YOUNG MAN’S FANCY: ENLIGHTENMENT TAXONOMY AND THE FEMINIZATION OF THE FREE MUSICAL FANTASIA by MICHAEL D. WEINSTEIN-REIMAN A THESIS Presented to the School of Music and Dance and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts June 2014 ii THESIS APPROVAL PAGE Student: Michael D. Weinstein-Reiman Title: Young Man’s Fancy: Enlightenment Taxonomy and the Feminization of the Free Musical Fantasia This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the School of Music and Dance by: Roger Grant Chair Lori Kruckenberg Member Stephen Rodgers Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research and Innovation; Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2014 iii Copyright 2014 Michael D. Weinstein-Reiman iv THESIS ABSTRACT Michael D. Weinstein-Reiman Master of Arts School of Music and Dance June 2014 Title: Young Man’s Fancy: Enlightenment Taxonomy and the Feminization of the Free Musical Fantasia In this thesis, I explicate the linkage between gender and the phenomenology of musical extemporaneity in the Enlightenment. In so doing, I trace the development of the free musical fantasia from its improvisatory roots in the music of courtesans to its codification as a Baroque topos and its eighteenth-century classification in the treatises of philosophers and music theorists. Enlightenment discourses on the free fantasia coincide with the emergence of the fantastic as a literary genre. This association manifests in the construction of the idea of “feminine music as other,” signified by an infatuation with technology, the exhibition of talented female performers and automatons in these narratives, and the awareness of the subconscious as a viable wellspring of creative ideas. As such, the urge to rationalize musical expression at this time may be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the limits of Classical semiotics around the year 1800. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Michael D. Weinstein-Reiman GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Mannes College: The New School for Music, New York Brandeis University, Waltham, MA DEGREES AWARDED: Master of Arts, Music Theory, 2014, University of Oregon Master of Music, Composition, 2012, Mannes College Bachelor of Arts, Music, 2004, Brandeis University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: History of Music Theory Musical Improvisation Women’s and Gender Studies Critical Theory PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Teaching Assistant, School of Music and Dance, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2012–2014 Teaching Assistant, Mannes College, New York, 2011–12 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Music Theory, University of Oregon, 2012–2014 Techniques of Music Fellowship, Mannes College, 2011–2012 Highest Honors, Undergraduate Thesis, Brandeis University, 2004 Phi Beta Kappa, 2003 Justice Brandeis Scholarship, Brandeis University, 2000–2004 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This document would not have been possible without the generosity of several people. I am grateful foremost to the vibrant community of scholars at the University of Oregon that embraced me upon my matriculation in 2012. To my colleagues and friends Lauren Joiner, Wing Lau, Anne O’Dell, Joon Park, Andrew Pokorny, Adam Shanley, and Helena Kopchik Spencer, I owe a debt of gratitude for their patience and enthusiasm. Likewise, I am grateful to Jessica Simoes for her kind words of encouragement, and for championing my many peregrinations throughout the School of Music and Dance. I am humbled by the professors who have inspired me to contribute to our discipline. As I reflect on these pages, I would like to acknowledge Stephanie Jensen- Moulton, whose good cheer, helpful feedback, and shared love of caffeine enabled me to do this work. Robert Cuckson at Mannes cultivated in me a love for music theory that was deeply invested in practice, and has advised my work as a scholar and composer with unparalleled kindness. In seminars and private conversations, my committee members have shaped this document in innumerable ways. Lori Kruckenberg’s course on musical notation pushed me to expand the scope of my project, and fortified my passion for early sources. Likewise, I am fortunate to have studied with Steve Rodgers, whose mentorship and insight I have treasured these past two years. My family continues to nurture my love of music in countless ways. Barbra Locker and Penny Zuckerwise have been cheerleaders par excellence, and I am indebted to them for their unflagging hospitality, generosity, and encouragement. My mother, Janice, and sister, Aly, have been utterly convinced of my success when I was not, and vii have always encouraged me to take risks. For the company and support of my husband, Aaron, I could not be more thankful. Lastly, this thesis would not exist without the tireless work of Roger Grant, in whom I have found my most valuable interlocutor. At every class meeting, every coffee, and every “quick” chat, I have been the lucky recipient of Roger’s superlative advising. Thank you, Roger, for guiding this process, and for showing me what makes the eighteenth century so fantastic. viii To Aaron. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 II. NOTATION AND A RENAISSANCE EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUANDARY .... 4 III. THE BAROQUE: AFFECT AND THE STYLUS FANTASTICUS ....................... 10 IV. MUSIC MAKING BY WOMEN AND THE HEGEMONY OF NOTATION .... 27 V. WAS IST AUFKLÄRUNG? SONATA QUE ME VEUX-TU? A SURVEY OF TAXONOMY AND MUSIC CRITICISM ................................. 42 VI. LE DIABLE AMOUREUX AND DER SANDMANN: THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION ............................................................... 61 VII. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 71 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 74 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 3.1. “De Vocibus volucrum” in Kircher, Musurgia universalis ................................. 16 3.2. Keys and Affections in Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre ....................... 24 4.1. Caccini, “Movetevi a pietà” in Le nuove musiche, mm. 1–11 ............................. 32 4.2. Froberger, Fantasia supra Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, mm. 1–13 ................................ 36 5.1. Louis Couperin, Prélude non mesuré .................................................................. 46 5.2. François Couperin, Premier Prélude from L’Art de toucher le clavecin, mm. 1–11 ............................................................................................................. 47 5.3. C.P.E. Bach, Fantasia in D major ......................................................................... 58 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In Jacques Cazotte’s fantasy narrative Le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love) from 1772, the protagonist Alvaro—a naïve and well-meaning youth turned amateur necromancer—conjures the devil in an attempt to impress his older compatriots with his desire for an understanding of the supernatural. The devil takes the form of a beautiful female musician, a Roman improvvisatrice who, in turn, captivates with her artistic agility and femininity. It should be noted, however, that the improvvisatrice’s charms are not only summoned by the imagination of the male protagonist, but also objectified and consumed by an audience of pleasure-seeking male voyeurs. “She takes her harp,” writes Cazotte, She preludes with a small, longish and plump hand, at once pale and purple, on which the fingers, rounded at the tips, are finished by a nail almost inconceivable in form and grace; we were all surprised, and believed to be present at a most delectable concert.1 Later in the novel, the devil—now christened Biondetta—becomes Alvaro’s consort. Near the end of the narrative, seated at a harpsichord that she has built, Biondetta improvises, swept away in a dreamlike state as the unwitting object of Alvaro’s gaze through a keyhole. In both of these instances, Cazotte signifies the acts of Biondetta’s music making as extemporaneous, indicating that she “preludes” or that, in fact, her 1 “Elle prélude avec une petite main longuette, potelée, tout à la fois blanche et purpurine, dont les doigts insensiblement arrondis par le bout, étoient terminés par un ongle dont la forme et la grâce étoient inconcevables; nous étions tous surpris, nous croyions être au plus délicieux concert.” Jacques Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux (Paris, 1772), 25. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 music book is closed during her performance.2 Musical improvisation in the novel is, in a sense, reinterpreted as feminine display created for male consumption. Biondetta’s public performance is offered to the reader as Alvaro imagines it and creates it from his subconscious, while her private one could not exist in the literary paradigm without Alvaro—and the reader—as witnesses, if not voyeurs. By examining select writings in literature and music theory from the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, I seek to explicate the ways in which gender and musical improvisation were often linked during the Enlightenment. In so doing, I trace the development of the free musical fantasia from its earliest codification as a quasi- improvisational genre to its classification as a musical topos already in seventeenth- century music theory.3 The emergence of the fantastic literary narrative in the late- eighteenth century—and the genre’s frequent depiction of extemporaneous musical performances by women—invites further investigation into the connection between these tales, improvisation, and gender. Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux, a prototype for the literary fantastic, and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816), widely considered a quintessential example of the genre, together serve as a point of reflection in my analysis. As case studies, the bewitching musical displays of Cazotte’s Biondetta and Hoffmann’s Olimpia underscore the link between the changing conception of the free fantasia and the appearance of fantasy novels around the year 1800. This association manifests vis-à-vis 2 “Elle avoit devant elle un livre fermé sur le pupitre. Elle prélude et chante à demi-voix en s'accompagnant.” “She had before her a closed book on the music stand. She preludes and sings in a whisper while accompanying herself.” Jacques Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux, 78. 