Not a “Telephone to the Beyond”: Nietzsche's Early Writings on Music

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Katherine Fry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Writings

Much has been written about the importance of music and music making to Nietzsche's life and works as a whole, and the relevance of his philosophy for particular composers, repertoires, and works. Meanwhile, music historians and philosophers have approached Nietzsche's musical aesthetics by way of larger nineteenth-century paradigms such as “absolute” music or the history of “metaphysics.” This article explores Nietzsche's philosophical writings on music from the 1870s as they reveal the emergence of his critical outlook on Romantic aesthetics and the musical culture of his time. Against the backdrop of more recent debates about material culture and aesthetics in current musicology, it traces the development of his critical ideas about musical expression and listening as presented in his published and unpublished texts, concentrating on the period from Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872) to the first volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human, 1878). Rather than foreground Nietzsche's relationship with particular composers or works, it illuminates his double relationship with music as actual compositional practice in society and as an idealist metaphor for philosophy.

Stone Tools

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Old World ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
History Of

The focus of this article is stone tools. The history of stone tool research is linked integrally to the history of archaeology and the study of the human past, and many of the early developments in archaeology were connected with the study of stone artefacts. The identification of stone tools as objects of prehistoric human manufacture was central to the development of nineteenth-century models of prehistoric change, and especially the Three Age system for Old World prehistory. This article draws on concepts derived from interdisciplinary material culture studies to consider the role of the artefact after being discarded. It suggests that it is impossible to understand the meaning or efficacy of stone tools without understanding their ‘afterlives’ following abandonment. This article aims to complement contemporary metrical studies of the identification of stone tools and the description of their production. A brief history of the stone tools is explained and this concludes the article.

Gustav Klemm, Cultural History, and Kulturwissenschaft

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
German Culture ◽  
High Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
Cultural Science ◽  
History Of Culture

This chapter examines a new material-based history of German culture and looks at how a study of material culture had since evolved into “cultural history.” It traces the history of culture in nineteenth-century Germany, at the same time puzzling out the ambiguity of such a category as it was applied during the period. Encompassing both high culture and low, the popular and the elite, cultural history has often seemed borderless and indefinite—leading even its admirers to “search” for it or to see it as a “problem.” The chapter then turns to a study of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867), the most important of the cultural historians of the 1840s and 1850s. His General Cultural History (1843–1852) and General Cultural-Science (1855) are both significant works in the field.

Serials to Graphic Novels

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine J. Golden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Book Illustration ◽  
History Of ◽  
Illustrated Book

The Victorian illustrated book is a genre that came into being, flourished, and evolved during the long nineteenth century and finds new expression in present-day graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth-century novels. This history of the Victorian illustrated book focuses on fluidity in styles of illustration across the arc of a genre diverse enough to include serial instalments, British and American periodicals, adult and children’s literature, and—most recently—graphic novels. The caricature school of illustration, popular in the 1830s and 1840s, was not a transient first period in the history of the illustrated book. In the 1870s, Academy-trained artists for the Household Edition of Dickens’s work refined characters created by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne for an audience that appreciated realism in illustration, but their illustrations carry the imprint of caricature. At the fin de siècle—which some critics consider a third period of the Victorian illustrated book and others call the genre’s decline—book illustration thrived in certain serial formats, artists’ books, children’s literature, and the U.S. market where we again witness a reengagement with the caricature tradition as well as a continuation of the realistic school. The Victorian illustrated book finds new expression in our time; the graphic novel adaptation of Victorian novels, referred to as the graphic classics, is a prescient modern form of material culture that is the heir of the Victorian illustrated book.

