Forms of Time in Nineteenth-Century Music: Geology, the Railway, and the Novel

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-56
Author(s):  
Lawrence Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Temporal Complexity ◽  
Long Span ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Measured Time ◽  
Instrumental Works ◽  
The One

European art music in the nineteenth century was characterized by both an expansion and a contraction of the timescale typical of earlier periods. On the one hand there was an outpouring of miniatures, primarily for piano; on the other there was a proliferation of instrumental works, especially symphonies, lasting anywhere from 40 minutes to over an hour. Although it is possible to refer these changes to developments in compositional technique, their wider significance derives from the era’s production of several new and epoch-making forms of time––that is, of ways to conceive, order, and experience time. Time literally changed during the nineteenth century, and music changed along with it. The long span of geological ‘deep time’, the compressed and precisely measured time of railway travel, and the temporal complexity of the multiply plotted novel all have musical parallels. Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor Op. 120 (1841), César Franck’s Symphony in D minor (1888), and Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude No. 18 in F minor Op. 28 (1835–9) provide pertinent examples.

scholarly journals Chaikovsky and the Economics of Art Music in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-227
Author(s):  
Philip Ross Bullock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art World ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Musical Institutions ◽  
The One ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
The Relationship

As Russia’s first professional, conservatory-trained composer, Petr Il'ich Chaikovsky operated in the rapidly evolving social and economic context of post-emancipation Russia, identifying ways to interact with Russia’s musical institutions—its opera houses and theaters, its concert organizations and publishers—to fashion a career that was as successful financially as it was critically. Yet the myth of Chaikovsky’s financial incompetence persists, and the image, whether popular or scholarly, is still one of Chaikovsky as a spendthrift, unable to manage his income or regulate his outgoings. This article challenges such views by drawing on the recently published complete correspondence between Chaikovsky and his publisher, Petr Iurgenson, as well as on financial records preserved in the composer’s archives. In particular, this article analyzes the relationship among Chaikovsky, Iurgenson, and the operation of Russia’s musical “marketplace” at the level of genre, examining the interaction between financial considerations on the one hand and Chaikovsky’s decision to work in particular musical forms on the other. By examining the connections among Russia’s nascent musical institutions, Chaikovsky’s particular collaboration with his publisher, and the relative status of different musical genres, it becomes possible to establish the nature of Russia’s musical “art world” in the second half of the nineteenth century. In proposing a more nuanced and systematic account of Chaikovsky’s economic agency than has been attempted previously, this article thus contributes to a growing body of work on the institutional structures that shaped the Russian arts in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals “A Living, Fleshy Bond”: The Electric Telegraph, Musical Thought, and Embodiment

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-166
Author(s):  
Inge van Rij
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
The Body ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

The development and rapid spread of the electric telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century were profoundly entangled with music in ways that are seldom if ever acknowledged. Particular emphasis is often placed on sound recording as enacting what Attali describes as “the moment when everything suddenly changed.” In fact, the telegraph anticipated several key premises of recording by decades. Its language is heard, on the one hand, in the direct imitation of Strauss Jr.'s Telegraphische Depeschen, and on the other, in François Sudre's development of a “universal musical language” to communicate across distance. Works by Berlioz and Georges Kastner reveal how the telegraph fed into conceptions of musical transcendence via Spiritualists and the Aeolian harp. The attendant emphasis on mind over body was extended through the employment by conductors of telegraph technology to control musicians across ever-greater distances. This apparent disembodiment of the telegraph carried threatening implications for those social or ethnic groups aligned with the body, including performers. However, as Marshall McLuhan suggests, electricity was also primarily a “tactile” medium, and sensitivity to the telegraphic signals in art music therefore also entailed a new appreciation of the powerful role of embodied performers. Listening for the sounds of the telegraph in music of the mid-nineteenth century thus both enriches our appreciation of the historicity of these works and offers new perspectives on the negotiations between embodiment and transcendence that continue to underpin this repertoire.

