1976 – 1978: Jazz Drums & Percussions at the European Jazz Academy, Darmstadt, Germany, director Lothar Scharf. Faculty included Emil Mangelsdorf (saxophone; together with his brother Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone) exerted similar influence on German/European jazz scene as Wynton and Branford Marsalis in the US), Jürgen Wuchner (bass), Lothar Scharf (drums), Peter Grieger (drums), et al. I was promoted to be assistant drum instructor and performed at the school’s famed TV production. As a musician, I played with a variety of successful local and nationally performing bands, including BlackMail, Head over Heels, and the Eddy Wright Quartet, Katzman-Kögler-Mikula. Nosie Katzman achieved international success in the 90s as composer with EuroBeat hits like “Mr. Vain” (Culture Beat; number 1 in several European pop charts) and “More and More” (Captain Hollywood Project). As instructor I taught a good number of drum students myself, similarly advancing my general musical education by attending the internationally recognized Darmstädter Tage für Neue Musik, an event which brings performers and theoreticians of music together and at which renowned philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Theodore W. Adorno presented keynotes.
1981 – 1991: I then advanced and deepened my musical and generally aesthetic studies (music being an essential part of the philosophy of art, which is part of the philosophy of culture and cultural studies.) throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies in philosophy. Coursework included a three semester course on Hegel’s philosophy of art (prominent in the philosophy of music), on the philosophy of Schopenhauer (a leading figure in the philosophy of music), as well as areas like the philosophy of language which serves as a major theoretical background for my philosophy of music research and teaching (‘music as language’ is one of the central tenets of the philosophy of music, both traditional (classical and 19th Century, as well as contemporary in Suzanne Langer and Peter Kivy, for instance). In addition, I began to develop during this year my distinctive approach to hermeneutics (the philosophical analysis and theory of interpretation) which I employ to make sense of the musical phenomenon in its diverse aesthetic and cultural expressions.
1991 – present: I developed a focus in both teaching and research in the areas of cultural aesthetics, including the philosophy of music. At the University of Illinois as well as the University of North Florida, I taught ‘Philosophy of Art’ as well as ‘Art, Society, and Politics’, in which the cultural reception, and critical appraisal, of art and music play a central role. My research focused on the cultural criticism of Th. W. Adorno vis-à-vis popular music, based on his conception of cognitive value and reflexive autonomy, and argues for a more culturally grounded, pluralistic version of cultural criticism and value, including certain forms of non-classical music. This work has received wide appraisal and culminated in several published and forthcoming essays (see research foci). It also led to my signature course, developed at the University of North Florida, in the ‘Philosophy of Music’ (taught face-to-face once and now online) which develops the classic aesthetic background (Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer), the 19th Century developments (Gurney and Hanslick), and the contemporary field of the philosophy of music, focusing on music as language, as expressing emotions, and as a contested cultural and social practice. The course is based, besides extensive listening examples (including classical music, non-Western music, ‘New classical music’ (Kagel, Cage, Stockhausen), diverse varieties of Jazz and popular music) and textual materials, on a set of audio lectures and 14 written up lectures that I plan to eventually turn into a book on the hermeneutics (the cultural interpretation of) music. The book will reconstruct the classical and contemporary approaches to music to reconstruct the possibility of a content- or meaning-based analysis of music. The discussion includes the analysis of problems in formalistic and structuralist accounts of music and develops a culturally situated phenomenology of music as experience, as a medium in which emotional, cultural, and social strata of experience are ‘entailed’ or ‘articulated.’ The work can be seen as a major application of my approach to critical hermeneutics (analyzing texts and symbolic expressions in their cultural contexts without reducing their truth value by including awareness of power factors) which I developed in my major works The Power of Dialogue, Empathy and Agency, and most recently Enigma Agency (see books).
