What determines the way we talk, write, and think about music of the nineteenth century? In periods of intensified disciplinary self-reflection such as our own, these activities attract ethical and political imputations that lend the question a high degree of urgency. At other times, this question seems almost peripheral or incidental, and its history is at best a marginal concern. After all, many view music as primarily a sounding art, and therefore one that engages us first and foremost through the experience of listening or participation. When we analyze music, and begin to think about formal structure, style, and meaning, and when we consider these things with reference to contextual and historical factors and their broader social significance, we are typically taken to be reflecting on different facets of these ways of experiencing music. When, however, the activity of reflection itself becomes the object of study, we are conventionally held to be no longer dealing with music. The implication then is that the history of the “idea of music” is not a legitimate topic of musicological reflection when it is considered separately from specific musical works or musical experiences.
This prevailing view issues from a skepticism toward approaches that seem to abstract their object of investigation from social context and conditions of production. It is commonplace, for example, to look critically upon histories of music that cast it as if it were abstracted or autonomous in this way. It has often been argued that this type of history necessarily favors elite musics and Western (particularly European) cultures, promotes a linear view of music history in terms of progressive development, and fetishizes musical texts as embodying timeless truths. In one sense, the history of ideas about music is often viewed in a similar way. Creativity does not occur in a vacuum, we are told, and treating ideas as if they somehow float above social reality and interact only with other ideas along their own autonomous historical trajectory is perhaps an even worse scholarly crime than writing an autonomous history of musical style, because at least the latter deals with music “itself.”
A similar form of skepticism can be seen across the humanities over the last half a century at least, where it has been directed not only against formalist approaches but also against intellectual history. Intellectual history has often been criticized for focusing on the ways that ideas are presented (including discursive conventions, the use of language and rhetorical patterns), in preference to the practices and larger forces that shaped those forms of representation. This is not merely a question of text versus context, because discursive conventions are themselves a type of context, just as the idea of musical “style” is a contextual category. It is more a question of whether ideas are simply a reflection of other, putatively more “real,” things—like forms of social organization, the movement of money, the division of labor, or the everyday activities of people—or whether they are in fact indistinguishable from these things, or entirely separate from them. Intellectual history has sometimes been seen as assuming that ideas inhabit a separate realm from social life, and conversely social history often assumes that ideas are mere reflections of social life (McMahon and Moyn 2014).
Increasingly, however, intellectual history is adapting itself to its onetime rival social theory, and showing how ideas should be seen neither as merely a reflection of, nor a realm above, material conditions. For example, Samuel Moyn has described the “powerful tendency to idealism in intellectual history” and pointed to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort to help move beyond the representation/practice divide by viewing ideas and concepts as constitutive of the “social imaginary”—the means by which social and individual realities are constituted. Moyn’s revival of the “social imaginary” as a category for intellectual historians calls us to “take seriously Marxism’s concern with the role of representations in the social order without reducing the former to the latter, understood as something in which representations play no role except as legitimating afterthought” (Moyn 2014, 116). There have been analogous calls from within musicology (particularly from studies of improvisation) to think beyond the “music and society” dyad and construe musical performance as modeling social relations, rather than merely reflecting them. Yet it is rarer for ideas about music to be accorded a constitutive role in material affairs.
One of the aims of this Handbook is to bring into focus the history of writing and thinking about music and the texts and practices, networks and institutions, and discourses that have shaped and sustained it. Part of what makes this project timely is that there are a range of sources now available to scholars that were simply not widely accessible a generation ago. This is due of course to the steady onward march of digitization, which makes rare sources more widely obtainable and brings to light professional networks that might not otherwise be visible, even as it carries its own pitfalls—such as the inherent selectiveness of digitization and the latent assumptions of search engines. To wit, digitization is by no means a value-neutral innovation. Equally, special interest groups, private collectors, and amateur groups with access to rare recordings, ephemera, and local knowledge have become more accessible to scholars through internet networking. These changes carry the potential to give us a much fuller picture of how ideas about music are embedded in wider discourses on narrating the nineteenth century. The types of documents, practices, and networks explored in the chapters that follow have been routinely marginalized or considered to be of only supplementary interest to the study of music “itself,” but here we place them center stage in an effort to promote future work that grapples with the question just outlined with respect to intellectual history, reimagining the relationship between representations and practices.
