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.

Critical Networks

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Paul Watt ◽  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Institutional Culture ◽  
Music History ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
International Networks ◽  
Relational Structures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This article examines the idea of ‘Critical Networks’ as a way of studying the relational structures that shaped music criticism in the long nineteenth century. We argue that the personal, institutional and international networks that supported the dissemination of critical ideas about music are worthy of study in themselves, as they can yield insights beyond prevailing methodologies that centre on individual cases.Focusing on the institutional culture of music criticism means looking beyond the work of individual critics and the content or influence of their views, towards the structures that determined the authoritativeness of those views and the impact of these structures in shaping the operation of critical discourse on music at the time. Examining these networks and how they operated around particular periodicals, tracing transnational exchanges of both ideas and critics, and uncovering the various ideological alliances that were forged or contested within critical networks, can not only provide a thicker context for our understanding of historical ideas about music, but it can also challenge current views about the history of our discipline and the kinds of structures that condition our own ideas about music and music history.

New Insights into Papyrus Millingen and the Reception History of The Teaching of Amenemhat

2021 ◽  
pp. 030751332110506
Author(s):  
Margaret Geoga
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Eighteenth Dynasty ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This article examines Papyrus Millingen, an important but now-lost manuscript of The Teaching of Amenemhat. The papyrus survives today in a nineteenth century facsimile, which was last published in black and white photographs in 1963. This article presents new color photographs of the facsimile, along with hieroglyphic transcription and philological commentary, which discusses not only the text but also what the facsimile’s paratextual features suggest about the ancient and modern copying processes. P. Millingen’s version of Amenemhat is contextualized within the full corpus of surviving copies of the poem. The article proposes several possible social contexts for the manuscript’s production and usage and considers the impact of those contexts, along with broader cultural trends of the Eighteenth Dynasty, on the papyrus owner’s reception of Amenemhat.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

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.

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.

Unveiling Modernity: Verdi’s America and the Unification of Italy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Körner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
New World ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
American Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Un Ballo In Maschera

This chapter examines the creation of Giuseppe Verdi's American opera Un ballo in maschera, first performed around the time of Italy's Second War of Independence, in 1859. Un ballo in maschera was the first modern Italian opera set across the Atlantic. The history of its creation and the subsequent debate around it serves as a classic example of the cultural imagination surrounding life in the New World as well as the wider social impact of political ideas in nineteenth-century Italy. The chapter first considers Un ballo's close connection to the Unification of Italy before offering a reading of the opera. It also explores how Verdi depicted America in his opera and how his depiction relates to Italian debates about America at the time. Finally, it assesses the impact of censorship on the plot of Un ballo.

The Politics of Intimate Care

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nurse Training ◽  
Army Nurse Corps ◽  
Military Nursing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter traces the early evolution of nursing from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on how nursing care became both gendered and racialized in civilian society. Focusing on the history of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), it explores the relationship between the military and civilian populace to illuminate trends in nursing practices, debates about work, and concerns about war taking place in the larger civil society. It also examines how war and military nursing needs shaped the evolution of the modern nursing profession and how nursing became embroiled in the politics of intimate care, along with the implications for gender roles and race relations that permeated social relationships and interactions in civilian society. The chapter points to the Civil War as the transformative moment in the history of nursing in the United States, moving nursing from an unpaid obligation to a paid occupation. Finally, it discusses the impact of the introduction of formal nurse training during the last quarter of the nineteenth century on African American nurses.

Dugald Stewart on intellectual character

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER TANNOCH-BLAND
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Character ◽  
History Of

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) lectured in astronomy and political economy, held the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University from 1775 to 1785, then the chair of moral philosophy from 1785 to 1810, and wrote extensively on metaphysics, political economy, ethics, philology, aesthetics, psychology and the history of philosophy and the experimental sciences. He is commonly regarded as the last voice of the Scottish Enlightenment, the articulate disciple of Thomas Reid, father of Scottish common sense philosophy. Recently some historians have begun to rediscover elements of the contribution Stewart made to early nineteenth-century British intellectual culture, and his Collected Works have been republished with a new introduction by Knud Haakonssen.

The Illyrian Provinces: A Step Towards Yugoslavism

1974 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-125
Author(s):  
Susana S. Macesich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Administrative Unit ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe history of the Illyrian Provinces belongs not only to the history of the Napoleonic Era in Europe, but also to that of the development of Yugoslav history in the early part of the nineteenth century. The Provinces can be studied from several aspects: political, social, economic and cultural. This paper will emphasize only one of the offered aspects-namely the impact of the Illyrian Provinces on the concept of Yugoslavism. Three features are of singular importance: first, the effects of the ideas of the French Revolution on the Yugoslavs (development of modern nationalism, use of the vernacular, secularism, abolition of feudalism); second, the effects of the political unification of Dalmatia, Slovenia and part of Croatia under French rule, which brought Croats, Slovenes and Serbs under one political and administrative unit; third, the correlation between French rule in the Western Balkans with the national-revolutionary movements of that period, such as the Serbian uprising of 1804 and its effect upon other Yugoslavs.1

Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic

PMLA ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 114 (5) ◽  
pp. 1043-1054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gamer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Charles Robert Maturin ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Matthew Lewis ◽  
Charlotte Dacre ◽  
History Of

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

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