Music Transcendent and Sublime

The translations in Song Loves the Masses close with Herder’s final large-scale essay on music, published in 1800 as a chapter in Kalligone, the culmination of his aesthetic work. With this late essay Herder, a polemic against his former teacher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), reveals the extent to which he has moved into a fully aesthetic domain in his concern for the universal history of humanity. Embodying the subjectivity of song and singing, music acquires the force of transcendence, and it therefore aspires to the Enlightenment ideals of the sublime. In Herder’s “On Music,” human beings are endowed with a degree of understanding that allows them to perceive the traits that make music unlike any other form of expression.

“Homer und Ossian” / “Homer and Ossian”

The magnificent goal entrusted to those seeking to understand history, to bring humankind’s works of art to light, to breathe life into the birth of the spirit, to endow art with a depth and fullness that leads to the harvest of fruit—this goal unfolds as a ...

The Folk Song Project at the Confluence of Music and Nationalism

Published in six folios during 1778 and 1779, Herder’s Volkslieder (Folk songs) has been one of the most influential works in modern intellectual history, even though it has never before appeared in English translation. The Volkslieder not only became the first collection of world music—songs came not only from many regions of Europe, but also from Africa, the Mediterranean, and South America—but also served as the source for European composers throughout the nineteenth century. Aesthetics, ethnography, and literary and cultural history converge to transform modern musical thought. Part one of the chapter contains translations from Herder’s own introductions to the songs, and part two contains twenty-four songs that represent the paradigm shift inspired by this monumental work on folk song.

The Shores of Modernity

In a broadly historical essay Herder examines the ways in which poetry and song reflect national character. Important distinctions between the objects and subjects of poetry, especially the relation between song as object and singing as subject, provide a comparative framework throughout and become the foundations for a critical language to represent modern culture and politics (e.g., the relation between Volk and Nation). Herder carefully traces the historical development of national literary traditions, but he draws the reader to considerations of poetry and song in the contemporary world of the Enlightenment. He concludes by drawing attention to the ways in which certain genres of poetry and song extend beyond the traditions of single peoples, acquiring a greater impact as transnational.

Letter 46, Theologische Schriften / Theological Writings

From time to time I have sent you poetic pieces, among them those in aesthetic genres from hymns, songs, parables, fables, etc., and with a few thoughts to accompany them. I do not believe, however, that such things offer atonement for what has otherwise been neglected, for I do not entirely understand what, in correspondence of this kind, might really atone for neglect. The letter writer ceases to write when he wishes, and the reader ceases to read when she comes to the end of the letter. Given the sheer abundance of reading material about which we speak, moreover, it is only likely that we skip over several lines here and there. You will have long known from your good sense and intelligence that poesy is ...

The Nation and Its Fragments

The first use of the word and concept, Volkslied (folk song), appears in Herder’s 1773 essay on the Ossian controversy, published in an influential volume of essays containing his own reflections the German character of art and culture, which included contributions by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among other leading Enlightenment intellectuals. Herder’s Ossian essay gathers fragments from correspondence with an imagined reader, thus allowing him to relate many different themes from eighteenth-century debates about song and poetry, especially the possibilities of translation of ancient myth and epic into modern, national forms. The Ossian poems and songs were published as the evidence of a mythological Scottish bard, but were in fact falsified by the eighteenth-century Scottish writer, James Macpherson.

From Lieder der Liebe: Die ältesten und schönsten aus Morgenlande / Songs of Love: The Oldest and Most Beautiful from the Orient

He kisses me With the kisses of his mouth: For your love is sweeter than wine. Like the fragrance of your sweet ointment, So too is your name A soothing balm: Thus, the maidens give you their love. Draw me unto you! … We hasten; me …...

Singing the Sacred Body

With his three-chapter book, Lieder der Liebe (Songs of Love), Herder not only contributed to the long tradition of translating the biblical Song of Songs (Hebrew, Shir ha-shirim), but published critical new perspectives on the confluence of religion and literature with an aesthetic formed from embodiment and sexuality. Herder combines earlier translations, especially those in the Middle High German repertories of medieval minnesingers and from the sixteenth-century Martin Luther Bible, and weaves his own paraphrases of the songs into them, emphasizing the beauty and sensuality of the biblical poetry. The English translation in chapter 3 of Song Loves the Masses captures what Herder called “the spirit of Hebrew poesy” and the ways it engenders a modern musical aesthetic.

Prologue

Over the course of more than two centuries modern readers have returned to Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings because of the wide-ranging influence on the many areas of thought that are foundational to modern intellectual history. In this prologue, Herder’s contributions to theological writings from world religions provide touchstones for the foundations of world music in intellectual history. His studies of Christianity and Judaism, as well as early Hindu writings, become common historical subject matter, joined through translation and the widespread presence of music in seminal texts. The prologue identifies the ways in which Herder’s universal thought leads to a new aesthetic and ontology of music, combining the object of song with the subject of singing.

The Epic as Nation

A full translation of the Iberian epic, El Cid, remained one of Herder’s most ambitious project throughout his life. Herder drew from several different sources, both Spanish and French, to create an expansive work of 70 cantos, which reflect the transmission in the smaller narrative forms of the Spanish romance and their realization in German through the line-by-line decasyllabic forms of epic, thereby representing its singability in oral tradition. The Cid’s story of encounter between religions in medieval Al-Andalus was widely known already in eighteenth-century Europe, but Herder’s translation, which would appear in hundreds of versions into the twentieth century, became one of the most sweepingly influential texts of epic nationalism.