The chapters in this Handbook are rarely aimed at presenting an intellectual history of music. The “intellectual culture” of the title signals that the Handbook is concerned primarily with forms of writing and thinking about music, as well as exploring a collection of possible claims about how this activity—an activity which is neither “music” nor “society” in conventional terms—might be viewed historically. A common mode of reflection along these lines is disciplinary history. For example, in 1985 Bojan Bujić took a “backward glance” at developments in “musicology and intellectual history” over the course of the previous century, demonstrating how the forces of specialization inherent in disciplinary development had gradually isolated ideas about music from broader intellectual discourses. In an effort to show how heavily embedded music had been in philosophical, psychological, historical, and scientific writing a century earlier, Bujić traced music’s appearance in the thought of a range of noted European thinkers, from those in the German idealist tradition through to those presenting developmental or evolutionary theories in a variety of national literatures. As a study of disciplinary development, this focus on learned discourse is understandable, yet more recent studies in the field of intellectual history more broadly serve to remind us that if we are to open the field of inquiry into music’s multiple entanglements with thought historically, we must take care not to limit ourselves to elite or privileged intellectual contexts, and therefore need to avoid a circumscribed view of what counts as intellectual culture (McMahon and Moyn 2014, Collini 2016, Maddox 2017).
“Intellectual culture” can sometimes imply a myopic commitment to progress, improvement, utility, and social cohesion. Yet it can also encompass a far broader range of agendas and applications. The exponential growth of journalism, fiction and travel writing, and music publishing, as well as the large-scale establishment of musical institutions such as concert societies and music academies, represents just some of the new infrastructure that shaped the way in which music was discussed in the nineteenth century. Histories of music, music textbooks, composer biographies, and autobiographies were written by the dozen, and the disciplines of musicology and what was termed comparative musicology became institutionalized. Archival research, ethnography, manuscript editing, and theorizing about the art and science of music took on new methodologies and invoked particular intellectual and ideological imperatives. It was an age of the autodidact and the polymath, with scholarly and intellectual interest in music shown by a range of writers from philosophy to the natural sciences.
In this Handbook, we are interested in the many and varied “relationships forged between ways of thinking and [their] contexts” in nineteenth-century musical culture (Wei 2012, 1). By “intellectual culture” we mean the ways in which ideas about music inform ideas more broadly, as well as the ways in which they shape narratives around musical style, history and historiography, and the kinds of music selected or avoided for performance and programming. We are also concerned with the media and means through which these ideas, linked to musical activity, are printed, distributed, and consumed (and sometimes ignored), and the ways in which these media have been received and interpreted.
The period demarcation of this Handbook is self-conscious. As Carl Dahlhaus noted, citing Georg Knepler, Guido Adler, and Friedrich Blume, from a musical perspective alone, ideas of a “Viennese Classic period,” an “age of Romanticism,” and a “modernist” period have contributed to competing models of periodization (Dahlhaus 1989, 1–2). Chris Lorenz’s recent reminders that while “the very idea of a period presupposes its substantial internal coherence vis-à-vis the other periods … chronology in itself produces neither substance nor coherence nor turning points”; that “cultures and social groups did and do fix the boundaries between past, present and future in different ways”; and (paraphrasing Arif Dirlik) that “only through the historization of the conceptual frameworks used in the construction of temporal and spatial blocs in history can their contingency and their relationships with suppressed alternatives be restored” (Lorenz 2017, 123, 110, 124) simply confirm a complex picture. Mirroring a range of recent studies in literary history and criticism, travel writing, the visual arts, race and language (Ayres 2017, Childs and Libby 2017, Hodson 2017, Olcelli 2018), this Handbook broadly adopts the notion of the “long nineteenth century.” Allowing “a series of over-lapping beginnings, contents, and endings” (Bevir 2001, 329), this approach offers workable parameters that enable discussion of writers from Goethe to Wharton, composers from Beethoven to Schoenberg, and organizations from the Institut de France to the International Society for Contemporary Music. Repertories, institutions, writings, and cultural traditions discussed in the volume are transnational in scope, including descriptions of musical performance in Africa and Japan in the travelogues of Henry Stanley and Isabella Bird, developments in Australian music education, the characterization of opera in the novels of Henry James and Willa Cather, and the significance of a wide range of British and European philosophers, critics, historians, and musicians. Lest the volume be charged with a “nineteenth-centricity,” several issues addressed in the individual chapters are contextualized appropriately through their earlier history, manifestations, or intellectual traditions (whether the writings of Rameau, or the foundation of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in the sixteenth century), or via a focus on later developments (such as Wiley’s reference to twentieth-century revisionist biography, and the explorations of the ongoing legacies of nineteenth-century thought in many of the chapters in Part III). And just as a recent nineteenth-century focus within literary criticism has had a current impact in offering “new models” for interpretation (Buurma and Heffernan 2013, 615–616), so several chapters in this volume suggest contemporary parallels.