3 See Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), and V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 3 the construction of the idea of “feminine music as other,” signified by an infatuation with technology, the exhibition of exceptionally musically talented female performers and automatons in these narratives, and the increasing awareness of the existence of the psychological subconscious as a legitimate wellspring of creative, musical ideas. In what follows, I posit that the academic urge to rationalize and quantify free musical expression at this time might be taken as a reaction against the encroaching sentimentality, Empfindsamkeit, or even femininity of the Romantic period. While others have pointed to a vast corpus of nineteenth-century musical, literary, and theoretical material often associated with the fantastic, Gothic, or even uncanny, I am mainly concerned here with musical fantasy as representation within a complex system of early-modern semiotics.! The epistemological reconfiguration initiated by the Enlightenment thus reveals a generation of eighteenth-century thinkers at pains to understand free musical expression, inherently non-representational, alongside the acknowledgment of the limits of Classical signification. These unsettling ideas converge in literary portrayals of women making music at the dawn of the nineteenth century. 4 See Francesca Brittan, “On Microscopic Hearing: Fairy Magic, Natural Science, and the Scherzo fantastique,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64:3 (Fall 2011): 527–600, and Marianna Ritchey, “Echoes of the Guillotine: Berlioz and the French Fantastic,” 19th-Century Music 34:2 (Fall 2010): 168–185. 4 CHAPTER II NOTATION AND A RENAISSANCE EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUANDARY Before embarking on a full-scale investigation of where and how the notions of extemporaneous music making and femininity intersect, it is necessary to examine the subtleties that distinguish “fantasia” from “improvisation” and the terms’ respective categorizations in the Enlightenment. In this section, I trace the origins of the fantastic topos to the emergence of printed music in the late fifteenth century—a cultural reconfiguration that relegated unnotated music to a liminal metaphysical space. Johannes Tinctoris’s 1477 Liber de arte contrapuncti engenders a discourse around somewhat vexing terminology for two supposedly opposed compositional tactics: res facta (or “made thing”) and cantare super librum (alternately super librum cantare, or “singing upon the book”). Several scholars have evoked Tinctoris’s treatise in an attempt to wrest from it fifteenth-century analogues for the modern terms “composition” and “improvisation.” The much-contested passage begins: 1. That counterpoint, both simple and diminished is made in two ways, that is, in writing or in the mind, and how resfacta [sic.] differs from counterpoint. 2. Furthermore, counterpoint both simple and diminished, is made in two ways, that is, either in writing or in the mind. 3. Counterpoint that is written is commonly called resfacta. 4. But that which we make together mentally we call counterpoint in the [absolute] sense, and they who do this are vulgarly said to sing upon the book.5 5 Johannes Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti (1477), in Opera theoretica, Albert Seay, ed., Corpus scriptorum de musica, XXII (Rome, 1975). Original Latin: “Quod tam simplex quam diminutus contrapunctus dupliciter fit, hoc est scripto vel mente, et in quo res facta a contrapuncto differt. Porro tam simplex quam diminutus contrapunctus dupliciter fit, hoc est aut scripto aut mente. Contrapunctus qui scripto fit communiter res facta nominatur. At istum quem mentaliter conficimus absolute contrapunctum vocamus, et hunc qui faciunt super librum cantare vulgariter dicuntur.” English translation in Margaret Bent, “‘Resfacta’ and ‘Cantare Super Librum,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 36:3 (Autumn 1983): 373. 5 The difficulties with this passage are manifold and pertain to the translation of Tinctoris’s somewhat unclear terminology. Attending to Coussemaker’s nineteenth- century translation of these quizzical terms, Ernest Ferand notes, “What strikes us in these definitions of res facta is the absence of any allusion to its supposedly characteristic feature … that it is a written, not improvised counterpoint.” Ferand later concludes, “[Res facta] may mean either a written contrapuntal composition, plain or florid, as distinguished from improvised counterpoint, either simple or florid; or it may mean florid, in contradistinction to simple, counterpoint, whether written or improvised.”6 It is via the term “chose faite”—a vernacular analogue for res facta excavated from a French translation of Jean Calvin’s sixteenth-century Institutio Christianae religionis—that Ferand generalizes cantare super librum (translated in very loose form as “musique rompue”) as florid counterpoint, surely extemporized. Ferand leaves the issue of res facta itself regrettably untidy; what emerges from his account, however, is a compression of associations that undermines the broader epistemological context of Tinctoris’s treatise. Writing in 1968 in response to Ferand, Ruth Harras notes, The Musique rompue is a Particular of the chose faite which is the broader term including, no doubt, among its demonstrations, transference from the Vocal Intrinsic to the Instrumental Extrinsic. Any number of Particulars can and do result from this secondary Universal chose faite … hence, res facta interpreted as the visible work, i.e., written down, and more likely to be written down because of the necessity owing to man-made complexities and elaborations inherent in “Art.”7 6 Ernest Ferand, “What is ‘Res Facta’?” Journal of the American Musicological Society 10:3 (Autumn 1957): 143. 7 Ruth Hannas, “Humanistic Light on ‘What is Res Facta?’” Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 22:1 (1968): 60. 6 One observes the Aristotelian logic implicit in Hannas’s pairing of res facta and cantare super librum, a metaphysics appreciable in the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. However, this universal-particular construction plays out in our contemporary understanding of notation as a compositional sine qua non: reading “man- made complexities” into res facta necessarily aligns the term with our post-nineteenth- century concept of the musical work, and its opposition to music fully-formed yet generated ex tempore. In her own response to Ferand from 1983, Margaret Bent addresses this modern distinction, suggesting that written counterpoint in the fifteenth century and earlier—that prefigured “in the mind” and orally transmitted, and that extemporized “on the book”— should be considered on a continuum of musical achievement.8 “At no point,” Bent writes, “is there any suggestion that singing super librum may be any less rigorous than composition, except in the distinguishing feature that allows contrapuncti to accord only with the tenor and not necessarily with each other.”9 While Bent notes that, in fact, “there is little in the vocabulary of music theory before 1500 to encourage ‘improvisatory’ interpretations of words such as ‘mental’ and ‘singing,’”10 her argument is nevertheless delimited by her own epistemology: it is the elevation of cantare super librum to the plane of notated composition that normalizes its assumed irregularity. In her view, singing upon the book is “a carefully-structured procedure” and “a far cry from the unpremeditated, collective improvisation we have been led to understand by modern 8 Bent, “‘Resfacta’ and ‘Cantare Super Librum,’” 378. 9 Ibid., 386. 10 Ibid., 375. 7 writers.”11 Music’s aesthetics rather than its practice become in Bent’s analysis a modern cultural graft onto early-modern music theory. Writing in response to Bent in 1996, Rob C. Wegman resituates the res facta debate within the fifteenth century: At the root of Tinctoris’s perception lies the Aristotelian distinction between making (poiesis) and doing (praxis). Music, by definition, belongs to the latter category. To “make” is to produce a piece of work, an object, and sound is not an object, but motion. … To think of music as a “thing” is a paradox: things have permanence and spatial extension, and for sound this is unthinkable unless it is represented by ink on paper, thus assuming matter and form.12 Indeed, considered broadly, cantare super librum is by its very nature a signifier of action—a verb (in infinitive form followed by a preposition and the object of the preposition)—and is well understood within the paradigm of Aristotelian metaphysics to connote motion rather than matter.13 The goal of my short précis of scholarship related to Tinctoris’s terms res facta and cantare super librum is not to solve a problem, but rather to highlight an epistemological quandary, one likely shared by the theorist himself. Music—by its very nature impermanent, evinced by a medieval Aristotelian metaphysics—is curiously linked to the development of print in the Renaissance. While musical notation in manuscript form predates Tinctoris’s Liber de arte by many centuries, I argue that the increasing accessibility of printed music in the fifteenth century demanded a 11 Ibid., 387. 12 Rob C. Wegman, “From Maker to Composer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 1450-1500,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49:3 (Autumn 1996): 439. 13 “[Rules of counterpoint] were learned by young singers for the purpose of improvisation, and following them would have been as natural as speaking in grammatically correct sentences.” For a full discussion of the association of counterpoint rules with the immediacy of grammar in the Middle Ages, see Peter Schubert, “Counterpoint Pedagogy in the Renaissance,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 503. 