar as it reframed compositional practices developed within the tradition of Western art music in the second half of the eighteenth century. In a paradoxical turn of events, the critique of Jena romanticism turned music into the supreme art form epitomizing the transcendental aspirations that remained unattainable to literary modernity. The discourse of the literary thus granted to the musical work an elusive epistemic status that Dr. Salinas identifies as "the materiality of the literary."

Courses Taught:
Masterpieces of Western Music (Core Curriculum course)
Music and the Critique of Modernity (Graduate Seminar)

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