scholarly journals Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Aesthetic Principle

The growing aesthetic prestige of instrumental music in the last decades of the eighteenth century was driven not so much by changes in the musical repertory as by the resurgence of idealism as an aesthetic principle applicable to all the arts. This new outlook, as articulated by such writers as Winckelmann, Moritz, Kant, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Schelling, posited the work of art as a reflection of an abstract ideal, rather than as a means by which a beholder could be moved. Through idealism, the work of art became a vehicle by which to sense the realm of the spiritual and the infinite, and the inherently abstract nature of instrumental music allowed this art to offer a particularly powerful glimpse of that realm. Idealism thus provided the essential framework for the revaluation of instrumental music in the writings of Wackenroder, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and others around the turn of the century. While this new approach to instrumental music has certain points of similarity with the later concept of "absolute" music, it is significant that Eduard Hanslick expunged several key passages advocating idealist thought when he revised both the first and second editions of his treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. The concept of "absolute" music, although real enough in the mid-nineteenth century, is fundamentally anachronistic when applied to the musical thought and works of the decades around 1800.

Art Nouveau

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Architecture And Design ◽  
Applied Arts

From the 1880s until the mid-1910s, Art Nouveau was the dominant style in art, architecture, and design in Europe, with innovative and thoroughly modern production in graphics, furniture, and applied arts. Though it incorporated elements from a range of diverse sources, the most characteristic forms of Art Nouveau were those inspired by nature, but nature that had been adapted, stylized, and aestheticized to reflect the cultural climate of the turn of the century. The origins of Art Nouveau developed out of the ideas of several leading figures during the mid-nineteenth century in their efforts to reconcile art with the increasingly industrialized methods of production dominating in the applied arts. In Britain, William Morris advocated for a unity among art, design, and applied arts that valued handcraftsmanship in well-made objects made available to the middle classes. The Arts & Crafts movement sought to counter the array of poorly designed consumer goods seen at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, in which individual objects were frequently overwhelmed by ornamentation.

The Spa: Emotional Economy and Social Classes in Nineteenth-Century Pyrmont

2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heikki Lempa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Mineral Springs ◽  
Mineral Spring ◽  
German Speaking

In 1835, Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, a Saxon writer and teacher, estimated that the Germanic realm was inundated with spas and that nowhere else were there as many as in Central Europe. In France there were “only ten springs, in Italy eight, Hungary had twelve, Sweden three, Spain two, England two, in Denmark and in vast Russia there was only one mineral spring of note in each, whereas in German-speaking countries, that is, including Bohemia and Switzerland, 149 facilities claimed to possess healing springs.” Although Kühne's estimate of foreign spas was too low—according to recent studies, the number of spas in England and France was significantly higher—contemporary accounts and recent local studies support his finding that Germans had the most bathing facilities in Europe. Fred Kaspar has isolated ninety-nine spas and mineral springs in Westphalia alone. Beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century, the number of spas and spa goers in particular increased rapidly in the Germanic realm. Only 200 guests came to the Kissingen spa in the summer of 1800, whereas fifty years later there were close to 4,000 and by the turn of the century 15,000 guests proper and more than 20,000 day visitors. Pyrmont, one of the most popular spas in the eighteenth century, started with 1,424 guests proper (not including peasants who were not considered guests proper) reaching 2,800 guests by the middle of the century, and around 19,000 by 1900.

Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the ‘Aesthetic Force’ of Music

2002 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Riley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Aesthetic

Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4) exerted considerable influence on late eighteenth-century German musical writers. But for many modern commentators, it typifies the negative attitude to instrumental music characteristic of much Enlightenment rationalism. A reassessment of Sulzer, taking account of his philosophical background in Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten, shows that in fact he considered music the first of the fine arts. The arts have an ethical, civilizing role; but while most can affect only people who are already partly civilized, music possesses a special ‘aesthetic force’ which energizes the minds of cognitively passive people or ‘savages’.

