Late Eighteenth-century Music and Visual Culture

Late Eighteenth-century Music and Visual Culture
Author: Cliff Eisen
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Art and music
ISBN: 9782503546292

The late eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing exchange between music and visual art which was expressed in the creative as well as commercial cultures of the time. Nevertheless, there has been relatively little research to actively consider and thoroughly examine the symbiotic relationship between looking and listening during the period. In this volume, nine prominent scholars employ a set of interdisciplinary methodological tools in order to come to a comprehensive understanding of the rich tapestry of eighteenth-century musical taste, performance, consumption and aesthetics. While the link between visual material and musicological study lies at the heart of the research presented in this collection of essays, the importance of the textual element, as it denoted the process of thinking about music and the various ways in which that was symbolically and often literally visualized in writing and print culture, is also closely examined. Through a critical analysis of a number of important contemporary sources as well as current scholarship and research, the authors draw conclusions that extend well beyond the scope of their immediate material and closely-formulated questions. The conversation opened up in the chapters of this volume will hopefully break new ground on which the interrelationship between art and music, and more broadly between visual art and other forms of creative practice, may be studied and debated.

Instrumental Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples

Instrumental Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples
Author: Anthony DelDonna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-12-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108477615

This book demonstrates the cultivation of instrumental genres by Neapolitan musicians and its significant stature at the royal court. Drawing on archival documents and musical sources, it paints a compelling history of local instrumental music culture and contributes to a wider ethnographic portrait of Naples in the late eighteenth-century.

Sovereign Feminine

Sovereign Feminine
Author: Matthew Head
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2013-05-09
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520954769

In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity—a newly emerging and primarily bourgeois ideal—linked women and music under the valorized signs of refinement, sensibility, virtue, patriotism, luxury, and, above all, beauty. This moment in musical history was eclipsed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately erased from the music-historical record, by now familiar developments: the formation of musical canons, a musical history based on technical progress, the idea of masterworks, authorial autonomy, the musical sublime, and aggressively essentializing ideas about the relationship between sex, gender and art. In Sovereign Feminine, Matthew Head restores this earlier musical history and explores the role that women played in the development of classical music.

The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century

The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century
Author: D R M Irving
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2024
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197632181

In this book, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories as "European music" and "Western music," showing how they originate from self-fashioning in contexts of intercultural comparison outside the European continent rather than the resolution of national aesthetic differences within it. Taken as a whole, this study demonstrates how reductive labels for the musics of a continent or a hemisphere often imply homogeneity and essentialism, and how a renewed critique of primary sources can help dismantle historiographical constructs that arose within narratives of musical pasts involving Europe.

The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture

The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture
Author: Tim Shephard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2013-07-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135956537

As a coherent field of research, the field of music and visual culture has seen rapid growth in recent years. The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture serves as the first comprehensive reference on the intersection between these two areas of study, an ideal introduction for those coming to the field for the first time as well as a useful source of information for seasoned researchers. This collection of over forty entries, from musicologists and art historians from the US and UK, delineate the key concepts in the field in five parts: Starting Points Methodologies Reciprocation – the musical in visual culture and the visual in musical culture Convergence –in metaphor, in conception, and in practice Hybrid Arts This reference work speaks to the important questions concerning this burgeoning field of research –what are the established approaches to studying musical and visual cultures side by side? What have been the major points of contact between these two areas and what kind of questions can this interdisciplinary research address moving forward? The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the field of music and visual culture.

The Sound of the English Picturesque

The Sound of the English Picturesque
Author: Stephen Groves
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-12-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000985911

Revealing the connections between the veneration of national landscape and eighteenth- century English vocal music, this study restores English music’s relationship with the picturesque. In the eighteenth century, the emerging taste for the picturesque was central to British aesthetics, as poets and painters gained popularity by glorifying the local landscape in works concurrent with the emergence of native countryside tourism. Yet English music was seldom discussed as a medium for conveying national scenic beauty. Stephen Groves explores this gap, and shows how secular song, the glee, and national theatre music expressed a uniquely English engagement with landscape. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Groves addresses the apparent ‘silence’ of the English picturesque. The book draws on analysis of the visualisations present in the texts of English vocal music, and their musical treatment, to demonstrate how local composers incorporated celebrations of landscape into their works. The final chapter shows that the English picturesque was a crucial influence on Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons. Suitable for anyone with an interest in eighteenth- century music, aesthetics, and the natural environment, this book will appeal to a wide range of specialists and non- specialists alike.

Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow

Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow
Author: Deirdre Loughridge
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 022633709X

Introduction : audiovisual histories -- From mimesis to prosthesis -- Opera as peepshow -- Shadow media -- Haydn's Creation as moving image -- Beethoven's phantasmagoria -- Conclusion : audiovisual returns

Instrumental Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples

Instrumental Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples
Author: Anthony R. DelDonna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-12-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108804942

The music of early modern Naples and its renowned artistic traditions remain a fruitful area for scholars in eighteenth-century studies. Contemporary social, political, and artistic conditions had stimulated a significant growth of music, musicians and culture in the Kingdom of Naples from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although eighteenth-century Neapolitan opera is well documented in scholarship, historians have paid much less attention to the simultaneous cultivation of instrumental genres. Yet the culture of instrumental music grew steadily and by its end became an exclusive area of focus for the royal court, a remarkable departure from past norms of patronage. By bridging this gap, Anthony R. DelDonna brings together diverse fields, including historical musicology, music theory, Neapolitan and European history. His book investigates the wide-ranging role of instrumental genres within late eighteenth-century Neapolitan culture and introduces readers to new material, including recently discovered instrumental works of Paisiello, Cimarosa and Pleyel.