Bartlett Lecture: Daniel Chua, “Is Music Joy?”

Daniel Chua, a University of Hong Kong music scholar who studies the intersection between music, philosophy, and theology, will give Yale Divinity School’s annual Bartlett Lecture at 5:30 p.m. (EST) on Tuesday, November 10.
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To be broadcast on the Divinity School’s YouTube channel, Chua’s lecture is titled “Is Music Joy?”
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Chua notes that joy might seem an unlikely paradigm for music theory. Today, joy is not fundamental to music theory; if anything, much philosophical thought on music veers towards the tragic. Yet, he notes, joy was fundamental to music theories from different parts of the ancient world, and it might have informed early Christian thought on music. His lecture considers the relationship between music and joy, and in what sense a theology of joy might help recover joy as a music theoretical paradigm today.
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Dr. Daniel K.L. Chua is the Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts and Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in musicology from Cambridge University. Before joining Hong Kong University to head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow and the Director of Studies at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and, later, Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He was an ISM Fellow (2014-15), a Henry Fellow at Harvard (1992-93), and a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge (1993-97). He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, and a Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society. He is currently the President of the International Musicological Society (2017-2022).
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Chua has written widely on music, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, but is particularly known for his work on Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, philosophy, and theology. His publications include The Galitzin Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), and Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017).