Arvin Sedaghatkish's Lecture Series: “A Micro-Essay on Improving Our Music Criticism”

The interdisciplinary conversation series titled “Miz” was held through the efforts of the Sedanet cultural institute. Miz is an opportunity we have created to transform monologue into dialogue. At Miz, we sometimes discuss a previously published lecture, speech, or writing, in order to open a path to the absent layers and, consequently, a broader understanding of each text, and to give voice to some of its unspoken aspects. And sometimes we simply provide an occasion for dialogue with a thinker. In the first conversation series, Arvin Sedaghatkish was the guest of Shiva Beyranvand, the program’s host. This series, based on a text by Arvin Sedaghatkish titled “A Micro-Essay on Improving Our Music Criticism” (published in issues 69 and 70 of Mahoor Quarterly), was held as a dialogue-oriented lecture series over eight two-hour sessions (two hours each week). The aforementioned essay is briefly founded upon an important question, namely: what paths lie ahead for improving our music criticism? Answering this seemingly simple question requires a careful examination of the contemporary state of music criticism, as well as an understanding of some of the knots and difficulties facing current music criticism in Iran. For this reason, the author has addressed this subject in his treatise and put forward suggestions, some of which have been realized in the very five-year period since the treatise’s publication, while others still await realization. The flow of the text carries the reader along into an analytical world of the existing situation and ultimately sketches an outline of the yet-to-arrive land of a kind of music criticism that has been called “better.” In the present conversation series, the guest and host, focusing on the main points of the text and its arguments, strive firstly to present one of the possible ways of engaging with the essay to the audience, secondly to smooth over the potential difficulties of encountering such a text through its exposition and interpretation, and thirdly, in the process of elaboration, to address points that are either mentioned only in passing in the essay itself or not discussed at all.

.

---

.

Session One

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Aparat

.

Session Two

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Aparat

.

Session Three (The Notion of Indigenous Criticism)

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Aparat

.

Session Four (The Ethics of Criticism)

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Aparat

.

Session Five (The Requisite Self-Awarenesses of Criticism)

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Aparat

.

Session Six (The Pillars of Criticism)

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Aparat

.

Session Seven (Aesthetics / The Pillars of Criticism)

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Aparat

.

Eighth and Final Session (Summary and Q&A)

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Aparat

.

---

.