Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Figures and Music examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaches to Word–Music Studies of the Long Nineteenth Century
- 1 Losing Sense, Making Music: What Erik Satie's Music and Poetry do for Each Other
- 2 Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Attention at the Opera
- 3 New Expectations: How to Listen to Sonata Form, 1800–1860
- 4 The Science of Musical Memory: Vernon Lee and the Remembrance of Sounds Past
- 5 Musical Listening in The Mysteries of Udolpho
- 6 Katherine Mansfield and Nineteenth-Century Musicality
- 7 E.T.A. Hoffmann beyond the ‘Paradigm shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas 1815–1819
- 8 Fiction as Musical Critique: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out and the Case of Wagner
- 9 Théodore de Banville and the Mysteries of Song
- 10 Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire's Invitation to Song
- 11 The Grit in the Oyster, or How to Quarrel with a Poet
- Afterword: Wording Notes: Musical Marginalia in the Guise of an Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - E.T.A. Hoffmann beyond the ‘Paradigm shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas 1815–1819
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Figures and Music examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaches to Word–Music Studies of the Long Nineteenth Century
- 1 Losing Sense, Making Music: What Erik Satie's Music and Poetry do for Each Other
- 2 Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Attention at the Opera
- 3 New Expectations: How to Listen to Sonata Form, 1800–1860
- 4 The Science of Musical Memory: Vernon Lee and the Remembrance of Sounds Past
- 5 Musical Listening in The Mysteries of Udolpho
- 6 Katherine Mansfield and Nineteenth-Century Musicality
- 7 E.T.A. Hoffmann beyond the ‘Paradigm shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas 1815–1819
- 8 Fiction as Musical Critique: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out and the Case of Wagner
- 9 Théodore de Banville and the Mysteries of Song
- 10 Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire's Invitation to Song
- 11 The Grit in the Oyster, or How to Quarrel with a Poet
- Afterword: Wording Notes: Musical Marginalia in the Guise of an Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In recent decades a preoccupation with the date 1800 has emerged in Anglo-phone musical research. This moment is said to mark a paradigm shift in the history of musical ideas and the replacement of one set of values and practices by another. Music historians tell a story of the decline of mimesis in music aesthetics and the emergence of idealism, along with the ascent of music within conceptual hierarchies of the fine arts. In most accounts the relationship between music and language is of central importance. Whereas eighteenth-century critics valued vocal music over instrumental music (the precision of linguistic representation compensating for the obscurity of musical signs), for the Romantics that very obscurity allowed music to disclose the hidden nature of ultimate reality more effectively than language. Many current musicologists tell how the patterns of thought that emerged around 1800 persisted in modern musical ‘high’ culture for much of the next two centuries: ‘Today, we are still making music under the premises of the post-1800 paradigm.’
The near-fixation with the familiar tale of the paradigm shift is no accident. It offers a way to understand and control some contested issues in contemporary musicology. By pinpointing the emergence of modern musical discourse at 1800 scholars can isolate and define their own intellectual inheritance, whether they approve of it or not. Thus, on the one hand, they chart ‘the emancipation of music from language’ during the late eighteenth century and uncover the origins of modern conceptions of musical autonomy and the emergence of the discourses of music criticism, hermeneutics and technical analysis at just the time that Mozart and Beethoven were composing their instrumental works.
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- Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century , pp. 119 - 144Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013