8 reassessment of music’s phenomenology. But if Tinctoris grappled with the notion of written music as a res facta, or “made thing,” what might be said about music extemporized “on the book,” only partially written? Crucially, this reassessment plays out in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century discourses on polyphony and its improvisatory pedigree. As Bonnie Blackburn and others have shown, at the core of the hostility surrounding polyphony’s infiltration into solemn, ecclesiastical affairs is the long-standing assessment of polyphonic music as a largely unwritten and “singerly” procedure, with Tinctoris’s cantare super librum growing out of the traditions of organum and fauxbourdon.14 Both praised for its sweetness and disparaged for its beguiling qualities, polyphony emerges in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a battleground for sparring musicians and theologians. Similarly, Lydia Goehr reminds us that as early as 1324 “Pope John XXII issued a bull forbidding the use of new music in the mass. ‘Originality,’ he had decided, ‘encourages effeminacy in descant, a rushing on without rest, and an intoxication of the ear without the healing of the soul.’”15 In 1491, Ficino’s print of Plato’s dialogues “affirmed the great power of music, but recognized its immense dangers to the moral fabric of society, as well as to the welfare of its citizens.”16 By the sixteenth century, we will see, the “dangers” of musical complexity—as literal and figurative representation—became conflated with matters extrinsic to notation, including virtuosic display and, ultimately, femininity. 14 Bonnie J. Blackburn, “On Compositional Process in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 40:2 (Summer 1987): 258. 15 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 135. 16 Rob C. Wegman. The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe 1470-1530 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 19. 9 With the preceding survey of scholarship, I have shown how a reexamination of music’s metaphysics in the fifteenth century initiated an early-modern epistemological quandary, by which extemporaneity was transformed from a compositional tactic into a perplexing, even aberrant phenomenon. Although facets of Tinctoris’s description of cantare super librum are familiar as what we might categorize as improvisatory (much like ornamentation, division, the applications of musica ficta) the notion that emotion was at all integral to the process is an anachronistic one. In the following section, I investigate the compression of musical ex tempore and early-modern cognition. This new formulation of ideas came to signify in some manner the idea of virtuosic instrumental performance from memory, in free time, with adventurous harmony and passagework. It is in the cultivation and transmutation of a seventeenth-century free musical fantasia topos that we may begin to elucidate the intersection of compositional extemporaneity with musical subjectivity and, in turn, to unpack the link between this style and sentiment, genius, and femininity. 10 CHAPTER III THE BAROQUE: AFFECT AND THE STYLUS FANTASTICUS The codification of the free musical fantasia topos in the Baroque is directly related to early-modern structures for knowledge and feeling. The modern concepts of compositional ingenuity or imagination thus find concordances in seventeenth-century discourses on emotion, and by extension, their meaning within a complex system of representations. Significantly, this transfiguration of the fantastic topos occurs contemporaneously with doctrines that attempted to unlock a universal mathesis of music, and culminates in the proliferation of the Figurenlehre, the Affektenlehre, and related music-theoretical traditions. Prefigured most notably by René Descartes in the Compendium musicae (1618; published in 1650) and Les Passions de l’âme (1649), and later amplified and disseminated by a host of eighteenth-century composer-pedagogues, this reconfiguration of music-theoretical thought is closely aligned with the revitalization and reification of Classical aesthetics in the representational episteme.17 In this section, I highlight the emergence of an early-modern listener—a musical subject—in conjunction with a generalized dramaturgical application of rhetorical study and practice across nearly all artistic disciplines, and a widespread philosophical positioning along an empiricism-rationalism axis. Documents that might be defined as belonging to the discursive practice of the Affektenlehre, including Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650) and Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister 17 René Descartes, Compendium of Music, trans. Walter Robert (American Institute of Musicology, 1961); Les Passions de l'âme (Paris: Henry Le Gras, 1649). 11 (1739), presented here as a paired study, serve as exponents of Cartesian reasoning. As such, the Affektenlehre might also signal a paradigm shift: the locus of human sensibility falls prey to a universal mathesis of understanding, the rise of the Classical sign, and a nascent taxonomic tradition. Broadly stated, the spectrum of human emotions is transformed from an inner-driven phenomenon to an assumed uniformity that could, theoretically, be imposed from without. Musical fantasy is brought into relief by and in opposition to this burgeoning epistemological propensity to classify, which Michel Foucault summarized as a meta-linguistic and ontological phenomenon.18 Descartes’ Compendium musicae is a useful, albeit unusual point of departure in a brief genealogy of affect. Written for his friend Isaac Beeckman and given to him as a gift in 1618, the Compendium was only published posthumously in 1650, and therefore presents as a curious anachronism when considered to post-date the philosophe’s widely read Meditations and Les Passions de l’âme. Nevertheless, an analysis of the Compendium reveals it to be an attempt at a synthesis of musica speculativa—likely inherited by Descartes from Gaffurius—and an early-modern, deductive rationalism."# Paradoxically, Cartesian dualism is manifest in this construction of early-modern sensus vis-à-vis affect and the musical subject.20 In Descartes, then, the subject becomes a curious amalgam of sensus and ratio, with speculative geometry delicately embroidered onto early-seventeenth-century discourses on perception and cognition. 18 “The process of naming will be based not upon what one sees, but upon elements that have already been introduced into discourse by structure. It is a matter of constructing a secondary language based upon that primary, but certain universal, language.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 139. 19 Franchinus Gaffurius, Practica musicae (Milan: Gulielmum signer Rothomagensem, 1496). 20 I use the term “musical subject” in concordance with Jairo Moreno’s usage. See Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 12 Descartes begins his Compendium not with an explanation of the monochord or the definition of terms, but an assessment of sense: “The basis of music is sound; its aim is to please and to arouse various emotions in us.”21 This statement is provocative in a number of ways, chief among them a reassessment of what music could and should do. Throughout Antiquity, the chief aim of music, at least according to some who attempted to theorize it, was to incite moral probity and religious devotion in its listeners. Emotions were extrinsic collateral damage to this communal responsibility, and ultimately necessitated containment, or at the very least, a careful understanding of their deployment. As early as the fifth century, Boethius noted: Plato prescribed that boys must not be trained in all modes but only in those which are vigorous and simple. Moreover, it should be especially remembered that if some melody or mode is altered in some way, even if this alteration is only the slightest change, the fresh change will not be immediately noticed; but after some time it will cause a great difference and will sink down through the ears into the soul itself. Thus Plato held that the state ought to see that only music of the highest moral character and prudence by composed, and that it should be modest, simple and masculine, rather than effeminate, violent or fickle.22 Boethius’ explanation of music’s effect on human emotion relies heavily on apocrypha and mimesis: “violent or fickle” melodies are ostensibly “theatrical” or “lascivious” provocations because history (i.e. Plato) tells us it is so. By contrast, in the Compendium, Descartes situates music in a liminal space between sensus and ratio, soul and body. He writes, The means to this end [pleasure], i.e. the attributes of sound, are principally two: namely, its difference of duration or time, and its differences of tension from high 21 Descartes, Compendium, 11. 22 Severinus Boethius, De Institutione Musica, Book 1, trans. Calvin Bower, “Boethius’ The Principles of Music, an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary” (Ph.D. diss., George Peabody College for Teachers, 1967). 13 to low. The quality of tone itself (from what body and by what means it emanates in the most pleasing manner) is the domain of the physicist.23 By divesting music of its mimetic mantle, Descartes commands a rationalist stance on music’s effect on the emotions. Rather than situating music within the paradigm of Platonic ethics,24 the Compendium instead defines music as an object in dialogue with a thinking and feeling subject. Jairo Moreno reads this reification of music’s meaning in Descartes’ brief treatise as an epistemological bellwether—a pivotal move away from a medieval metaphysics of resemblance and toward a philosophy that traded in measurable phenomena, signs, and representations.25 This shift, however, uncovers a contradiction. By Descartes’ estimation, to be moved by music is to perceive and to process, a function contemporary scholars might label as cognition. (Descartes continually refers to “the soul” as the locus of this process.) Furthermore, Descartes explicates early-modern cognition as belonging to “the domain of the physicist,” citing easily perceived mathematical proportions as the cause of pleasurable sensibility. This mathesis stands in stark contrast to the philosophe’s efforts throughout the essay to ascribe physicality to music’s effect on the emotions. He writes, Few are aware how in music with diminution, employing many voices, this time division is brought to the listener’s attention without the use of measures; this, I say, is accomplished in vocal music by stronger breathing and on instruments by stronger pressure, so that at the beginning of each measure the sound is produced more distinctly; singers and instrumentalists observe this instinctively, especially in connection with tunes to which we are accustomed to dance and sway.26 23 Descartes, Compendium, 11. 