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INTEGRATING MUSIC INTO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART MUSIC AS A DISCOURSE OF AGENCY AND IDENTITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2008

JOHN E. TOEWS
JOHN E. TOEWS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Washington
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Extract

Few intellectual historians of nineteenth-century Europe would deny that the tradition of art music that evolved between the revolutionary watershed at the end of the eighteenth century and the international wars and domestic convulsions of the first half of the twentieth century—a body of musical works from Haydn and Mozart to Mahler and Strauss that has been passed down to us in canonized form as the “imaginary museum” of “classical music” —was an enormously significant dimension of European cultural and intellectual history, especially in German-speaking central Europe. In the territories of the German Confederation, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, and later in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the production, performance and consumption of classical music was not just an important element in the history of aesthetic and cultural forms but also a privileged site for imagining and enacting the organization of individuals into historical subjects (the Bildung of modern individuals) and for the integration of individuals into collectivities through processes of subjective identification. Broad interest in the relations between agency and identity among historians, including European intellectual historians, should have drawn many of them, one would have thought, toward investigation of the ways the cultural work undertaken by music was connected to, and interacted with, the cultural role of the textual and visual arts, or of how musical performance and experience helped European individuals organize and perform their self-activity and self-consciousness in relation to the past, to other individuals within the networks of communal relations, and to the transcendent. The history of music would appear to be critical for understanding historical experiences of the relations between memory and expectation at both the individual and communal levels.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , August 2008 , pp. 309 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

2 Barzun, Jacques, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 2 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1950, 3rd edn 1969)Google Scholar; Robinson, Paul, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

3 See especially the chapter on Schoenberg and Kokoschka in Schorske, Carl, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980)Google Scholar; and the lecture on Mahler published in idem, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

4 Steinberg, Michael, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. The book includes a discussion of musical works by Strauss, Schoenberg and Mahler.

5 McGrath, William, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), esp. chap. 5 (on Mahler)Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Clayton, Martin, Herbert, Trevor and Middleton, Richard, eds., The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar.

7 Subotnik's influential essays of the 1970s and 1980s are collected in Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Kramer's books include Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Leppert and McClary's anthology, Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) played a critical role in promoting the development of the new historical musicology, as did their subsequent efforts to infuse musicological analysis with conceptions of subjectivity drawn from critical theory and post-structuralism.

8 References to Adorno are omnipresent in the new musicology. He is clearly the primary intellectual mentor of recent attempts both to historicize musical forms and to analyze these forms in terms of the dialectical dynamics of subjectivity. For a good summary of the impact of Adorno on Anglo-American musicology see the introduction and commentaries by Richard Leppert in Adorno, Theodor W., Essays on Music, selected and with an introduction and commentary and notes by Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

9 The classical modern account is Dahlhaus, Carl, Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Kassel: Baerenreioter Verlag, 1978)Google Scholar; but see the more recent Daniel Chua, K. L., Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hoeckner, Berthold, Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

10 The beginnings of the aesthetic theory of autonomous, abstract art is connected to the emergence of the classical instrumental forms of symphony, sonata and chamber music in the late eighteenth century in Neubauer, John, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

11 Steinberg, Michael P., Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Bent, Ian, ed., Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Applegate, Celia, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St Matthew Passion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Beller-McKenna, Daniel, Brahms and the German Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Bonds, Mark Evan, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Painter, Karen, ed., Mahler and His World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

12 Steinberg, Listening to Reason, 5 ff.

13 The conference anthology edited by Hermand, Jost and Richter, Gerhard, Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)Google Scholar, represents a sustained effort to reconstruct this tradition and, more, to sustain its viability in the post-Adorno era.

14 Goehr, Lydia, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1Google Scholar; original emphasis.

15 For Mark Evan Bonds, this construction of music as an imagined narrative of the thinking subject, as a discourse of subjectivity, a way of knowing rather than a rhetoric of speaking, is clearly a fiction of the listener. In his view the “revolution” in music c. 1800 was really a revolution in the aesthetic discourse about music, a change in the framework of listening created by the critical and pedagogical activity of aesthetic theorists and music critics rather than by composers and compositions. Beethoven's symphonies did not create a new way of listening—a new way of listening was created by a transformation of ideas about subjective agency that was subsequently attached to Beethoven's compositions. See his Music as Thought, 5–29 and passim.

16 Steinberg, Listening to Reason, 9–11.

17 Bonds, Music as Thought, 29–62.

18 Applegate, Bach in Berlin, 2; original emphasis.

19 This part of Applegate's work should be read alongside Gramit, David, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar, which provides a more general, systematic and theoretically informed analysis of the same phenomena, and critically examines the tension between, on the one hand, the claims that musical experience was essential to the cultivation of human subjectivity per se and, on the other, the interest in directing musical experience toward the construction of exclusionary identities, not only of nationality, but of class and gender as well.

20 Steinberg, Listening to Reason, 95, 122.

21 Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit, 126.

22 There is an insightful comparative analysis of the role of modernist irony in Mann and Mahler in Frisch, Walter, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 186–213Google Scholar.