Between Antiquarians and Archaeologists—Continuities and Ruptures (2002)

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Schnapp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Radiometric Dating ◽  
Biological Anthropology ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
History Of

The current renewal of interest in the history of archaeology has several causes, but it is primarily the result of the extraordinary extension of the discipline’s objectives and methods. During the last decades, the most far-flung regions of the earth have been subjected to systematic exploration, radiometric dating techniques have continually improved, DNA studies have contributed to the transformations of biological anthropology, and indeed the very process of human evolution has been cast in new light by the changing boundaries between human and animal behaviour. A natural science for many founding fathers of prehistory, a social science for those who emphasize its anthropological dimensions, archaeology has remained for others a historical discipline by virtue of its proximity to ancient languages and inscriptions. At one end of the spectrum, some archaeologists see themselves as specialists in material culture, able to deal with objects, both ancient and modern, as simultaneously technical and semiotic systems. At the other end, there are those who will put their faith only in the detailed approach of singular, particular cultures. To put the matter in extreme terms: it seems as if there is a universalist archaeology standing in opposition to a plethora of incompatible and irreducible vernacular archaeologies. In this context, appeals to the history of archaeology can be understood as recourse to the multiplicity of approaches and traditions characteristic of the discipline. The pioneering work of B. Trigger (1989) and L. Klejn (1973, 1977) has contributed much in this respect to our understanding of the development of archaeological thought. Until then, in effect, the history of archaeology was mainly conceived of as a history of discoveries, without taking much account of the ideas and institutions surrounding them. It is ironic to recall that the first syntheses of archaeology in the nineteenth century were rather conceived as phenomenologies of art (Müller 1830), or as histories of oeuvres and their interpretation (Starck 1880). It appears that the critique of the archaeology of art, during the second half of the nineteenth century, had as one of its side effects the rejection of a history of ideas in favour of one centred on discoveries.

Nineteenth-Century Dundonian Flute Manuscripts Found at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 99-141
Author(s):  
Karen E. McAulay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
Music Making ◽  
History Of ◽  
Drawing Room

Early in 2002, three nineteenth-century Scottish flute manuscripts came to light in the Whittaker Library at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD). The manuscripts are inscribed with the name of James Simpson of Dundee. The two slimmer volumes are dated 1828 and 1830. The third undated manuscript is a more handsomely bound volume and, judging by the content and handwriting, was likely to have been started at around the same time. Each manuscript consists almost entirely of flute duets and trios, and untexted psalm tunes for three and four voices. The history of the manuscripts is unknown, but it can be deduced that they were acquired by the RSAMD sometime after 1958. The manuscripts offer a colourful ‘snapshot’ of music-making in Dundee in the nineteenth century, with their cross-section of Scottish tunes and more widely-used drawing-room music, not to mention their church connections.

Aesthetic Amputations: Absolute Music and the Deleted Endings of Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Geometric Patterns ◽  
The Third ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
History Of

Abstract Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is the single most important document in the history of the construct known as absolute music, the idea that music functions as an entirely self-contained and self-referential art. Hanslick deleted—and did not replace—the final paragraph of the first edition, cutting most of it for the second edition of 1858 and the remainder for the third edition of 1865. This original ending evokes imagery that stands out from most of the rest of the treatise, including references to the “great motions of the cosmos” and “profound and secret connections to nature.” Scholars have pointed to the apparent inconsistencies of both tone and substance in this paragraph over and against the rest of the treatise to explain its later deletion but have not suggested why Hanslick might have ended his treatise in this way originally. The evocation of “connections to nature” points to the influence of Naturphilosophie, a mode of thought particularly prevalent in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century that posited a basic unity of all nature. Proponents of Naturphilosophie, including such major figures as Schelling, Ritter, Goethe, and Ørsted, believed that the basic forces of nature were all interconnected. Ernst Chladni's demonstrations of the geometric patterns that could be created by sound under certain conditions fascinated his contemporaries and provide an example of how motion, sound, form, and beauty might all be interrelated. Hanslick saw tönend bewegte Formen (“forms set in motion through tones”) as the essence of music, and his original ending suggests that the kind of motion resulting in sound was related to the motions at work in physics, light, magnetism, and other forces, the “great motions of the cosmos.”

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.