24 On Plato and the ethical regime, see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). 25 Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects, 85–127. 26 Descartes, Compendium, 14. 14 With the introduction of the notions of musical instinct and physicality into the discourse (indeed, what Amy Cimini underscores as the document’s investment in the “materiality” of sound), Descartes’ Compendium curiously intertwines mind and body in a fraught dualism.27 As such, the Compendium itself limns a space between ratio and sensus, with the emergent, listening musical subject caught precariously between the two ideas. The legacy of medieval music theory—amplified by the author’s mathesis—looms large as the backdrop upon which Descartes projects an early-modern concept of feeling. Works of seventeenth-century music theory, like Descartes’ Compendium, are characterized by a synthesis of ratio and sensus, out of which emerges the concept of early-modern cognition and a separation of mind and body. This Cartesian dualism manifests in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century proliferation of the Affektenlehre— documents that attempted in some way a rationalized classification of irrational human sensibility. In what follows, I show how these early-modern conceptualizations of listening and feeling presage a reconfiguration of the structures for knowledge that characterized the representational episteme. Merely leafing through the pages of Kircher’s massive and lively Musurgia is itself an almost exhausting endeavor. Comprising ten books divided into two large tomes, the Musurgia is an expansive text, covering an astonishing array of musical and natural phenomena, the ruminations on which are offered in an elaborate, though puzzling taxonomy.28 In the first book, “Anatomicus de Natura soni et vocis” (Anatomy of Natural 27 Amy Cimini, “Baruch Spinoza and the Matter of Music: Toward a New Practice of Theorizing Musical Bodies” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2011), 118. 28 Paul Collins indicates the affections as a unifying force behind Kircher’s seemingly disorganized taxonomy, a provocative underscoring of the paradoxically dualist musical subject emergent in the 15 Sounds and the Voice) for example, Kircher interlaces disquisitions into the production of sound with vivid illustrations of human and animal anatomies (f. 22).$# Therein, the polymath’s chapter headings range from explorations into the very origins of sound (e.g. Chapter II, “De Genesi sive productione soni”), to elaborate transcriptions of and reflections on a variety of bird calls, insect sounds, and even the croaking of frogs (Figure 3.1, “De Vocibus volucrum,” f. 30; also “De Insectorum quorundam vocibus uti de Ranis, Cicadis, Locustis, Grillis”; “De causa coaxatus Ranarum,” p. 32). seventeenth century: “Despite its immense influence on musicians writing on musical style throughout much of the eighteenth century, Kircher’s classification cannot be considered systematic. The weakness in the scheme lies primarily in its attempt to classify and define styles according to such varied criteria as social function, musical genre, and compositional technique … affective quality constitutes a consistent criterion in Kircher’s discussion of individual styles, the concept of the affection emerging as the ‘one homogeneous means of classification.’” The Stylus Fantasticus and the Free Keyboard Music of the North German Baroque (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 18. 29 Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (Rome: 1650), 22–32. 16 Figure 3.1, “De Vocibus volucrum” in Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis, f. 30 Such a broad swath of ideas so generously included in Kircher’s rambling text is likely to leave the modern reader in a state of confusion. What exactly can the Musurgia tell us about the affections, seventeenth-century taxonomy and, by extension, the episteme’s structures for knowledge? Like Descartes’ Compendium, Kircher’s treatise is a fraught synthesis of Renaissance constructions of resemblance and an exhaustive, Classical taxonomy. The enclosing of likenesses of sound—ranging from the highly theoretical to the whimsically 17 banal (i.e. croaking frogs)—into a singular volume evinces an epistemological shift, out of which the subjectivity of the early-modern listener is born alongside the emergence of Classical representation. As natural signs, then, these constellations of similarities lend themselves easily to categorization. Book VII of the Musurgia, in which the theorist adumbrates a variety of musical styli, is an exponent of this. As styli, musical genres could function as representation, having themselves “no content, no function, and no determination other than what [they] represent, entirely ordered upon and transparent to it.”30 The affective possibility of these styli, rooted in the same mimetic principles on which Plato expounded and Boethius disseminated, but now quantified as mathematical proportions, is therefore transformed from a direct response to a cognitive process that included the same mathesis within it. The phenomenology of musical expression in the seventeenth century begins to move away from the “domain of the physicist,” to paraphrase Descartes, and toward the realm of the composer, without ever being fully divested of a system of correspondences. Like Descartes’ Compendium, Kircher’s comprehensive Musurgia presents us with an epistemological quandary. The Jesuit’s stylus phantasticus, or fantastic style, is of particular interest, for in its implication of the musical subject as a generative (and cognitive) force, it calls into question the significance of a universal mathesis of music and its relationship to the composer in the Classical episteme. Kircher writes, The fantastic style is suitable for instruments. It is the most free and unrestrained method of composing; it is bound to nothing, neither to words nor to a melodic subject; it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues; it is 30 Foucault, The Order of Things, 64. 18 divided into those [pieces] that are commonly called fantasias, ricercatas, toccatas, sonatas.31 Kircher’s definition of the stylus phantasticus is provocative for its introduction of the notion of the composer’s ingenium into seventeenth-century discourses on musical fantasy. As Friedhelm Krummacher, Paul Collins, and others have demonstrated, Kircher’s positioning of the fantasia as a stylus—and its applicability as a procedure across a wide range of genres—interfaces curiously with the artifice of strict counterpoint (i.e. fugues).32 As such, Kircher also intertwines the idea of ingenium, including an association with display and freedom, with elaborately complex and traditionally rigid polyphonic structures. The result is a paradox that positions the stylus phantasticus as a type of musical chicanery: a rational composition that would be “bound to nothing”—a Classical sign, or topos, representing a composer’s ingenium in whatever context that happened to be.33 However, this interpretation does not account for what Kircher calls music’s “hidden design of harmony” (abdita ratio harmoniae). Kircher’s evocation of harmony’s hidden design is not simply to temper a composer’s ingenium with burgeoning rationality, as Collins would have us believe (for this, we will have to wait until the eighteenth century and the limits of representation), but to implicate and explicate it within the greater 31 “Phantasticus stylus aptus instrumentis, est liberrima, et solutissima componendi methodus, nullis, nec verbis, nec subiecto harmonico adstrictus ad ostentandum ingenium, et abditam harmoniae rationem, ingeniosumque harmonicarum clausularum, fugarumque contextum docendum institutus, dividiturque in eas, quas Phantasias, Ricercatas, Toccatas, Sonatas vulgo vocant, Cuiusmodi compositione vide in libro V fol. 243 et 311 a nobis compista triphonia fol. 466, 480, 487, et libr. VI varijs instruentis accomodatas considera.” Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 585. English translation in Kerala Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck (New York: Schirmer, 1987), 251–2. Quoted in Paul Collins, The Stylus Phantasticus, 29. 32 Ibid., 31. 33 Ibid., 32. 19 workings of a seventeenth-century universe—as affect. In an earlier portion of Book VII, Kircher addresses the affections thus: Harmony, then, naturally affects man; but number and proportion (a movement of the air) affects the spirit (the organ of the motor faculty); words of fancy set up an object, which, if it is merry, will stir one to similar affects and emotions; if it is sad and gloomy, it will elicit tears, groans and sighs; if it breathes a martial rage, it will drive subjects of a martial disposition to a like rage, and so on.34 It is only via the Affektenlehre that we are able to understand the stylus phantasticus as an exponent of representation; only in the surety of representation as epistemological sine qua non can Kircher (as an exemplar of seventeenth-century structures for knowledge) untroublingly synthesize musical proportion and human sensibility as such. In Foucault’s Classical episteme, the capacities for knowledge inhere in the materials themselves: the notion of compositional ingenium thus places the listening and feeling musical subject at the center of a universal mathesis of music that was always already decipherable in this model. The stylus fantasticus of Athanasius Kircher, like the resultant mind-body dualism that obtains in Descartes’ Compendium musicae, therefore casts into relief a curious seventeenth-century musical subject that is both processing (evinced by Descartes’ rationalist stance in the Compendium and the later Discourse on Method) and a mere resonant space for a pre-ordained, mathematically cogent system of affect. Indeed, the physics of sympathetic vibration—the literal materiality of acoustics made visible and quantifiable at this time—yield structures of feeling in the seventeenth century that 34 “Harmonia itaque naturaliter hominem afficit; numerous vero et proportion morus aeris, afficir spiritum motivae facultatis organum; verba phantasie sistunt obiectum, quod si iucundum suerit, in affectus motusque consimiles concitabit, si triste et luctuosum, lachrymas, gemitus et suspiria eliciet: si martium furorem spiret, ad eunde ingenij martii subiecta impellet, et sic de coeteris.” Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 551. My thanks to Jonathan Breit for his translation. 20 themselves became susceptible to an increasingly taxonomic worldview.35 In this light, no investigation into the Affektenlehre discourse would be complete without a look at Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739). For the purposes of this document, I choose to focus on a comparison between Kircher’s stylus fantasticus and Mattheson’s own summary of musical fantasy, and what this comparison can tell us about the eighteenth century’s understanding of knowledge and feeling in the Baroque. Mattheson begins his definition of the fantastic style thus: The name fantasy is normally detested; though we do have a style of writing with this name which is a favorite and which maintains its place mainly with the orchestra and on the stage, not only for instruments but also for vocalists. It actually consists not so much in the writing or composing with the pen, as in the singing and playing that occurs spontaneously, or as is said extempore [sic.]. The Italians call this style a mente or non a penna. Though the so-called Fantasie, Capriccie, Toccate, Ricercare, etc., be they written down or printed really belong here, not to mention the boutades and the preludes.36 The reader notes that Mattheson’s phantastischer Stil and Kircher’s stylus phantasticus are strikingly similar; indeed, the former based many portions of his Der vollkommene Capellmeister on the latter’s widely-circulated Musurgia. It is worthwhile to remark, however, that significant differences between the two treatises abound, chief among these 35 For more on the influence of machinery and technology on the affections in the seventeenth century, see Penelope Gouk, “Clockwork or Musical Instrument? Some English Theories of Mind-Body Interaction Before and After Descartes,” and Thomas Christensen, “The Sound World of Father Mersenne,” in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression, ed. Susan McClary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 36 “Der phantastische Nahm ist sonst sehr verhaßt; alleine wir haben eine Schreib-Art dieses Nahmens, die wol beliebt ist, und hauptsächlich ihren Sitz im Orchester und auf der Schaubühne, nicht nur für Instrumente, sondern auch für Sing-Stimmen behauptet. Er bestehet eigentlich nicht sowol im Setzen oder Componiren mit der Feder, als in einem Singen und Spielen, das aus freiem Geiste, oder, wie man sagt, ex tempore geschiehet. Die Italiener nennen diesen Styl a mente, non a penna. Wiewol die so genannten: Fantasie, Capriccie, Toccate, Ricercate &c. sie mögen geschrieben oder gedruckt seyn, allerdings hieher gehören, der Boutaden und Vorspiele nicht zu vergessen.” Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: Christian Herold, 1739), Teil 1, Kap. 10, §88, trans. Ernest C. Harriss, Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister: A Revised Translation with Critical Commentary (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1973), 216. 21 the documents’ respective audiences. As Claude Palisca notes, Mattheson most certainly intended for his document to be used by the every day musician as a guide to composition, a practical applicability Kircher, writing in extensive Latin prose only eighty-nine years prior to Mattheson, would not have imagined for his own treatise.37 To position Mattheson as a mere pedagogue entirely divested of the traditions of Medieval and Renaissance musica speculativa, though, undermines his treatise’s pedigree and epistemology. A curious addition to Kircher’s stylus phantasticus presents in Mattheson’s description of the phantastischer Stil. Of the fantastic style, Mattheson writes, One is restricted in this style of writing only to the rules of harmony, to no others. Whoever can bring to bear the most artistic embellishments and the rarest inventions does the best. … The principal motifs and subjects cannot be completely ignored just because of the improvisatory nature; they may however not be done in sequence. Much less be regularly performed: hence those composers who work out formal fugues in their fantasias or toccatas do not maintain the integrity of this style, for nothing is so very contrary to it as order and constraint.38 37 “In the volkommener Capellmeister Mattheson Germanizes Kircher’s categories, which in the book on melody were still couched in Kircher’s Latin. But every one of the categories themselves is retained … From the earlier terminological focus Mattheson now shifts toward compositional procedures. He is now writing for the musician, initiating him into unfamiliar styles in which he needs to become proficient as a listener, performer, and composer. … Throughout his chapter Mattheson strives to instill a sensitivity to stylistic propriety and decorum with verbal characterizations that are more evocative than scientific.” Claude V. Palisca, “The Genesis of Mattheson’s Style Classification,” in New Mattheson Studies, ed. George J. Buelow and Hans Joachim Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 414. 38 “An die Regeln der Harmonie bindet man sich allein bey dieser Schreib-Art, sonst an keine. Wer die meisten künstlichsten Schmückungen und selteneste Fälle anbringen kan, der fährt am besten. … Die Haupt-Sätze und Unterwürffe lassen sich zwar, eben der ungebundenen Eigenschafft halber, nicht gantz und gar ausschliessen; sie dürffen aber nicht recht an einander hangen, vielweniger ordentlich ausgeführet werden: daher denn diejenigen Verfasser, welche in ihren Fantaisien oder Toccaten förmliche Fugen durcharbeiten, keinen rechten Begriff von dem vorhabenden Styl hegen, als welchem kein Ding so sehr zuwieder ist, denn die Ordnung und der Zwang” in Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: Christian Herold, 1739), Teil 1, Kap. 10, §94, trans. Ernest C. Harriss, Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 216. 22 This stipulation—that strict, imitative counterpoint has no place in the fantasia or toccata—contrasts with Kircher’s own contention that compositional artifice is well suited to the style. Mattheson also directly acknowledges the “improvisatory nature” of the phantastischer Stil, a distinction from Kircher’s stylus phantasticus that Paul Collins reads as an introduction of the musical performer into matters of musical phenomenology.39 This interpretation, like Palisca’s, overlooks essential matters of epistemology: for Kircher and his contemporaries, the hidden harmonic design of a fantasia or toccata acted as a microcosmographical function of the universe’s greater harmonic design. The delight of the fantasia thus stemmed from a composer’s deft synthesis of elaborate counterpoint and ingenium. Mattheson’s acknowledgment of Kircher’s investment in a metaphysics characterized by likenesses and his eschewing of it, however, is a further intensification of the musical-subject-focused universe initiated by Descartes in the Compendium and only hinted at in the Musurgia. In this sense, by configuring the phantastischer Stil as a Classical sign unto itself, divested of “hidden harmony” (the style’s plan would now be based on formulations of subjectivity like taste and sentiment), Mattheson doubles down on a ternary structure of musical understanding of affect rooted in Descartes’ mind-body dualism. This understanding would be predicated on a transmission of feeling that consisted of a literal impulse, an interpretation of this impulse as a physical phenomenon 39 “Mattheson, eighty-nine years after Kircher’s Musurgia was published, would, interestingly, reproduce what he mistakenly believed to be the incipits of both a toccata and fantasia by Froberger to illustrate his own concept of the stylus phantasticus, which skewed the notion of the ‘fantastic’ to refer more to the improvising performer than the calculated final produces of the compositional process. The improvisatory ‘freedom’ and extemporary ability that Mattheson was later to view as pivotal to the fantastic style was seemingly not of consequence to Kircher.” Collins, The Stylus Phantasticus, 31. 23 in the body, and a resultant “sympathetic vibration” in the soul, but more importantly, as a process mediated by the musical subject’s own apperception.40 With the vestiges of a seventeenth-century cognitive musical subject situated at the center of an increasingly perceived and theorized system of signs and representations, the taxonomy that presents in Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister underscores the eighteenth century’s often enigmatic relationship to human sensibility. George Buelow’s summary of affections that Mattheson associated with specific musical keys in an earlier treatise, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre from 1713 (Figure 3.2), evinces a somewhat uncompromising system of classification already inherent in the theorist’s reasoning.!" 40 In contrast to my own, George Buelow’s model of Cartesian affect takes a somewhat anachronistic, hermeneutical stance: “Mattheson believed the listener was involved in a four-part aesthetic experience. First, he heard the music; second, apperception occurred when the listener interpreted the various musical symbols (hermeneutical interpretation) leading to a recognition of an Affection; third, the listener perceived the emotion; and fourth, through reelection on the experience, he would enjoy moral improvement and, when appropriate, a religious edification. Like Descartes and other contemporary philosophers, Mattheson thought the Affections existed either as virtues or as vices. Both types were capable of musical expression, but only through the virtuous Affections could the soul be healed.” George J. Buelow, “Johann Mattheson and the Invention of the Affektenlehre,” New Mattheson Studies, ed. Buelow and Marx, 401. 41 Johann Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg: B. Schiller, 1713). 