Béla Bartók: An Estimate and an Appreciation

Tempo ◽  
1945 ◽  
Vol -3 (13) ◽  
pp. 236-240
Author(s):  
Ernest Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bela Bartok ◽  
Racial Consciousness ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

The history of nineteenth-century Hungarian art music, like that of England, is mainly one of foreign domination. Although Liszt and his chief national contemporary Ferenc Erkel both gave musical expression to racial consciousness—the one in his employment of popular gypsy airs, the other in a series of patriotic operas—the accumulated weight of German tradition (Liszt) and Italian operatic supremacy (Erkel) was too heavy suddenly to be overthrown. The results, viewed from the standpoint of an indigenous national art, cannot be considered important.

Framing Till Eulenspiegel

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 004-043 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Hepokoski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
The One ◽  
Cultural Sector ◽  
Formal Construction

Strauss's Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895) may be read as the composer's credo of a new, antimetaphysical musical modernism that resonated with aspects of Nietzschean philosophy. In the immediately preceding years Strauss had taken a decisive philosophical-aesthetic turn away from the metaphysical assertions of Schopenhauer and Wagner and toward a more individualistic, palpably material conception of music. As was recognized by some writers of that period, the provocations and unstoppable laughter apparent in the tone poem could be understood as brash dismissals of one "sacred" tenet of the institution of art music after another. The seemingly gemutlich wit represented by Till (a metaphorical stand-in for Strauss himself) masked a more subversive agenda: on the one hand, a mocking of the metaphysical pretensions that then underpinned the art-music enterprise; on the other, the proclaiming of a new aesthetic staging itself as exhilaratingly emancipated from the overly inflated "Spirit of Gravity" still dominating that cultural sector of the musical world. These subversions are perceptible not only in the piece's program but also in its local musical details and overall formal construction. Several larger issues are at stake in such considerations. Strauss's personal move away from the metaphysics of music provides one of the earliest, most urgent alarms from within the high-prestige cultural system that its fundamental axioms were now corroding away, no longer sustainable by authoritarian fiat, in a rapidly modernizing and secularizing world. In turn, this suggests that such a reframing of Strauss's (and others') projects could encourage historians to approach the separate subhistories of musical modernism with a more problematized complexity and nuance. Finally--as all commentators on Till Eulenspiegel have noted--a significant part of the piece's impact resides its flamboyant, high-technical compositional display (a leading sign of its "modernism"). From this perspective the requisite framing is grounded in our recognition of its brazenly confrontational dialogue with established musical styles and practices. Non-normative formal patterning and architectonic layout are substantial components of Strauss's (Till's) musical subversion. In the reading proposed here, Till Eulenspiegel is processed as a radicalized sonata-rondo deformation with telling hermeneutic and social connotations, some of whose essential clues are located in the piece's prologue and epilogue. I interweave this analytical interpretation with remarks about the concept of sonata (and sonata-rondo) deformations as applied to music of the late nineteenth century.

“Las joyas son cortesanas de la riqueza”

2015 ◽  
pp. 169-189
Author(s):  
Jacob Rapp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Manuel Gutierrez Najera ◽  
Internal Struggle ◽  
The One

In his only published novel, Por donde se sube al cielo (1882), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera explored the contradictory desires produced by Mexico’s experience of modernization through the story of a Parisian actress. Her internal struggle between, on the one hand, accepting the commodification of her beauty in the commercial marketplace, and, on the other, pursuing traditional moral virtues rooted in Catholic spirituality and manual labor is not clearly resolved in the novel, prompting readers to question their expectations and beliefs about the quickly-developing effects of modernization at the end of the nineteenth century. By adding a more literal reading of the novel to established allegorical interpretations, I argue in this essay that Gutiérrez Nájera paradoxically represents the growing influence of commercialism by criticizing the desire for luxury goods while at the same time promoting a virtuous work ethic.

