We are sorry to hear that English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton recently died at the age of 75. Scruton was the penultimate speaker of our Lloyd and Constance Old lecture series, for which he gave a talk called “Walking Among Noise,” with a response from Greil Marcus. His talk extended from his 1997 book The Aesthetics of Music, in which he explored the spatial perception of musical tones. As The Guardian writes in their obituary, “‘If someone said that, for him, there is no up and down in music, no movement, no soaring, rising, falling, no running or walking from place to place’, would we count what he is hearing as music?”

For a full look at  Scruton’s many accomplishments and controversies, please read the full obituary. If you’d like to hear the talk he gave at the Graduate Center (which yielded a lively audience discussion), you can watch the full video online.