Simon Clarke

Dr Simon Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Music and Deputy Head of Graduate School at the Royal Northern College of Music. Beginning with his 2010 article ‘Line and Colour: Instrumental (Ir-)Rationality in Adorno’s Musicology’, his focus has been the aesthetic foundations of traditional ontology, very much in the Derridean line, though this has more recently developed into a self-styled 3D philosophy (Deconstruction, Dialectics and Dialetheism). In this vein, ‘Debussy’s Speculative Idea: Orchestration and the Substance of Jeux‘, reading Debussy through Hegel’s Science of Logic, was published by the Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2018. More recently, both ‘Aporetology or Aporetography in Derrida and Badiou’ and (2020) and ‘Nothing Else Matters: Dialetheism and the Event of Sovereignty’ (2022) have appeared in the French journal MaLiCE.

Simon is currently writing a monograph with David Horne entitled Music in Contradiction – here, the idea is to interpret music in accordance primarily with Graham Priest’s Logic of Paradox (LP), along with the work of his fellow ‘paraconsistent frontierspeople’ Hegel, Heidegger, Adorno, Althusser, Derrida and Butler (update: a full draft is complete and under peer review with Routledge).

As a composer and guitarist Simon’s work centres on his chamber ensemble, Vulgar Display, the unusual conception behind which being an irreconcilable antagonism of extreme metal and the classical chamber tradition. He also specialises in orchestration, most notably the orchestral ‘completion’ of Ravel’s Miroirs (2003) and the remodelling of Ravel’s violin sonata as a violin concerto (2009).