The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Musical Understanding ◽  
Substantive Importance

This Handbook provides a forum for consolidated interdisciplinary discussion on intellectual culture in the “long” nineteenth century highlights and focuses its innovative methodological potential for the areas of musicology, literary and historical studies. In particular, the collection challenges the work-centred focus of Western music history by treating writings about music as cultural artefacts of substantive importance—rather than mere supplements to musical understanding—and will thereby historicize and problematize current conceptions of periodization and national narratives of music history.

scholarly journals Biography and Life-Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-102
Author(s):  
Christopher Wiley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
Music History ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This chapter outlines the proliferation of musical biography and life-writing in its multifarious forms across Europe in the long nineteenth century, and its role in establishing and perpetuating the canon, shaping the reception history of specific composers, constructing exemplary lives, providing firm foundations for the intellectual culture of the time, and maintaining a strong relationship to music history and criticism. Two case studies explore distinctive examples of “popular” manifestations of nineteenth-century music-biographical writing by influential authors to educate and entertain wide communities of autodidactic readers. This first concerns a two-volume compilation of anecdotes, surveyed for its reflection of Victorian values and musical preoccupations; the second, a collected biography whose close reading reveals much about the passive role into which women were repeatedly cast in contemporaneous life-writing on the Great Composers. A concluding section considers the extent of the impact and continued indebtedness of modern musical biography and musicology to the legacy of nineteenth-century intellectual developments.

Liszt at the Piano: The Impact of Iconography on mid-Nineteenth Century Musicology

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Suzanne Marie Francis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Maximum Benefit ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Impact

By the time of his death in 1827, the image of Beethoven as we recognise him today was firmly fixed in the minds of his contemporaries, and the career of Liszt was beginning to flower into that of the virtuosic performer he would be recognised as by the end of the 1830s. By analysing the seminal artwork Liszt at the Piano of 1840 by Josef Danhauser, we can see how a seemingly unremarkable head-and-shoulders bust of Beethoven in fact holds the key to unlocking the layers of commentary on both Liszt and Beethoven beneath the surface of the image. Taking the analysis by Alessandra Comini as a starting point, this paper will look deeper into the subtle connections discernible between the protagonists of the picture. These reveal how the collective identities of the artist and his painted assembly contribute directly to Beethoven’s already iconic status within music history around 1840 and reflect the reception of Liszt at this time. Set against the background of Romanticism predominant in the social and cultural contexts of the mid 1800s, it becomes apparent that it is no longer enough to look at a picture of a composer or performer in isolation to understand its impact on the construction of an overall identity. Each image must be viewed in relation to those that preceded and came after it to gain the maximum benefit from what it can tell us.

Being Modern: Living in Flats in Interwar Brisbane

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Helen Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western World ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Second World

In the period between the First and Second World Wars, Brisbane — in common with most of the ‘Western’ world — embraced a self-conscious modernity: the by-product of nineteenth century industrialisation, imperialism, liberalism and emergent consumerism. Reflected in material and intellectual culture from high art to daily lifestyle, and from the home to the workplace, modernity became the catch-cry and call-sign of the interwar years.

scholarly journals Revising the musical equal temperament

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haye Hinrichsen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Frequency Ratio ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Equal Temperament ◽  
Frequency Ratios ◽  
High Degree

Western music is predominantly based on the equal temperament with a constant semitone frequency ratio of 21/12. Although this temperament has been in use since the nineteenth century and in spite of its high degree of symmetry, various musicians have repeatedly expressed their discomfort with the harmonicity of certain intervals. Recently it was suggested that this problem can be overcome by introducing a modified temperament with a constant but slightly increased frequency ratio. In this paper we confirm this conjecture quantitatively. Using entropy as a measure for harmonicity, we show numerically that the harmonic optimum is in fact obtained for frequency ratios slightly larger than 21/12. This suggests that the equal temperament should be replaced by a harmonized stretched temperament as a new standard.

scholarly journals Iphigénie à Paris: Positioning Gluck Historically in Early Twentieth-Century France

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
William Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Unusual Event ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Vincent D'indy

In December 1907, Gluck's opera Iphigénie en Aulide was produced in Paris at the Opéra-Comique, the last of his major operas to be revived in France. The ensuing critical reception pitted Vincent d'Indy, who harshly criticized the production, against its director, Albert Carré; d'Indy further responded by conducting the overture to Iphigénie only a few weeks later as a musical corrective to the performance at the Opéra-Comique. This unusual event highlights the historiographie problem Gluck presented to early twentieth-century critics in France: did his music look backwards to the tragédies lyriques of Lully and Rameau, or did it prefigure the Wagnerian music-dramas of the nineteenth century? The 1907 Opéra-Comique production of Iphigénie and its aftermath encapsulate the struggle to incorporate Gluck into newly developing and often competing narratives of music history.

scholarly journals Beyond the Mainstream

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kraus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Amazon Region ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Cultural Dissemination

Analyzing the work of Max Schmidt (1874-1950), especially his 1917 book Die Aruaken. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Kulturverbreitung [The Arawak: A Contribution to the Problem of Cultural Dissemination], this article deals with methodological and theoretical trends among German ethnologists carrying out expeditions in the Amazon region at the turn of the nineteenth century. The approaches outlined are placed in the context of the institutionalisation of ethnology as a separate academic discipline in Germany. The focus is on the development of modern fieldwork methods; the critique of diffusionism by Schmidt and other South America researchers; and the specific approaches of Max Schmidt who, in spite of the contemporary emphasis on "material" and "intellectual" culture, also considered sociological issues in his analysis.

On the Foundations of Dahlhaus’s Foundations

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-229
Author(s):  
Tobias Robert Klein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Music History ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Structural History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

In the foreword to his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (1977), translated into English as Foundations of Music History (1983), Carl Dahlhaus names three reasons for writing the book: the lack of theoretical reflection in his own field; the problem of mediation between methodological maxims and their political implications; and the difficulties he encountered while preparing his history of nineteenth-century music. Each of the three reasons can now be understood more precisely and historically contextualized in light of recently uncovered letters and notes. Dahlhaus’s methodological critiques of political music as conceptually distinct from aesthetically autonomous works—contrary to a popular claim by Anne Shreffler (2003)—were directed mainly at the “Western left.” Moreover, in the 1980s this controversy became intertwined with historiographical questions regarding the concept of “event” that was reinforced in publications by the “Gruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik.” A postscript discusses the English translation of the book and the concept of “structural history” in late Dahlhaus.

Coleridge and Language Theory

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
James C. McKusick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Language Theory ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Origin Of Language

This article examines the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in relation to language theory. It argues that Coleridge's speculation on linguistic universals anticipates Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar. The article suggests that Coleridge's engagement with language theory was vitally important to the intellectual culture of its own time, and that it remains a seminal instance of nineteenth-century speculation on the nature and origin of language.

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