“SKINS TO JUMP INTO”: THE SLIPPERINESS OF IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN WILKIE COLLINS'S NO NAME

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Banking System ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Social Deviance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Response ◽  
The One

Victorian sensation literature was inextricably related to identity and the body: its primary purposes were to elicit a physical response from the senses of readers and to question “the social formation of the self” (Taylor, The Secret 2). Sensation fiction regularly relied on different, deformed, or diseased bodies to provoke fear or unease in its readers, and it created anxiety by juxtaposing the domestic with scandal, crime, and Gothicism to disturb the perceived stability of the home and social identity. Lyn Pykett argues that the genre reproduces the “real mid-nineteenth-century anxiety” that domestic selfhood “could be disrupted by danger, death or disease on the one hand, and the vagaries of the law, the banking system or the stockmarket on the other” (“Collins” 59). Nineteenth-century critics’ reactions to sensation novels connected anxieties about the body to fears about the instability of social identity: contemporary reviews described sensation literature and its works as “feverish” (Smith 141), “a collective cultural nervous disorder” (Taylor, The Secret 4), and as “symptoms of . . . social disease” (Pykett, “Collins” 51). In his 1880–81 series of essays, “Fiction Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin argues that the “[p]hysically diseased, ‘deformed,’ and ignobly dead bodies [in Collins's and Dickens's novels] are symptomatic of diseased and deformed genres, produced by morally and physically ill writers to cater to the tastes of morally and physically diseased urban readers” (Holmes, Fictions 92). These extreme critical responses, as well as the extreme popularity of sensation fiction, call attention to Victorian preoccupation with the body and social identity and with the instability of both. This paper, through analyzing the instability of bodies and identities in Wilkie Collins's sensation novel No Name (1862) and its serial context, challenges readings by both Victorian and more recent critics that distinctly interpret diseased and disabled bodies in the novel as either symbolic of or a result of social deviance.

James Thomas Marshall's correspondence (1887–1895) with Scotland's Alexander Somerville: practical, personal and controversial matters in conchology

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. MOORE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Taxonomic Revision ◽  
Marine Science ◽  
The One ◽  
Clyde Sea ◽  
Sea Area ◽  
Molluscan Species

Attention is drawn to the one side remaining of a nineteenth-century correspondence addressed to Alexander Somerville that is housed in the archives of the Scottish Association for Marine Science at Oban, concerning conchological matters. Previously unstudied letters from James Thomas Marshall shed new light on the practicalities of offshore dredging by nineteenth-century naturalists in the Clyde Sea Area; on personalities within conchology; on the controversies that raged among the conchological community about the production of an agreed list of British molluscan species and on the tensions between conchology and malacology. In particular, the criticism of Canon A. E. Norman's ideas regarding taxonomic revision of J. G. Jeffreys's British conchology, as expressed by Marshall, are highlighted.

Hurry Up and Wait: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Maritime in Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Role

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Elementy poetyki ludowej w powieści Rzeczy uprzyjemniające. Utopia T. Bołdak-Janowskiej

2020 ◽  
pp. 182-197
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Goral
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The One ◽  
Cultural Features

The aim of the article is to analyse the elements of folk poetics in the novel Pleasant things. Utopia by T. Bołdak-Janowska. The category of folklore is understood in a rather narrow way, and at the same time it is most often used in critical and literary works as meaning a set of cultural features (customs and rituals, beliefs and rituals, symbols, beliefs and stereotypes) whose carrier is the rural folk. The analysis covers such elements of the work as place, plot, heroes, folk system of values, folk rituals, customs, and symbols. The description is conducted based on the analysis of source material as well as selected works in the field of literary text analysis and ethnolinguistics. The analysis shows that folk poetics was creatively associated with the elements of fairy tales and fantasy in the studied work, and its role consists of – on the one hand – presenting the folk world represented and – on the other – presenting a message about the meaning of human existence.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document