It becomes apparent from a number of the chapters how institutional norms work in a reflexive interaction with discursive conventions. For example, while German institutions preferred seminars, which tended more often toward conceptual systemization, the French preferred the scholarly conference for research and technical instruction adhering to a formal curriculum for study; and in Britain, where religious constraints and professional politics involving the academies and conservatories slowed the recognition of musical study within universities, a combination of the increasing influence of nonconformist values, cultural philanthropy, and music’s appearance in Darwinian and Spencerian thought in the broader intellectual sphere led to its progressive legitimization in the second half of the nineteenth century.
By design, chapters do not follow a pre-determined format. Some chapters offer chronological accounts of their subject matter while others adopt a case-study approach or focus on the early or latter part of the nineteenth century, should it help cement their argument or point of view most clearly. What has not occurred by design is the gender imbalance among contributors to this volume. As many women as men were invited to contribute to the book, but fewer women could accept the invitation due to being over-committed elsewhere. However, it was also important that the range of contributors should be international, hence the inclusion of scholars from America, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Sweden, and the UK who draw on material from a multitude of language groups across the three parts of the book.
Part I, “Texts and Practices,” provides a critical context for the significant forms or genres of musical literature that were the main conduits for musical knowledge in the period. In chapter 1, “History, Historicism, Historiography,” by Kevin C. Karnes, three modes of thinking historically about music in nineteenth-century Europe are considered, exploring facets of the philosophical, ideological, and political heritage of each. Beginning with claims about the uses of history, the chapter then shifts to writings about the geographies of history before concluding with the peoples of history. Each section is supported by examples from a range of literature, from Nietzsche to Engel. In chapter 2, “Criticism,” Noel Verzosa interrogates narratives of positivism that were ubiquitous in nineteenth-century criticism, arguing that French music criticism and positivism—whose births coincided exactly with each other—were effectively part of the same cultural project. In chapter 3, “Figures and Forms of Analysis Practice,” Rémy Campos considers the recent history of this area of research. He maps the intellectual changes in the conception and use of analytical discourse by musicologists, as well as amateur and professional musicians who have increasingly made use of analysis in the last two centuries. Campos illustrates how the development of musical analysis is linked to several major changes in the cultural history of the nineteenth century: widespread literacy of musicians, success of comment disciplines (e.g., hermeneutics, art criticism, philology, etc.), and the growing autonomy of art.
Christopher Wiley, in chapter 4, “Biography and Life-Writing,” 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.
Chapter 5, “Travel Writing,” by Michael Allis, discusses the ways in which music has been represented, referenced, and discussed in nineteenth-century travel literature. Focusing upon writings descriptive of travel from 1800–1914, Allis demonstrates how these texts are demonstrably rich in musical reference, documenting performing practice, referencing composers and performers, commenting on music’s status, and providing detailed accounts of creative partnerships. Musical references also contribute to tropes of “otherness,” and highlight competing levels of national musicality and identity. However, travel writing can also be used as a hermeneutic tool to explore “meaning” in specific musical works. In chapter 6, “Philosophy and Aesthetics,” Lawrence Kramer argues that although nineteenth-century philosophy and aesthetics consigned music primarily to the sphere of feeling, inwardness, and subjectivity, the instrumental art music of the era sometimes sought—and found—the ability to defy this limitation and engage in a musical version of philosophical reflection. To understand the relationship between philosophy and music during the period, he proposes, it is not enough to examine the philosophy of music; rather, we must view ideas about music as philosophy. He pursues this argument through case studies of works by Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Nietzsche.
Fiction and poetry is the subject of chapter 7 by Michael Halliwell, where narratives about the prima donna loom large in any discussion of music’s role in aesthetics and the broader intellectual life of the century. These artists captured the imagination of poets and novelists such as Gustav Flaubert, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Walt Whitman, William Makepeace Thackeray, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, Henry James, George du Maurier, Willa Cather, E. M. Forster, and Edith Wharton, who all used this potent social and musical force to explore a wide variety of aesthetic, philosophical, and social ideas and issues.
In the final chapter of this part of the book, “Ephemera,” Catherine Massip explains how ephemera is of interest both to musical historiography and to intellectual culture. We have to consider many different kinds of materials: concert and opera programs, playbills of performances, auctioneers and antiquarians’ catalogues, newspaper and journal cuttings, prospectuses for advertising by musical societies, illustrated title pages of music, posters, postcards, tickets, menus, bills, visiting cards, obituaries, and marriage licenses, among many other categories.