Latin America, colonial thought in

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter B. Redmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
The 1960S

Colonial refers to Spanish and Portuguese sovereignty in America from the arrival of Columbus in 1492 up to the emergence of modern Latin American states in the nineteenth century. The intellectual life of the colonies and their mother countries at that time falls into two phases: traditional and modern. The traditional phase includes the siglo de oro, or the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was a time when literature and the arts flourished, along with Scholastic philosophy, jurisprudence and theology. During the eighteenth century, traditional thought gradually gave way to modern movements, particularly from France. The universities founded in the mid-sixteenth century, notably those of Mexico and Peru, as well as colleges and seminaries, were impressively productive in the area of philosophy. The pressure of events such as the clash between European and Native American cultures in the sixteenth century and the struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal in the nineteenth century brought about numerous nonacademic works with philosophic content. Authors wrote in both Latin and Spanish or Portuguese and often knew native languages, such as Nahuatl and Quechua as well. Many operated in several different areas, such as the nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language, who wrote a book on logic in Latin, which has since been lost. Students studied philosophy first, then specialized in medicine, law, or theology. The core philosophy curriculum was logic, natural philosophy or physics and metaphysics. In the eighteenth century Scholastic logic, similar to what has come to be known as formal logic, was weakened and natural philosophy began to incorporate experimental science. The bulk of philosophy was affected by modern thinkers such as René Descartes. Eighteenth-century savants were critical of Scholasticism and later Latin American intellectuals tended to disavow the entire colonial past. However, historians since the 1940s have stressed the currency of modern scholarship, especially in science and since the 1960s have been rediscovering the sophisticated philosophy of the Golden Age.

The Aesthetic Conflict

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
Douglas W. Shadle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Program Music ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Open Question ◽  
World Premiere

An aesthetic conflict between advocates of abstract instrumental music (or “absolute music”) and advocates of instrumental music that tells stories (or “program music”) raged throughout Europe and the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. American critics assessed Dvořák’s Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies through the lens of this conflict as they premiered throughout the 1880s and 1890s. But listeners could not reach a consensus about where along the aesthetic spectrum his music fell. Which direction the composer’s new symphony might take therefore remained an open question until its 1893 world premiere in New York, when the results surprised everyone.

Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Developmental Biology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophic Tradition ◽  
Independent Property

On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, applies to parts, aspects and wholes, and so forth. Beyond this, dispute prevails. Realists hold that judgements of beauty ascribe to their subjects either a response-independent property inherent in things or a capacity of things to affect respondents in a way that preserves objectivity. In both cases acute problems arise in defining the property and in explaining how it can be known. Classical Platonism holds that beauty exists as an ideal supersensible ‘form’, while eighteenth-century theorists view it as a quasi-sensory property. Kant’s transcendental philosophy anchors the experience of beauty to the basic requirements of cognition, conferring on it ‘subjective universality and necessity’. Sceptics complain that the alleged property is merely a reflection of aesthetic pleasure and hence lacks objective standing. Partly due to its preoccupation with weightier matters, the philosophic tradition has not yet developed a theory of beauty as fully and deeply as it has, say, theories in the domain of morality. For most of the twentieth-century the generally subjectivistic and relativistic bent of the social sciences and humanities, as well as the scorn heaped on beauty by avant-gardism in the arts, discouraged concentration on beauty. However, the turn of the century has brought a remarkable reawakening of interest in theorizing about beauty. The burgeoning fields of cognitive science and evolutionary developmental biology have played a part.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-88
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Separate Species ◽  
Biological Adaptation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sister Arts

Chapter 2 documents that, in contrast to more recent theories that have rendered adaptation a bad theoretical object, prior to the late eighteenth century, adaptation was theorized as a good theoretical object, fostering an innovative, progressive, national aesthetic culture and situating artists in a long lineage reaching back to classical Greece. Subsequently, late eighteenth-century Romantic theories of originality and theories of the arts as separate species militated against adaptation in the same way that theologies of original creation and scientific theories of separate species would militate against theories of biological adaptation in the late nineteenth century. Even so, some nineteenth-century theorists continued to valorize adaptation equivocally as a means of civilizing the lower classes and foreign cultures, even as its aesthetic deficiencies offended the higher ranked, fiercely nationalist arbiters of civilization and culture. Copyright laws, which did not apply when a work changed medium until the early twentieth century in Britain and other nations, intensified the opprobrium cast upon adaptation in a rhetoric of theft at home and piracy abroad. Even so, some critics maintained that adaptation is original when created by an original genius; others valorized intermedial adaptation in a pseudo-religious discourse of realization of the word made flesh; yet others pitted sister arts theories against theories of the arts as separate species that cannot mate to produce adaptation, although both militated against the reproductive, generative capacities of adaptation. These discourses were not limited to academics and reviewers, but extended to the adaptation industry.