24 Figure 3.2, Keys and Corresponding Affections in Johann Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (1713) This chart would seem to construe Mattheson as an exponent of a worldview steeped in signs and representations such that emotions could be theorized within the paradigm of Cartesian reasoning as causal relationships in the body. However, in Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Mattheson is mindful of his own subjectivity, offering the following as a clarification of how the affections could be understood (and, one might say, implemented) most effectively: Besides, the more one tries to postulate something positive about them, the more one finds contradictory things, because the beliefs about this material are almost numberless. For this I know no other reason than that based on the differences of human constitutions [Complexionen], according to which for someone with a sanguine temperament a key may seem lively and merry, but for someone who is phlegmatic, it will seem complaining and troubled, etc.42 42 Johann Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre. Quoted in Buelow, “Mattheson and the Affektenlehre,” 402. 25 The fact that Mattheson believed that certain keys elicited certain affections is not of primary importance here. Rather, as a list—or at the very least, as the potential for a list—Mattheson’s affections implicated an eighteenth-century musical subject that was both aware and unaware of its cognition. The Classical subject’s awareness manifested in Cartesian, physical relationships that were rooted in the laws of physics; its unawareness stemmed from a growing propensity to classification that would relegate anomalous phenomena (largely related to this same subjectivity) to a liminal space. Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister and its antecedent, the Musurgia universalis of Athanasius Kircher, are exemplifications and intensifications of structures for knowledge made manifest in Descartes’ initiation of early-modern cognition. With the physical, impulse-driven mechanics of human sensibility rendered increasingly theoretical in Descartes’ model (itself a curious interface of inherited Renaissance metaphysics and early-modern rationalism), scholars in the Classical episteme readily traded in systems of representation. The seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Affektenlehre (applied loosely here as a terminology) thus attempted a universal mathesis of musical phenomenology that hinged on the listening and feeling subject’s apperception of natural signs, and, curiously, its own subjectivity in relation to the universe’s greater design. The assessments of the fantastic style in the writings of Kircher and Mattheson show how this subjectivity—positioned by both theorists in relation to the concept of ingenium—evinces a propensity to taxonomy that operated in ontological contrast to the period’s structures for feeling. The following sections demonstrate how this early-modern contradiction came to bear on matters pertaining to fissures in these 26 taxonomic structures, namely as it related to the construction of gender, and the episteme’s acknowledgement of the limits of representation. 27 CHAPTER IV MUSIC MAKING BY WOMEN AND THE HEGEMONY OF NOTATION As indicated in the previous sections, the construction of a musical subject in the Baroque parallels a reconfiguration of early-modern musical semiotics, due in large part to the ubiquity of written music in the Renaissance. More specifically, the circulation of printed music throughout Europe inaugurated a new class of musical practitioners and consumers. As such, the standardization of musical notation, coupled with the availability of print matter, redefined the conceptualization of musical extemporaneity and aligned it with connotations of inexplicability and otherness. The alterity of improvisation thus attained a multivalence of signification in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, carrying with it characteristics of the fantastic topos, spectacle and virtuosity, and a link to notions of femininity. A full investigation into the vast and rich history of extemporaneous female music making—a synthesis of processes that are at once productive (women composers, performers, improvisers, patronesses, and antiquarians) and inductive (the subsequent influence these women had on musical practice and aesthetics, largely promulgated by men)—and this tradition’s overwhelming marginalization is beyond the scope of this thesis. This well-trodden musicological terrain is often relegated to the fringe of music- theoretical scholarship, and has interfaced even less with the history of music theory. Susan McClary’s seminal Feminine Endings from 1991 and its notable situating of analysis as a gendered discourse brings to the fore a host of historically problematized issues pertaining to music theory and its traditionally uncompromising formalist stance 28 on music qua music.43 Similar positions have been argued by a cadre of authors with regard to other conspicuous omissions from the mostly unilaterally male and heteronormative historiography of music.44 Historically, music theory has in many ways been reluctant to engage with extra-musical sociopolitical issues in this manner, though not exclusively, and in curious ways, as Kofi Agawu notes, “new musicologists often fall back on conventional methods. … Rarely are the perceptual and conceptual foundations of musical analysis openly confronted.”45 My goal in presenting this already mired historiography as a regrettably unrefined summary, and, in turn, folding this history into the historiography of musical analysis, is not to analyze an unwieldy corpus of fantasias, ricercars, toccatas, and the like, but rather to consider the operative epistemology that engendered this music’s construction alongside its contemporaneous analytical toolkit. As early as 1500, Karin Pendle notes, female performers were featured delicacies at homosocial gatherings of male cognoscenti in Europe, as exponents of an already robust tradition of improvised vocal performances.46 By the early-seventeenth century, the notion of women as musicians came to be associated with the prominence of the 43 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 44 Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, eds., Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950 (London: Macmillan Press Music Division, 1986); Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994); Judith A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 45 V. Kofi Agawu, “Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime,” The Journal of Musicology 15:3 (Summer 1997): 302. 46 “In mid-sixteenth-century Venice, wealthy and noble men took pleasure in meeting with their educated, like-minded peers in informal clubs, called academies. … One of the best known of these academies was that led by Domenico Venier. … Of particular importance here is the interest Venier and his circle took in improvised song as performed by accomplished female singers.” Karin Pendle, “Musical Women in Early Modern Europe,” in Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 69. 29 courtesan.47 The increasing influence of musica secreta in the late-sixteenth century, designated for the private enjoyment of men and women of the nobility, gave the female voice an illicit compositional characterization within this early-Baroque paradigm of extemporal performance. In the mid-sixteenth century, for instance, Alfonso II d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, assembled his own all-female ensemble, the concerto delle donne, which specialized in “music decorated with numerous passaggi, trills, and cadenzas, probably improvised in rehearsal and then committed to memory.”48 In the 1570s and 80s, Anthony Newcomb writes, the Duke lured a fair amount of talented female musicians to his court, whose music making he reserved for only the most intimate occasions. In an almost peculiar transformation, however, the reservata nature of Alfonso’s consort became integral to carnival spectacles in the early 1580s with one observer reflecting on the celebrations thus: “‘this evening the main street was adorned by an infinite number of horses and carriages; among them was a large uncovered carriage filled with nymphs singing sweet amorous trifles.’”!# With the ensemble’s display as such, the formerly private music making of Alfonso’s highly skilled musicians became fetishized, along with its gestures of extemporaneity. Despite the improvisatory heritage of these delightful musical “trifles,” Alfonso’s concerto—along with its agile vocal acrobatics and diminutions—was influenced by and, in turn, influenced notation and print culture. The secret pastime and occasional carnival display of the Duke eventually blossomed into a locus of Italian commerce, with Tasso, 47 Pendle, “Musical Women in Early Modern Europe,” 77. 48 Ibid., 82. 49 Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–1597 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 32. 30 Luzzaschi, and other madrigalists writing and publishing for the women and the developing musical market.%& Similarly, Newcomb highlights the singing a libro by the concerto delle donne, from part-books at sight, as indicative of a remarkable performance practice that was unique for female performers, and one that invites a reconsideration of the concerto’s influence. “It was distinctly unusual,” he writes, “ to find that such ladies had benefited by considerable musical training, and that they used their training and skill for the performance in concert of printed polyphonic music … a great deal of music for the musica secreta must have been brought in from the outside.”%" Herein, we observe the shaping of an all-female singing tradition by memorized gestures of virtuosity and spontaneity, packaged as formulae and delivered, presumably, in moments of pathos or intense pleasurability.52 More significantly, this influence exceeded the largely domestic boundaries of the Ferrara court, occasioning a reification of the madrigal style and matters of commerce. The fervor for all-female singing at this time was pervasive enough to infiltrate ecclesiastical matters, such that one observer described the captivating musical nuns at Ferrara’s San Vito as “‘not human, bodily creatures, but rather truly angelic spirits.’”53 Within secular, commercial, and religious contexts, therefore, the changing concept of all-female music making begins to connote 50 Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 69. 