Magnified Vision, Mediated Listening and the ‘Point of Audition’ of Early Romanticism

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEIRDRE LOUGHRIDGE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Spatial Position ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Senses

ABSTRACTEmploying the term ‘point of audition’ to describe the spatial position musical works imply for their listeners, this article examines the use of technologies for extending the senses to define new points of audition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Popular literature on natural philosophy promoted magnifying instruments as windows onto distant or hidden realms and as tools for acquiring knowledge. On the operatic stage and in writers' metaphorical musings, kindred sensory extensions were imagined for hearing. These contexts connected (magic) mirrors and magnifying instruments to their musical analogues: muted tone and keyboard fantasizing. The development of these associations in opera and literature made it possible for instrumental music to position listeners as eavesdroppers upon unknown realms. Such a point of audition is shown to be implied by the Adagio un poco mosso of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. By examining material practices and discourses surrounding sensory extension, this article demonstrates the relevance of technologically mediated observation to musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, and its contribution to the otherworldly orientation characteristic of romantic listening.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Quest for Natural Species

1996 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-553
Author(s):  
Alexandre Métraux
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) was a prolific writer, a multifaceted naturalist, and a zoologist by second profession. Throughout his adult life he lived up to his passion of politely contributing to the advancement of natural philosophy by publishing more than 30,000 pages, probably too much for even the most scrupulous (and persevering) historians of science who seek to reconstruct his theories and to shed some light on the role he played in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century biology.

Haydn, Hoffmann, and the opera of instruments

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 325-346
Author(s):  
Emily Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Musical Works

In 1809, E. T. A. Hoffmann declared that the symphony, in the hands of Haydn and Mozart, had become the “opera of instruments.” This view of symphony, which was echoed by other writers of the period, reflected how composers engaged with instruments through orchestration. This essay explores the use of instrumental sonority in the slow movements of Haydn’s later symphonies, in particular looking at the ways in which Haydn’s approach to the orchestra helped cultivate the notion that symphonies unfolded as dramas. This conception of the orchestra and of orchestration informed the language of musical criticism of the early nineteenth century: Hoffmann’s discussions of musical works frequently take the form of operatic plot summaries, in which individual instruments act as characters. The persistence of operatic metaphors suggests that, instead of thinking of this period as the “rise of instrumental music,” it is more accurate to understand it as the rise of the orchestra.

The Operatic Voice of Leoni the Jew: Between the Synagogue and the Theater in Late Georgian Britain

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-321
Author(s):  
Uri Erman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Anti Jewish

AbstractMichael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish operaThe Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni's intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant––a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.

P. P. Ershov’s “Russian Song”: On the History of Musical Interpretations

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Наталья Юрьевна Зарубина
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
History Of

Статья посвящена истории музыкальных произведений, написанных на слова стихотворений П. П. Ершова. Автор рассматривает поэтическое наследие поэта в широком контексте музыкальной культуры первой половины XIX в. Акцентируется во- прос о роли и месте в ней жанра русской песни. Предметом специального изучения стали песенные варианты стихотворения «Русская песня» («Уж не цвесть цветку в пустыне»). Особое внимание уделено сопоставительному музыковедческому анализу двух интерпретаций рассматриваемого произведения, первое из которых принадлежат перу тобольского любителя К. Широкова, а второе - столичного композитора А. А. Вилламова. The article is devoted to the history of musical works written to P. P. Yershov’s poems. The author considers the poet’s poetic heritage in the broad context of the musical culture of the first half of the nineteenth century. She focuses on the role and place of the Russian song genre within it. The object of special attention is song versions of the poem “Russian Song” (“A Flower Won’t Bloom in the Desert”) and considers two musicological interpretations of the work; the first belongs to the pen of Tobolsk amateur K. Shirokov, and the second to the composer A. A. Villanov.

Touching Blind Bodies: A Critical Inquiry into Pedagogical and Cultural Constructions of Visual Disability in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Tilley ◽  
Jan Eric Olsén
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Blind People ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Visual Disability ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Educational Challenges ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.

Suffering in Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Relationship

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).

The Politics of Chiefs and Commoners before the 1830s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raevin Jimenez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
State Level ◽  
Temporal Context ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
African History ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Level Analysis

The field of pre-1830 South African history has been subject to periodic interrogations into conventional narratives, sources, and methods. The so-called mfecane debates of the 1980s and 1990s marked a radical departure from characterizations of warfare in the interior, generally regarded in earlier decades as stemming solely or mostly from the Zulu king Shaka. Efforts to reframe violence led to more thorough considerations of political elites and statecraft from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century but also contributed to new approaches to ethnicity, dependency, and to some extent gender. A new wave of historiographical critique in the 2010s shows the work of revision to be ongoing. The article considers the debates around the wars of the late precolonial period, including unresolved strands of inquiry, and argues for a move away from state-level analysis toward social histories of women and non-elites. Though it focuses on the 1760s through the 1830s, the article also presents examples highlighting the importance of recovering deeper temporal context for the South African interior.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

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