The Eighteenth-Century Ballet-Pantomime and Modern Mime

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43
Author(s):  
Edward Nye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Lincoln College ◽  
As If

Histories of mime largely overlook one of the most remarkable theatrical phenomena of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the ballet-pantomime. In contrast, it is widely discussed in dance history circles, as if there were a tacit understanding that only one half of this hyphenated art mattered: the ballet rather than the pantomime. This article explores the mime component of the ballet-pantomime in order to compare and contrast it with modern mime, especially Etienne Decroux's principles and practices. Through the works of Noverre particularly (since Decroux declares himself an admirer), but with reference also to other famous and less famous eighteenth-century choreographers and dancers, Edward Nye discusses five aspects of mime: use of the body, mime and dance, mime and language, objective and subjective mime, and pedagogy. He finds differences as well as similarities between modern and eighteenth-century mime, but overall argues that there is no reason to exclude the ballet-pantomime from histories of mime. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in A Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000), and of dance, in Danse et littérature; sur quel pied danser? (ed., Rodopi, 2003).

Flowers over the Abyss: A Musical Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Criticism

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Amanda Lalonde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ninth Symphony ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Definition Of

The term unheimlich (uncanny) comes into usage in German music criticism in the nineteenth century and is often used to describe instrumental music, particularly sections of works featuring the ombra topic. While the idea that instrumental music can be uncanny regardless of text or program is not novel, this work differs from most existing scholarship on the musical uncanny in that it presents a possible precursor to the twentieth-century psychoanalytic uncanny. Instead, it examines Schelling's definition of the uncanny in the larger context of his ideas in order to form a basis for theorizing a version of this aesthetic category that is active in the nineteenth-century critical discourse about music. In the early nineteenth century, music becomes uncanny because it discloses what should remain hidden from finite revelation. Critics understand passages of instrumental ombra music as uncanny moments when music calls attention to itself as the sensuous manifestation of the Absolute. They remark on these passages’ effacing of boundaries and sense of becoming, residues of eighteenth-century uses of the topic in operatic supernatural scenes and as part of a chaos-to-order narrative in symphonic music. The article concludes with the reception of the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the finale of Schubert's Octet, D. 803, using critics’ comments as a basis for extrapolating, through new analyses, as to the features that might make the particular works remarkable as examples of music's uncanny power made manifest.

The Flighty Coquette Sings on Easter Sunday

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-593
Author(s):  
Andrei Pesic
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Market Pressures ◽  
Concert Spirituel

Abstract French colonists in Saint-Domingue brought a variety of entertainments from the metropole to the island's theaters during the later eighteenth century. This included the Parisian Concert Spirituel, which replaced theatrical entertainments with performances of religious and instrumental music during religious holidays. Yet these concerts never caught on in earnest and began to diverge significantly from the metropolitan institution: the Easter concert in Port-au-Prince entirely composed of opera arias would have been unthinkable in the metropole. Linking developments in the colony's entertainments with the understudied subject of religious practices among France's Caribbean colonists, this article argues that strong market pressures overrode weaker religious constraints in Saint-Domingue, making opera arias acceptable for Eastertide. It presents a new fine-grained approach for studying how cultural practices are transformed when traveling within an empire, with implications beyond the history of the arts. Les colons français ont importé une grande variété de divertissements de la métropole à Saint-Domingue durant la deuxième moitié du dix-huitième siècle. Le Concert spirituel de Paris, qui remplaçait les spectacles profanes pendant les fêtes religieuses, a été l'une de ces institutions. Néanmoins ces concerts n'ont jamais entièrement pris dans le contexte colonial et ont peu à peu divergé de leurs homologues métropolitains : un concert de Pâques à Port-au-Prince entièrement constitué d'airs d'opéra aurait été inimaginable dans l'Hexagone à cette époque. Liant l'histoire des divertissements coloniaux et le sujet peu étudié des pratiques religieuses des colons, cet article développe l'idée que de fortes pressions commerciales ont primé sur de faibles contraintes religieuses à Saint-Domingue, rendant des airs d'opéra acceptables au moment des fêtes de Pâques. L'analyse souligne la façon dont les pratiques culturelles évoluent lorsqu'elles voyagent au sein d'un empire colonial, tirant des implications qui vont au-delà de l'histoire des arts.

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