Peculiar Attunements

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Mathew Grant
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Entire Structure ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Parallel Movement ◽  
Affective Attunement ◽  
Vital Component ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music. These theorists postulated that it was music’s physical materiality as sound that vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it argues for renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.

Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects

2018 ◽  
Vol 144 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-60
Author(s):  
Roger Mathew Grant
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Music Lessons ◽  
Parallel Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Materialist Theory

This article places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in eighteenth-century music theory. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. By refracting contemporary affect theory through this historical antecedent, the essay argues for renewed attention to the objects in the world that generate affects in subjects.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Roger Mathew Grant
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Parallel Movement ◽  
Materialist Theory ◽  
Repeating Patterns

This chapter places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in eighteenth-century music theory. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. The chapter demonstrates the similarities between eighteenth-century attunement theories and contemporary affect theory, explaining how the peculiar problems of theorizing affect generate repeating patterns in the historical evolution of the concept. It also includes a discussion of the book’s methodology and a brief sketch of its contents.

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.

VII.—The Rise of a Theory of Stage Presentation in England During the Eighteenth Century

PMLA ◽  
1917 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-200
Author(s):  
Lily B. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Artistic Theory ◽  
Dramatic Presentation

Stage history has generally been regarded by the student of the arts as a thing apart. It has been assumed that the stage has developed its own art, influenced only by the art of the stage in other lands or in other times. In general, this assumption seems to me unjustified. Rather, the stage should, I believe, be regarded as giving expression in its art to the dominant artistic theory of the time. It is only in its medium of expression that the art of the stage differs from the other arts; its fundamental artistic theory is that held in common with the other arts. Certainly, it seems to me, it is only in this fashion that one can account for the changes in the theory of dramatic presentation that came about within the compass of the eighteenth century. It is my purpose in this paper, therefore, to show the development of the theory of acting in England in the eighteenth century, and to show that in its development the theory of acting followed the general artistic theory of the day.

Cultural Bases for Understanding Literature

PMLA ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Margaret Mead
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Farm Laborer ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
A Chain

Among the variety of contributions which modern anthropological research might be able to offer to members of this Association, I plan to stress only one, that which anthropological studies of whole cultures can make to those whose task it is to cherish and cultivate the arts, and especially literature, in the contemporary world. Just because we, the anthropologists, specialize in primitive, usually quite small, societies and take as our focus communities of a few hundred people with an oral tradition which can be no more elaborate than the memories of those few, we are able to include within our study many aspects of human experience which the scholar dealing with a period or trend within a complex high civilization accepts on authority or takes for granted. Yet, to the extent that the scholar who works with the eighteenth century in England must so take for granted the economic arrangements of agriculture or the methods of child care in the nursery, he or she is cut off from watching the intimate interplay between the way a farm laborer is paid or a child rebuked and the images of sophisticated literature, within which these experiences of the poor or immature may be represented by a chain of transmuted images or an explicit counterpoint which cuts them off from the developed consciousness of the small literate elite who inherited and cultivated the literary tradition of the past. Short of time, and very often short of materials, historians have only recently thought it worth while to consider the “short and simple annals of the poor” or the life of children who were neither the subjects of later literary elaboration by a Samuel Butler or a Proust, nor had even the dubious claims of a Daisy Ashford.

The Arts

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-195
Author(s):  
Murray Pittock
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Public Display ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Outdoor Environments ◽  
Indoor And Outdoor Environments ◽  
Indoor And Outdoor

The growing circulation of visual art and its widening appearance in domestic collections and public display is an important moniker of the advance of consumerism, cosmopolitanism and innovation. What once had been (and for much of the eighteenth century still remained) an international aristocratic pastime suffused itself steadily into the houses and purchases of the professional well-to-do, bringing with it variety of origin, variety of subject, and whole new genres which could inflect the manner in which indoor and outdoor environments were represented and understood as they came under the control of society’s elites. Such new images could, in their turn, embed the centrality of questions of landscape, geographical conditions and human societies in the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who moved in intellectual spheres much removed from the visual arts.

Is Nature Priceless?

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Collier
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Rain Forest ◽  
Organic Food ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Left Flank ◽  
Modern Industrial Society ◽  
Recent Variation

The indignant tears of a child command attention. Daniel, aged eight, has just learned about the Brazilian rain forest and it has moved him to his first expression of political outrage. It is directed at me, not as his father, but as representative of the generation of adults who are destroying something precious before he reaches the age at which he can stop us. Through sobs and rage he shouts, “Tell the president!” Having seen me on television, Daniel has a somewhat inflated impression of my influence. Eight-year-olds are not, on the whole, always repositories of good sense, and Daniel is no exception. But by chance his anger is right on target: son and father are ethically aligned in the battleground of natural assets. First, the left flank. I agree with environmentalists that nature is special: at some level most of us recognize that. But why is it special? Mainstream environmentalists, such as Stewart Brand, offer one answer. Nature is especially vulnerable and that matters because, being dependent upon it, mankind is thereby vulnerable. But as Brand argues, many environmentalists are carrying ideological baggage that needs to be discarded. For romantic environmentalists nature is incommensurate with the mundane business of the economy: it is in some way ethically prior. Echoing Baron d’Holbach’s diagnosis of modern angst, they see industrial capitalism as having divorced us from the natural world which it is rapidly destroying. You can sense their discomfort with modern industrial society in the language that they use, replete with words such as “organic” and “holistic.” For a recent variation on the theme of Holbach, watch Prince Charles delivering the BBC’s 2009 distinguished Dimbleby Lecture. Perhaps man needs to return to a simpler, nonindustrial lifestyle. Prince Charles produces organic food, and he has created a village, Poundsbury, in the style of the eighteenth century—the last age prior to industrialization. At the extreme end of romantic environmentalism the diagnosis is more radical: mankind itself has become the enemy of what is truly good. Reflecting these sentiments, there is now a considerable cult that relishes the prospect of the extinction of mankind.

Coda: Affect after the Affektenlehre

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-142
Author(s):  
Roger Mathew Grant
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Historical Investigation

This concluding chapter places contemporary affect theory in conversation with the historical investigation outlined in the body of the book. It finds within recent affect theory a certain musicality and a tendency to rehearse dynamics that once played out within historical music theory. This final chapter closes with a call to restore diachronicity and movement to affect theory: to think affect historically, and to therefore pay close attention to the movements between the objects and subjects that have generated it.

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