51 Ibid., 68. 52 “In contrast with the polyphonic madrigal, which was deigned as chamber music largely for the pleasure of participants, the music written for the Ladies of Ferrara means to be consumed as display.” See Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 84. 53 Pendle, “Musical Women in Early Modern Europe,” 70. 31 “otherworldliness,” if not simply a generalized alterity wherein women represent a supposed conduit between the corporeal and metaphysical, unmediated by notation. Similarly, by 1600, the evolving relationship between performance and notation became bound up in a reconsideration of what exactly constituted a musical composition, and increasingly nebulous exchanges between sacred and secular realms. The preface to Lodovico Viadana’s Cento concerti ecclesiastici (1602) proudly heralds the dawn of a new, more practically-minded era—the seconda pratica, after Monteverdi—and positions the collection of concerted music that follows as an inevitable (though still ingenious, certainly by his own estimation) solution to long-standing problems of chorus personnel and ability: basso continuo.54 Mindful of his singers, Viadana is careful not to impinge on their naturally improvisatory sensibilities in these contexts, though nevertheless resorts to notating previously extemporized gestures (passaggi comuni) and offering them up as tasteful suggestions.55 In conjunction with the increasingly institutionalized implementation of basso continuo in sacred contexts and the subsequent proliferation of the madrigale concerto, documents like Viadana’s underscore John Walter Hill’s contention that “the church concerto of the early seventeenth century arises, in part, out of a process of reducing to precise notation aspects of actual performance that were 54 Lodovico Viadana, Li cento concerti ecclesiastici (Venice, 1602). 55 “Non ho mancato di apportare à tempo, & à loco alcuni passi, e cadenze con altri lochi accommodati per Accentuare, per Passeggiare, e per fare altre prove della dispositione, e gratia dei Cantori, se bene per il più, e per facilità, si è usato Passaggi comuni, che la natura istessa porta, ma più fioriti.” “I have not failed to introduce, where appropriate, certain figures and cadences, and other convenient opportunities for ornaments and passagework and for giving other proofs of the aptitutde and elegant style of the singers, although, for the most part, to facilitate matters, the stock passaggi have been used, such as nature itself provides, but more florid.” Lodovico Viadana, “Preface to One Hundred Sacred Concertos, op. 12 (1602)” in Oliver Strunk and others, Source Readings in Music History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 619. 32 formerly not reflected in the written music.”56 The preface to Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1601) perhaps most overtly embodies this notion, codifying a broad swath of ornamental vocal gestures followed by twenty-three works in which these notated figures are prominently highlighted.57 The introductory measures of the composer’s solo madrigal “Movetevi a pietà” is but one example of this increasingly hegemonic approach to musical notation. Figure 4.1, Giulio Caccini, “Movetevi a pietà,” in Le nuove musiche (1601), mm. 1–11 56 John Walter Hill, Baroque Music: Music in Western Europe, 1580-1750 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 96. 57 Giulio Caccini, Le nuove musiche (Firenze: Marescotti, 1601). 33 Caccini’s Le nuove musiche and a host of other seventeenth-century concerted madrigals bespeak a shift in compositional approach: performances could and should be flexible, evinced by the inherently improvisatory nature of basso continuo, but were increasingly delimited by notational constraints. Furthermore, the emergence of the seconda pratica signaled a generalized fluidity between secular and sacred musical realms, engendering a fraught and increasingly unclear stance on heavily ornamented performances by female singers. Amidst this early-modern reconfiguration of extemporaneity, the conceptualization of music making was transformed into an almost fully notation-centric enterprise. Women were not, though, consigned to a life of extemporal music creation simply because many lacked the means to notate or read the compositions of the day, as the concerto delle donne and what we know of performance practice would attest. More likely, the increasing hegemony of graphic symbolism pushed musical improvisation—and with it gestures of musical ex tempore like diminution, trills, and cadenzas—to the boundaries of musical meaning. This semiotic “edge” on which the fraught concepts of femininity and virtuosity intertwined during the Baroque is most discernible in opera. Recent scholars have pointed to the operatic stage as the physical and metaphorical space on and from which music’s expressiveness underwent a sort of gendering. “Those performances [by women],” Carolyn Abbate writes, “had a significant effect: shaping an impulse to weave between opera and performance, between listener, author, and noisemaker, to return to performance as a phenomenon, to contemplate the possibility of a ‘double work.’”%' I extrapolate Abbate’s analysis to include the “double work” of women in opera as the 58 Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 51. 34 living, fleshly performance of inanimate notes on a page written by men. This reading invites an ontological reconfiguration of musical practices like ornamentation and virtuosic display: “the text,” Abbate continues, “the authority of the male composer, and the strangleholds of objectification and representation, are ultimate objects of celebration, and in a peculiar sense the music—the realization of that text, and those responsible for it—has begun to vanish.”%# Concurrent with opera, instrumental musical material generated in an extemporal aura—that marked by performative “excess,” to borrow Susan McClary’s terminology—is thus positioned in contrast and resistance to notation’s hegemony. We might say that musical notation became doubly fetishized in the seventeenth century, with the curiosity of female performance developed as a representational sign alongside the objectification of music’s symbology. Again, Kircher’s Musurgia universalis serves as a useful excursion into these matters of early-modern signification. The practice of including musical excerpts in theoretical documents was certainly not new in 1650; the tradition dates back to at least the ninth century Musica enchiriadis treatise and likely earlier. However, the incorporation of Johann Froberger’s Fantasia supra Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (FbWV 201), which the theorist refers to as a paragon of the stylus fantasticus (under the rubric of “De Symphonia Clavicymbalo Apta”), is unique, however, for its complete presentation and for Kircher’s commentary (Figure 4.2). Kircher writes, Harpsichords, organs, regals and all multiplucked musical instruments … require compositions, which indeed must be such, that with them the organist not only shows his own genius, but also with them as preambles as it were he prepares and excites the spirits of the listeners for the entertainment of the symphonic harmony that will follow. Many call harmonic compositions of this type praeludia, Italian 59 Abbate, In Search of Opera, 51. 35 toccatas, sonatas, ricercatas, of which manner we present one, which J. Jacob Froberger, imperial organist and formerly pupil of the most celebrated organist Hieronymus Frescobaldi made on ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, prepared with such workmanship that whether you observe the most perfect method of composition and of fugues, the order of things following themselves cleverly, or the remarkable change of the time, it seems that nothing at all can be missing; and therefore we consider it to be set out before all organists as a most perfect example of composition of this kind which they might imitate.(& 60 Kircher, Musurgia universalis, 465. Translation in Snyder, Dietrich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck, 255. “Clavicymbala, Organa, Regalia & omnia polyplectra instrumenta musica … compositiones requirunt, quae quidem tales debent esse, ut ijs organoedus non tantus ingenium suum ostendat sed & ijs veluti praeambulis quibusdam auditorium animos praeparet, excitq; ad symphoniaci concentus sequuturi apparatum; Vocant plerique huiusmode harmonicas compositions praeludia, Itali Toccatas, Sonatas, Ricercatas cuiusmodi hic unam exhibemus, quam D. Io. Iacobus Frobergerus Organedus Caesareus celeberrimi olim Organedi Hieronymi Frescobaldi discipulus, supora Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la exhibuet eo artificio adornatam, Ut sive perfectissimam compsitionis methodum, fugartumq; ingeniose se sectantium ordeineml sive insignem temporis mutationem varietatemque sepctes, nihil prorsus desiderari posse videatur: adeoque illam omnibus Organoedis, tanquam perfectissimum in hoc genere compositionis specimen quod imitentur, propenendum duximus.” 36 Figure 4.2, Johann Froberger, Fantasia supra Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, FbWV 201 (ca. 1649), mm. 1–13 As Paul Collins observes, Kircher’s use of Froberger’s Fantasia as a musical example in this context is less about its discussion of a composer’s ingenium and more about its visual presentation. “Kircher’s concept of the fantastical style,” Collins writes, “in accordance with the derivation of the Latin adjective phantasticus from the Greek !"#$% 37 (phainein, ‘to show’) and !"$&'(% (phantazein, ‘make visible’), emphasizes the satisfaction of the intellect by means of a work’s visual order.”