The Virtuoso as Subject - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Virtuoso as Subject write by Zarko Cvejić. This book was released on 2016-06-22. The Virtuoso as Subject available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book offers a novel interpretation of the sudden and steep decline of instrumental virtuosity in its critical reception between c. 1815 and c. 1850, documenting it with a large number of examples from Europe’s leading music periodicals at the time. The increasingly hostile critical reception of instrumental virtuosity during this period is interpreted from the perspective of contemporary aesthetics and philosophical conceptions of human subjectivity; the book’s main thesis is that virtuosity qua irreducibly bodily performance generated so much hostility because it was deemed incompatible with, and even threatening to, the new Romantic philosophical conception of music as a radically disembodied, abstract, autonomous art and, moreover, a symbol or model – if only a utopian one – of a similarly autonomous and free human subject, whose freedom and autonomy seemed increasingly untenable in the economic and political context of post-Napoleonic Europe. That is why music, newly reconceived as radically abstract and autonomous, plays such an important part in the philosophy of early German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, with their growing misgivings about the very possibility of human freedom, and not so much in the preceding generation of thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel, who still believed in the (transcendentally) free subject of the Enlightenment. For the early German Romantics, music becomes a model of human freedom, if freedom could exist. By contrast, virtuosity, irredeemably moored in the perishable human body, ephemeral, and beholden to such base motives as making money and gaining fame, is not only incompatible with music thus conceived, but also threatens to expose it as an illusion, in other words, as irreducibly corporeal, and, by extension, the human subject it was meant to symbolise as likewise an illusion. Only with that in mind, may we begin to understand the hostility of some early to mid-19th-century critics to instrumental virtuosity, which sometimes reached truly bizarre proportions. In order to accomplish this, the book looks at contemporary aesthetics and philosophy, the contemporary reception of virtuosity in performance and composition, and the impact of 19th-century gender ideology on the reception of some leading virtuosi, male and female alike.
The Virtuoso Under Subjection
The Virtuoso Under Subjection - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Virtuoso Under Subjection write by Zarko Cvejic. This book was released on 2011. The Virtuoso Under Subjection available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The purpose of this dissertation is to offer a novel reading of the steady decline that instrumental virtuosity underwent in its critical reception between c. 1815 and c. 1850, represented here by a selection of the most influential music periodicals edited in Europe at that time. In contemporary philosophy, the same period saw, on the one hand, the reconceptualization of music (especially of instrumental music) from "pleasant nonsense" (Sulzer) and a merely "agreeable art" (Kant) into the "most romantic of the arts" (E.T.A. Hoffmann), a radically disembodied, aesthetically autonomous, and transcendent art and on the other, the growing suspicion about the tenability of the free subject of the Enlightenment. This dissertation's main claim is that those three developments did not merely coincide but, rather, that the changes in the aesthetics of music and the philosophy of subjectivity around 1800 made a deep impact on the contemporary critical reception of instrumental virtuosity. More precisely, it seems that instrumental virtuosity was increasingly regarded with suspicion because it was deemed incompatible with, and even threatening to, the new philosophic conception of music and via it, to the increasingly beleaguered notion of subjective freedom that music thus reconceived was meant to symbolize. Thus while the virtuoso could be and often was celebrated as a direct embodiment of free subjectivity, he was more typically dreaded as a threat to it. Chapter One reviews the conceptual links between music and subjectivity in the early German Romantics, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, as well as in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. The topic of Chapter Two is the impact of early-nineteenth-century aesthetics of music and the philosophy of subjectivity on the critical reception of virtuosity in performance, with focus on the denigration of performance (and thus also of virtuosity) in favor of composition, the imposition of interpretation as the guiding ideal of performance, and the binary opposition between "expressivity" and "empty virtuosic technique". Chapter Three revisits some of the same issues but in the context of the reception of virtuosity in composition and adds some new ones, such as the valorization of clear-cut formal structures and historically established genres at the expense of program music, improvisation, and most genres of virtuosic music. Finally, Chapter Four examines the hyper-masculine tropes in the reception of some virtuosi, their female rivals, and Chopin, from the perspective of the contemporary gendering of the subject, of music, and of musical instruments.
Crescendo of the Virtuoso
Crescendo of the Virtuoso - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Crescendo of the Virtuoso write by Paul Metzner. This book was released on 2024-07-26. Crescendo of the Virtuoso available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. During the Age of Revolution, Paris came alive with wildly popular virtuoso performances. Whether the performers were musicians or chefs, chess players or detectives, these virtuosos transformed their technical skills into dramatic spectacles, presenting the marvelous and the outré for spellbound audiences. Who these characters were, how they attained their fame, and why Paris became the focal point of their activities is the subject of Paul Metzner's absorbing study. Covering the years 1775 to 1850, Metzner describes the careers of a handful of virtuosos: chess masters who played several games at once; a chef who sculpted hundreds of four-foot-tall architectural fantasies in sugar; the first police detective, whose memoirs inspired the invention of the detective story; a violinist who played whole pieces on a single string. He examines these virtuosos as a group in the context of the society that was then the capital of Western civilization. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1999.
The English Virtuoso
The English Virtuoso - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The English Virtuoso write by Craig A. Hanson. This book was released on 2009-05-15. The English Virtuoso available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This study aims to overturn 20th-century criticism that cast the English virtuosi of the 17th and early 18th centuries as misguided dabblers, arguing that they were erudite individuals with solid grounding in the classics, deep appreciation for the arts and sincere curiosity about the natural world.
Schumann's Virtuosity
Schumann's Virtuosity - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Schumann's Virtuosity write by Alexander Stefaniak. This book was released on 2016-09-19. Schumann's Virtuosity available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. “A valuable resource for musicologists, theorists, pianists, and aestheticians interested in reading about Schumann’s views on virtuosity.” —Notes Considered one of the greatest composers—and music critics—of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann (1810–1856) played an important role in shaping nineteenth-century German ideas about virtuosity. Forging his career in the decades that saw abundant public fascination with the feats and creations of virtuosos (Liszt, Paganini, and Chopin among others), Schumann engaged with instrumental virtuosity through not only his compositions and performances but also his music reviews and writings about his contemporaries. Ultimately, the discourse of virtuosity influenced the culture of Western “art music” well beyond the nineteenth century and into the present day. By examining previously unexplored archival sources, Alexander Stefaniak looks at the diverse approaches to virtuosity Schumann developed over the course of his career, revealing several distinct currents in nineteenth-century German virtuosity and the enduring flexibility of virtuosity discourse.
