Shira Miron is a Ph.D candidate at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation, titled “Composition and Community: The Extra-Musical Imagination of Polyphony 1800/1900/1950,” follows the modern reconsideration of the old musical compositional technique of polyphony as a new aesthetic problem and potential beyond the musical context. Focusing on three historical conjunctures from the middle 18^th century to the second half of the 20^th century, the dissertation argues that the increasingly explicit debate on polyphony in and beyond the musical arena carried significant implications for the understanding of form and structure, communication, and society. Across this long durée, the project observes a reversal in the relationship between what it distills as “composition” and “community” through the lens of polyphony as an idea and technique. Among the authors and music theorists the dissertation brings into a new conversation are Baumgarten, Koch, Diderot, Rousseau, Simmel, Weber, Schonberg, Adorno, Broch, Boulez and Bachmann.

First fruits of this project were published in the Wiener Digitale Revue. Further publications appeared and are forthcoming in the Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies, Kleist-Jahrbuch and New German Critique.

Before joining the doctoral program at Yale, Shira Miron completed B.Mus and M.Mus degrees in piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and studied German literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Freie Universität Berlin, where she held several research fellowships.

During her fellowship at Schloss Wiepersdorf Shira Miron plans to develop a crucial link for her broader dissertation project through a focus on the Romantic Kunstlehre. Tracing the theoretical function ascribed to multi-vocal music in different treatises on art and aesthetics in German Romanticism, she will explore the ways in which polyphony might have been perceived as the “real” instantiation of the “ideal” and vice versa in the philosophy of subject, object, and intersubjectivity.