Goethe Annual Lecture 2022
Matthew Herbert: Hearing Beyond
We are delighted to have musician Matthew Herbert as one of this year’s speakers of our Goethe Annual Lecture series at the Goethe-Institut London. Through a series of extraordinary sound recordings, Matthew Herbert will push us to hear further than we might have thought possible and tell us how systemic listening can lead to meaningful action.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by artist and academic Dr Ella Finer.
As part of the Goethe-Institut London's 60th anniversary celebrations, we are inviting you to three Goethe Annual Lectures this year featuring author Mithu Sanyal, academic Mercedes Bunz and musician Matthew Herbert.
For the last 140 years or so, audio recording has allowed us to re-hear ourselves. We have subsequently talked and sung a lot into microphones and pressed the results onto wax cylinders, vinyl discs, tapes and hard drives. On Spotify alone, there are 65,000 songs uploaded every day. But beyond music and the human voice, there is a profound new terrain emerging in audio that has the potential to unlock new ways of understanding. We can hear disease growing and waves emerging from black holes. We have recordings of 23,000 people singing a single note and 20,000 dogs barking.
At the same time as the capacity to record, store and manipulate sound has evolved, we have also brought to life a near-perfect economic system for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. From subsidising fossil fuels, to prioritising harmful foods, to distorting information for profit, to proactively stimulating over-consumption – it is consciously designed to maximise short term rewards over long term sustainability. This system has at its core a fundamental requirement for related injustice: exploited workers, an exploited environment and a commitment to the patriarchal and white supremacist historical structures and narrative justifications that keep it running smoothly.
What if we could apply the new reach of sound recordings in order to be able to hear how the workings and consequences of this system might sound? And once heard, can we go even further than our microphones can - what Anne Balsamo calls ‘listening with technology’ - to listen to the previously impossible? Can we hear all the water pumps on farms in Iowa, or all the supermarket tills in Rio? Once we have heard such noises, it can become harder to defend the status quo as healthy or harmonious.
Through a series of extraordinary sound recordings, Dr. Matthew Herbert will push us to hear further than we might have thought possible, and finally ask us: “How can systemic listening lead to meaningful action?”
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Register for the livestream
On 15 November we are showing the documentary A Symphony Noise, which gives an insight into Matthew Herbert’s thinking and working process. Find more information here.
Past speakers of our Goethe Annual Lecture include Dan Hicks (2021), Sharon Dodua Otoo (2020), John Kampfner (2019), Brendan Simms (2018), Anne McElvoy (2017), Neil MacGregor (2016), Christopher Clark (2014), David Chipperfield (2012), Norman Rosenthal (2010), Tacita Dean (2006), Peter Jonas (2005), Ian Kershaw (2003), Richard Wentworth (2002) and AS Byatt (2001).
Here you can find videos of previous lectures.
Learn more about our 60th anniversary on our website.
Details
Goethe-Institut London
50 Princes Gate
Exhibition Road
SW7 2PH London
Price: Free (incl. post-lecture reception), Online-Livestream: Free
The lecture will take place at the Goethe-Institut London as well as being streamed live online. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and, for those attending in person, a reception in the Goethe-Institut Library.