2025 Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture: Music, Joy, and the Good Life

Save the date! The Jackman Humanities Institute invites you to the 2025 Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture "Music, Joy, and the Good Life" and reception on Monday, February 24, 2025, with Daniel KL Chua, Chair Professor of Music, University of Hong Kong.

Is music joy? From Confucius to Saint Augustine and Beethoven to the blues, Daniel KL Chua explores the ancient correlation between music and joy and asks whether its cosmic and theological dimensions can be retrofitted to the modern world as a way of life.

Daniel KL Chua earned his PhD in musicology from Cambridge University and is currently the Chair Professor of music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU, he was 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 a Visiting Senior Research fellow at Yale (2014-15), a Henry Fellow at Harvard (1992-3), and a Research Fellow at Cambridge (1993-7).  He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, a Fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He served as the President of the International Musicological Society 2017-2022. He was editor of Music & Letters, and is the founding editor of IMS Musicological Brainfood, and the founding co-editor of the California University Press series on global musicology.

He has written widely on music – from cosmological concepts in ancient Chinese music theory to NASA’s Golden Record on the Voyager mission – but is particularly known for his work on Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, philosophy, technology and theology. His is the author of five books: The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom, (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), and Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale, 2024). His articles include: ‘Rioting With Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring’ (2007), ‘Beethoven’s Other Humanism’ (2009), ‘Listening to the Self: The Shawshank Redemption and the Technology of Music’ (2011), and ‘Global Musicology: A Keynote Without A Key’ (2022). He is currently working on two projects: Rethinking Beethoven and the Enlightenment and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Beethoven's Late Quartets.

Seats are limited so register early!