Part II of this volume, “Networks and Institutions,” reflects both the increasing need in the nineteenth century for physical spaces and forums where musical culture could be discussed and the developments in travel and communication networks that allowed scholars, collectors, performers, critics, composers, and musical enthusiasts to share ideas. As Paul Watt argues in chapter 9, newspapers and periodicals were key in the dissemination of intellectual and cultural ideas; the increase in literacy not only encouraged the publication of a wide range of music-related journals and periodicals where ideas could be broadly disseminated but also offered readers the opportunity to engage in intellectual debate, with the potential to challenge editorial policy or take issue with the comments of a growing body of significant writers—the professional music critics. By focusing on the distinctive intellectual lives of petites revues (“little magazines”), Watt highlights ways in which these publications often offered alternatives to mainstream publications—whether the extended musical analyses and essays in the New Quarterly Musical Review or the specialized remit of the Revue wagnérienne.
Taking as his starting point William Lebenow’s suggestion (2015, back cover) that “escape to networks of association and belonging” represented one “road to modernity” in early nineteenth-century culture, Jeremy Dibble, in chapter 10, explores the role of musical societies and institutions. Noting the diversity of these associations in terms of membership and support (ranging from the state-sponsored Académie des Beaux Arts in France to private clubs such as the Réunion des Arts in London’s Harley Street) and the wealth of activities that they encouraged (including concerts, editions, lectures, competitions, colloquia, and scholarly publications), Dibble charts the various motivations behind these networks, echoing many of the themes in part I of this book; variously representative of professionalization, self-improvement, public education and the promotion of culture, scholarly endeavor, and nationalist agendas, institutions such as the Internationale Musikgesellschaft (established in 1899) reflected a growing sense of “international outreach.”
If some of the learned societies highlighted by Dibble catered to more specialized interests, Martin V. Clarke’s chapter 11 on churches and devotional practice reminds us how intellectual engagement often had wider practical consequences in terms of music-making. Hymnology, with its interdisciplinary situation “at the convergence of literature, music, and religion,” was not only the subject of scholarly research and debate in dictionary and encyclopedia entries; the documentation of singing practices, repertories, and cultural traditions experienced in missionary work also established a growing field of intellectual inquiry and revealed a global diversity of approach. As Clarke demonstrates, through sermons, lectures, and a plethora of publications aimed at historians, religious leaders, and congregations alike, a network of clergy, church musicians, and scholars was able to explore the role of music as part of religious experience, applying the fruits of research directly within professional practice.
Collectors, archivists, and librarians represented another important nineteenth-century network; indeed, with a figure such as François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), the delineation between his role as a private collector and as an expert appointed by national institutions (the Paris Conservatoire and the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels) to build up their particular holdings was not always clear. While the nineteenth century saw a growth in subscription and public libraries, along with ever-expanding music collections in national libraries and museums, conservatoires, universities, and academies of music, Mattias Lundberg, in chapter 12, identifies some of the intellectual concepts behind these collecting practices. In developing Raphael Kieswetter’s categories of collectors—those interested in the ancient, in items of the highest quality, in following a “completist” strategy, and those focusing on curiosities (Kieswetter 1834, v)—Lundberg discusses the particular interest in the “obsolete,” rare or obscure, those pursuing completist and universalist agendas, and others practicing a “historical rejuvenation.” Invoking Aleida Assmann’s definition of “cultural memory” (Assmann 2012), Lundberg suggests that the contemporary notion of latency (passive, stored information that could be retrieved if needed) is applicable to the collecting practices of several custodians of musical culture in the nineteenth century.
The expansion of musical libraries was of course not the only contribution that conservatories and universities made to intellectual culture. As Peter Tregear demonstrates in chapter 13, the creation of new institutions, or the development of programs of musical study within those already established, catered deliberately to the growing professionalization of music during the nineteenth century. Tracing the rise of the discipline of music in both types of institutions, including their increasingly distinctive roles (the universities being associated primarily with scholarly research, music history, music theory, and music appreciation; the conservatories with vocal and instrumental tuition, specialized teacher training, and—initially—acoustics), Tregear reminds us how such developments reflected a range of contemporary issues. These included the role of music education in relation to moral character, social mobility, national and universal values, idealistic/pragmatic tensions, and the status of culture in general.
