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MUSICAL EXPRESSION: LESSONS FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2020

BETTINA VARWIG
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Abstract

This article outlines a number of potential contributions that a consideration of early eighteenth-century conceptions of musical expressivity might make to certain present-day philosophical and psychological accounts of musical emotions and their expression. Taking as its central case study a performance by Christian Gerhaher in Peter Sellars's 2014 staging of J. S. Bach's St John Passion, the article calls for closer attention to both the historical specifics of music's expressive capacities and the corporeal dimension of performance (past and present). It argues that a more sustained engagement with these domains can productively complicate some fundamental assumptions that underpin current approaches to musical expression.

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Articles
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Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 53 - 72
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2020

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References

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63 Rupert Christiansen declared Sellars's staging of Bach's St Matthew Passion a ‘tasteless spectacle best appreciated with eyes closed’. See his review in The Daily Telegraph (7 September 2014) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/11079980/BBC-Prom-66-St-Matthew-Passion-review-verging-on-ludicrous.html (17 June 2019).

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73 Cumming, following Manfred Clynes, identifies this as an archetypal ‘grief’ gesture: ‘The Subjectivities of “Erbarme Dich”’, 22.

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