Biography and Life-Writing

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.

Time and Temporality

For the nineteenth century, music was commonly characterized as the “art of time,” and provided a particularly fertile medium for articulating concerns about the nature of time and the temporal experience of human life. This chapter examines some of the debates around music and time from the period, arranged thematically around a series of conceptual issues. These include the reasons proposed for the links between music and time, and the intimate connection between our subjective experience of time and music; the use of music as a poetic metaphor for the temporal course of history; its use by philosophers as an instrument for the explication of temporal conundrums; its alleged potential for overcoming time; its various forms of temporal signification across diverse genres; and the legacy of nineteenth-century thought on these topics today.

The National and the Universal

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

Landscape and Ecology

Images of landscape lie at the heart of nineteenth-century musical thought. From frozen winter fields, mountain echoes, distant horn calls, and the sound of the wind moving among the pines, landscape was a vivid representational practice, a creative resource, and a privileged site for immersion, gothic horror, and the Romantic sublime. As Raymond Williams observed, however, the nineteenth century also witnessed an unforeseen transformation of artistic responses to landscape, which paralleled the social and cultural transformation of the country and the city under processes of intense industrialization and economic development. This chapter attends to several musical landscapes, from the Beethovenian “Pastoral” to Delius’s colonial-era evocation of an exoticized American idyll, as a means of mapping nineteenth-century music’s obsession with the idea of landscape and place. Distance recurs repeatedly as a form of subjective presence and through paradoxical connections with proximity and intimacy.

Ephemera

Among the documents which give access to musical life and its various events, ephemera occupy a special field. The word (ephemeron singular; ephemera plural) covers several kinds of written or printed documents largely scattered but being produced for a short life and not subject to be handled and stored in a permanent way. “Those papers of the day” as defined in eighteenth century were produced on a large scale in the nineteenth century when newspapers became the major medium for publicity. The main purpose of these documents was primarily information and publicity. This chapter argues how ephemera may be read not as mere sidelines to culture but as central documents pertaining to the wide and complex intellectual issues in music.

Fiction and Poetry

The rise of the European novel reached its zenith during the nineteenth century. One can hardly turn on the TV without seeing an adaptation of a novel from this period in a classically sumptuous BBC-TV production. The depiction of music-making in a variety of forms is a significant feature of many of the works of literature and poetry of the period, as the professional evaluation of music performance became part of a broader critical discourse. Poetry found an ever-growing mode of dissemination through the commercial performance of the art song—the work of many, mostly forgotten poets of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lives on in the German Lied, the French mélodie and the English art song.

Figures and Forms of Analysis Practice

For the last twenty years, studies of the history of musical analysis have undergone considerable revision. For a long time, analytical theories had monopolized the attention of historians (Ian Bent, for example). Then, the terms of analytic practice have become a new field of research (cf. Nicholas Cook’s contributions). By shifting interest to the conception and use of analytical discourse, musicologists have pursued an interest in intellectual tools and their dissemination. New players appeared: analysts themselves (and not only their ideas), and amateur and professional musicians made use of the increasing emphasis on analysis in the last two centuries. Finally, related research topics emerged: listening skills, genetic criticism, analysis of music performance—ideas all of are presented in this chapter and which are supported by an extensive bibliography. This chapter will present an overview of these recent changes: the development of musical analysis linked to several major changes in the cultural history (the literacy of musicians, the success of hermeneutics, art criticism or philology, the growing autonomy of art); how the analysis changed the way of composing musical works but also the profession of composer; the globalization of analysis beyond national traditions.

Churches and Devotional Practice

This chapter discusses the contribution of hymnology to nineteenth-century intellectual culture. It demonstrates how clergy and musicians engaged in scholarly writing and debate concerning the history, context, practice, and spirituality of congregational song. Using a diverse range of sources, including journal articles, lectures, sermons, and hymnals, it argues that hymnology was recognized as an important area of scholarship that drew on a range of musical and religious perspectives. Interest in it extended across denominational and national boundaries, and was characterized by professional and amateur participation. The key to understanding hymnology’s centrality in intellectual culture lies in the pervasiveness of church music in nineteenth-century cultural practice and experience.

Newspapers, Little Magazines, and Anthologies

The nineteenth century has been described as the age of the periodical, for good reason. Periodicals were published in large and small formats and in varying quantities; despite their size or circulation, they reached local, national, and global readerships. Most writers were paid on a freelance basis, but those who had achieved a modicum of fame were salaried writers who contributed to the prestige of the periodical. Critics were also mobile and traveled across Europe, to the Americas, and to Australasia, or their articles were sent across the seas by telegraph or shipped in crates to the furthermost outposts of the world, as public libraries and universities were established. This chapter examines a number little and large magazines and periodicals and anthologies to probe the varied intellectual life of music in the nineteenth century to show how ideas about music shifted across seas and continents.

Science and Religion

While nineteenth-century science and religion are commonly portrayed as being at war, this chapter uses musical contexts to test an alternative hypothesis: that science and religion were in fact compatible. It does that by tracking Anglo-European ideological changes in scientific and religious discourse, and explaining how music absorbed and reflected those changes across intellectually reciprocal environments. An introductory section outlines key scientific and religious changes from pre- and post-Darwinian evolutionary formulations to nineteenth-century theologies of divine emotion. Three further sections investigate the relationship of science and religion to the musical body, mind, and soul, emphasizing concepts of sensation and the voice; consciousness and feeling; and mystery and emotion.