Simon McVeigh’s final chapter in part II focuses on the concert series. Although the broad narrative of how concerts developed in the nineteenth century (whether in terms of growing numbers, the significance of specific performers, programming strategies, or the development of the program note) is a familiar one, McVeigh charts the many tensions at the center of this important marker of nineteenth-century culture as part of a “contested space.” Not only were there alternative practices in metropolitan areas and the provinces, a variety of audience models in terms of class distinction and integration, and competing ideologies of generic hierarchy and how specific repertory related to culture and taste, but the concert series and surrounding debates encapsulated many of the cultural dichotomies highlighted in this volume: national and cosmopolitan identities, the commercial and the idealistic, the individual and the societal, the professional and the amateur, the spiritual and the intellectual, the old and the new.
Part III of this volume, “Discourses,” traces strains of nineteenth-century thought in which the idea of music was a shaping factor, and considers the contemporary implications or ongoing legacy of these discourses. In chapter 15 on “Musical Canons,” William Weber reveals how the increasing separation between different spheres of musical activity in the nineteenth century was underpinned by distinct intellectual apparatus and value structures that continue to condition our treatment of these activities and their canonic repertories today. Daniel M. Grimley, in chapter 16, explores how musical evocations of landscape give us insight into forms of subjectivity in the nineteenth century that are not otherwise apparent through nonmusical sources. In chapter 17, Sarah Collins traces continuities between the categories of the “national” and “universal” in the work of early nineteenth-century thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill, whose work was later used to rationalize exclusivist nationalisms, arguing that their respective treatment of music illuminates a nonhierarchical conception of the “world” that could be created—through music-making and other activities—according to universalizable principles. Likewise, Bennett Zon, in chapter 18, extrapolates the relationship between two major areas of discourse in the nineteenth century that are commonly considered to have been opposed—science and religion—and shows through ideas about music how they in fact mirror one another with respect to their treatment of the central human categories of body, mind, and soul. Zon argues that the idea of music sometimes mediated and reflected this compatibility. And Gillian M. Rodger, in chapter 19, argues that the intellectual culture of working-class populations in the United States during the nineteenth century can be more fully understood by viewing popular song and its associated tropes and conventions alongside other textual resources such as newspapers and magazines that were directed toward a working-class readership.
In his chapter 20 on “Emotions,” Michael Spitzer argues that the state of philosophizing about emotions in the nineteenth century was sometimes in inverse relation to the exploration of the physiological and moral aspects of emotional states and the idea of subjectivity and affective sympathy as the basis of sociability in musical practice. For example, he notes that while German philosophers never created taxonomies of emotion in the manner of David Hume and Adam Smith, they perfected, in the form of the piano miniature, a musical taxonomy of emotion. And while early nineteenth-century French orchestral music explored the relationship between the psychological and moral aspects of emotion, French philosophers such as Victor Cousin and Auguste Comte never systematically addressed the issue.
Benedict Taylor, in chapter 21, similarly marks out for music a role in discourse, specifically with respect to the understanding and experience of time and temporality in the long nineteenth century. Taylor explores how music was thought to structure time, not only through harmony, melody, and rhythm but also through what was conceived as its unmediated aesthetic properties. In chapter 22, Tomás McAuley traces how changes in ideas about music arose from or related to changes in ethical thought, and he describes how this observation can provide insight into the ethical bases of musical discourses today.
In the final chapter of the Handbook, Michel Duchesneau retrieves the work of polymaths, historians, critics, and amateur writers—especially in Italy, England, and France—who predated the move toward specialization and institutionalization in the discipline of musicology, showing an earlier malleability of the boundaries of musical thinking in the nineteenth century that shares some characteristics with contemporary interdisciplinarity.
There is undoubtedly far more to be done in the area sketched by contributors to this Handbook. How, for example, are we to take account of musical performance as itself an intellectual practice historically? What role has been played by practices of translation or other forms of adaptation that sometimes have far-reaching effects? And what of the multitude of local, regional, and global networks of musical thought that remain to be excavated, especially of exilic or diasporic communities,? Many of the chapters in this Handbook sketch intellectual practices across class boundaries, giving a glimpse of the sheer range of these practices that we must begin to grapple with historically. Some of the chapters also trace the influence of ideas about music in other areas of discourse, such as science, history, economics, ecology, religion, early psychology, philosophy, and politics, opening the way for further mapping across areas while coming to terms with the impact of this cross-pollination upon local generic conventions—conventions which have a continuing legacy within intellectual practices today. Overall, this Handbook challenges the pervasive notion that the history of practices of thinking, writing, and talking about music is a mere footnote to the history of music “itself,” on the one hand, or simply a type of disciplinary history, on the other. It looks directly at practices and structures that mediated ways of thinking about music over the course of the “long” nineteenth century.