E. T. A. HOFFMANN AND THE ETHEREAL TECHNOLOGIES OF ‘NATURE MUSIC’

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILY I. DOLAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Musical Formalism

ABSTRACTIn 1814, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his short story, Die Automate. The story concerns the dealings of two friends and a fortune-telling automaton, the Turk, whose prophetic utterances seem to reveal a supernatural and psychic ability. Although the story first appeared in the Allegemeine musikalische Zeitung, it has been mostly overlooked by music scholars. In addition to the lengthy passages dealing with artificial intelligence, the story includes an extensive discussion of music performance and music instruments. The instruments they discuss – machines capable of bringing forth the voice of nature – perhaps appear as fantastical creations of Hoffmann’s imagination. However, he refers to real instruments that played an established role in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture. This period saw the frenzied production of many novel and bizarre instruments such as the euphon, aiuton, aenomochord, xänorphica and the harmonichord. Though these instruments are all but forgotten today, they testify to a widespread preoccupation with timbre and instrumental sonority. The consolidation of the orchestra as a concept, musical body and institution in the eighteenth century went hand in hand with the notion that individual instrumental sonorities had distinct expressive characters. By the early nineteenth century, this idea manifested itself in two distinct traditions: an orchestral one, in which composers increasingly took advantage of the ever-growing palette of instruments, giving rise to the modern concept of orchestration and the romantic symphony, and an instrument-oriented one, in which musicians, scientists and inventors attempted to capture ‘ideal sonorities’ (usually timbres resembling the human voice) in specially designed instruments. These creations offer a missing link between idealist aesthetics of the period and musical practice. Though ultimately ephemeral, they represent a kind of ‘absolute’ music that was founded purely in ethereal sonorities rather than in musical formalism.

scholarly journals Télémaque, Ṭahṭāwī and the (Counter-) Enlightenment in the Arab World

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Hisham Hamad ◽  
Robbert Woltering
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Movements ◽  
Political Lessons ◽  
Philosophical Writings

The Arab cultural awakening (Nahḍa) was one of the most pervasive and consequential intellectual movements in modern history. A key figure within this movement was the Egyptian civil servant, educator, translator and Islamic scholar Rifā‛a Rāfi‛ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873). Having visited Paris, he developed an interest in the moral, social and political ideas that were prevalent in nineteenth-century France. However, most current scholarship agrees that because of their secular nature, these ideas were of limited use for a devout Muslim such as Ṭahṭāwī in his own cultural and political context. In 1850 Ṭahṭāwī translated François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), and while it has been suggested that this novel may have influenced Ṭahṭāwī’s later works, his translation of it has been mostly ignored by modern researchers. In this paper we demonstrate that Ṭahṭāwī found Télémaque to contain many potentially suitable moral and political lessons to translate into the modernizing Arabic-Islamic culture of the late nineteenth century. First, we present a history of the reception and cultural position of Fénelon’s Télémaque in France. This will help scholars understand it as a popular text across ideologies and philosophical movements. Then we discuss Ṭahṭāwī’s ideological makeup, specifically in relation to modernity. Lastly, we offer a discussion of passages from Ṭahṭāwī’s translation of Télémaque. This allows us to expose some of Ṭahṭāwī’s discursive strategies in Islamizing and Arabizing the concepts and ideas present in the novel, thus laying the conceptual groundwork for his later philosophical writings. On a broader level, this paper examines if and how Ṭahṭāwī’s own ideas and his appropriation of those of Fénelon as present in Télémaque can be plausibly included in the category of a ‘global Counter-Enlightenment’.

Silence

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-106
Author(s):  
Andrea F. Bohlman
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Economic Hardship ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Music Making ◽  
History Of ◽  
Concert Programs ◽  
Private Homes

This chapter offers a history of martial law (1981–84) in Poland to argue that music was a mode of civil resilience as well as a crucial means of conveying information and writing histories from below. The declaration of martial law brought about economic hardship and the curtailment of civil liberties, but also stimulated music making in three zones: public streets, church sanctuaries and private homes, and internment camps/prisons. This chapter revisits oral histories and diaries from the time to rehear the interplay between singing and military sounds during protests against the declaration. Experimental scores, concert programs, and observational songs played in domestic salons complicate the assumption that martial law effected a cultural hold—a metaphorical silence. The material culture of music in detention reveals that song—religious hymns, ballads, and legion songs—provided internees and prisoners the opportunity to reclaim authorship over their own histories.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document