(" I would add, however, that along with visual order and intellect, we may observe in Kircher’s evocation of Froberger a nascent fetishizing of the fantastic topos, and an attempted normalization of it. Notated handsomely in open score, Kircher’s example is intended to invite inspection and realization of the Fantasia’s perfect, rational nature (tanquam perfectissimum). Like Alfonso’s concerto delle donne, the piece is legible to Kircher’s reader only as a musical object, and not as an aural experience. Abbate’s “double work” concept of opera, therefore, expands to interface with the history of music theory, and invites a gendered interpretation of the instrumental fantastic topos as representation. The vestiges of the association of women with unnotated music linger in eighteenth-century discourses on performance, talent, and taste. Book V of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762), in which the author addresses the education of Émile’s fiancée, Sophie, has embedded within it links between feminine sentiment and musical intuition. Rousseau writes, Sophie has natural talents; she senses them and she doesn’t ignore them: but not being exposed to much art or culture, she is content to exercise her pretty voice to sing appropriately and with taste, to walk lightly with little feet, easily, gracefully, to curtsey in all sorts of situations without discomfort or awkwardness. Besides, her only voice teacher was her father, her mother her only dance instructor, and a neighboring organist to give her some lessons in accompaniment she has since cultivated on her own. At first, she thought only to use her hand on the black keys, next she found that the harsh, dry sound of the harpsichord made her voice sound sweeter; little by little, she became sensitive to harmony; finally, maturing, she begin to feel the charms of expression and to love music for itself. But this is taste more than talent; she would hardly know how to sight read a tune.($ 61 Collins, The Stylus Phantasticus, 32. 62 “Sophie a des talents naturels; elle les sent, & ne les a pas négligés: mais n’ayant pas été à portée de mettre beaucoup d’art à leur culture, elle s’est contentée d’exercer sa jolie voix à chanter juste & avec goût, 38 Here, Rousseau touches upon two important facets of eighteenth-century notational hegemony. First, the philosophe is eager to emphasize Sophie’s innate sensitivity, underscored by the his references to her taste, or “goût.” As such, Rousseau furthers the Enlightenment’s conception of female music making as biological and performative, noting that Sophie plays on the black keys of the harpsichord mainly by feel, and that Sophie cannot read music. The multivalence of the word “touche,” meaning “key” or “touch,” concords with Rousseau’s persistent reduction of Sophie to her representative body parts throughout Émile—diminutive feet and hands, for example. Similarly, Sophie’s voice is rendered sweeter only in contrast to the harpsichord’s brittle sound, ostensibly emphasizing her lack of training, but also a kind of suppleness brought into relief by the keyboard’s harsher, angular qualities. Second, Rousseau intertwines the notions of music’s “charms” and Sophie’s performativity (“les charmes de l’expression”). “Charmes,” like “touche,” has a similar double meaning in this context: Sophie’s promising understanding of harmonic function is both an outgrowth of her natural sensitivity (without proper training, Rousseau is quick to remind us, Sophie has intuited most of her musical education) and recognition of how these musical maneuvers might produce emotional responses in her listeners. This residue of seventeenth-century affect-based structures of feeling is layered with yet another ses petits pieds à marcher légèrement, facilement, avec grâce, à faire la révérence en toutes sortes de situations sans gêne & sans maladresse. Du reste, elle n’a eu de maître à chanter que son père, de maîtresse à danser que sa mère; & un organiste du voisinage lui a donné sur le clavecin quelques leçons d’accompagnement qu’elle a depuis cultivé seule. D’abord elle ne songeoit qu’à reparaître sa main avec avantage sur ces touches noires, ensuite elle trouva que le son aigre & sec du clavecin rendait plus doux le son de la voix; peu à peu elle devint sensible à l’harmonie; enfin, en grandissant, elle à commencé de sentir les charmes de l’expression, & d’aimer la musique pour elle-même. Mais c’est un goût plutôt qu’un talent; elle ne sait point déchiffrer un air sur la note.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou de l’Éducation (Paris, 1762), 274. 39 double-entendre, Sophie’s learning to feel and love music “pour elle-même,” either “for herself” or “for itself.” The concept of music for itself, it may be argued, connotes transience and frivolity, and stems from the same “singerly” compositional procedures that inspired the res facta discourse mentioned earlier in this thesis, in addition to the performance practices of the concerto delle donne. In the seventeenth century, the curiosity of non- mimetic instrumental music came to bear on constructions of musical subjectivity in the Affektenlehre, and carried with it associations with egregious vocal ornamentation and female performativity. For Rousseau and his contemporaries, then, Sophie’s love of music for her/itself was a doubly provocative peculiarity: female sentimentality and intuition compounded by the lack of notation. In an earlier portion of Émile, the author writes, It can well be believed that as I am in so little hurry to teach him to read writing, I will not be in a hurry to teach him to read music either. Let us set aside an effort of attention too great for his brain and not rush to fix his mind on conventional signs. This, I admit, seems to involve a difficulty, for although the knowledge of notes does not at first appear more necessary for knowing how to sing than does knowledge of letters for knowing how to speak, there is, however, this difference: in speaking we transmit our own ideas, while in singing we transmit hardly anything but others’ ideas. Now to transmit them, one must read them.() Musical meaning, in Rousseau’s interpretation, is inextricably linked to notational practice; his conceptualization therefore intensifies the taxonomic trajectory initiated in seventeenth-century composition treatises. Later in the same passage, the philosophe is 63 On pense bien qu’étant si peu pressé de lui apprendre à lire l’écriture, je ne le serai as non plus de lui apprendre à lire la musique, écartons de son cerveau toute attention trop pénible, & ne nous hâtons point de fixer son esprit sur des signes de convention. Ceci, je l’avoue, semble avoir sa difficulté ; car, si la connaissance des notes ne paraît pas d’abord plus nécessaire pour savoir chanter que celle des lettres pour savoir parler, il y a pourtant cette différence, qu’en parlant nous rendons nos propres idées, & qu’en chantant nous ne rendons guère que celles d’autrui. Or, pour les rendre, il faut les lire.” Rousseau, Émile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 149. 40 keen to emphasize that true music making, in fact, necessitates notation, and that the process itself should be devoid of impulse or sentiment. “In order to know music well,” he writes, “it does not suffice to transmit it; it is necessary to compose it … never a bizarre song, never a passionate one, and never an expressive one.”(! Sophie’s charming expressiveness might then also be considered a reification of the female sign—a construction of sentimentality that Matthew Head associates with the period’s consumer culture and, poignantly, with the accessibility of printed music during the Enlightenment.(% While the free musical fantasia came to be codified as a musical topos via the seventeenth-century proliferation of the Affektenlehre, a conflation of the cultural concept of musical extemporaneity with the curiosity of unnotated music occurred simultaneously. This nexus of musical signifiers has at its origin the association of all- female musical performance with religious hysteria, musica secreta, and ultimately a collective memory of opera and indelicate courtly entertainment. By the late-eighteenth century and the publication of Rousseau’s Émile, the Enlightenment’s hegemonic stance on musical notation assumes a fetishistic patina, with the musical score acting as a normalization of the “irregularity” of musical performance, itself a fetishized enterprise. In the following survey of eighteenth-century music theory documents, I explore further 64 “De plus, pour bien savoir la musique, il ne suffit pas de la rendre, il la faut composer, & l’un doit s’apprendre avec l’autre, sans quoi l’on ne la sait jamais bien. Exercez votre petit musicien d’abord à faire des phrases bien régulières, bien cadencées ; ensuite à les lier entre elles par une modulation très simple, enfin à marquer leurs différens rapports par une ponctuation correcte ; ce qui se fait par le bon choix des cadences & des repos. Surtout jamais de chant bizarre, jamais de pathétique ni d’expression.” Rousseau, Émile, trans. Allan Bloom, 149. 65 Matthew W. Head, Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 73. 41 the period’s struggle with the fantastic topos, specifically as it pertained to notation, taxonomy, and the reconceptualization of “womanly sentiment.” 42 CHAPTER V WAS IST AUFKLÄRUNG? SONATA QUE ME VEUX-TU? A SURVEY OF TAXONOMY AND MUSIC CRITICISM The question “Was ist Aufklärung?” posed in 1783 by Johann Friedrich Zöllner in Die Berlinische Monatsschrift engendered an outpouring of rejoinders from Germany’s thinkers including Immanuel Kant.66 Kant’s essay, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” opens famously with an Enlightenment “call to arms”: Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.67 By historiographical and archeological accounts, the Enlightenment as the standard-bearing epoch of modernity was well underway by the 1784 publication of Kant’s essay. A Whig classification like this—its application revisionist even at the time of Kant’s writing and certainly as a temporal category in this context—can therefore only be made tenuously. As such, the “enlightened” philosophical self-conception and reflexivity of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars has been assiduously examined in an outpouring of scholarship. Foucault, whose own response to “Was ist 66 Johann Friedrich Zöllner, “Was ist Aufklärung?” Berlinische Monatsschrift (December 1783). 67 “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Mutes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines andern zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.” Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” Berlinische Monatsschrift (December 1784): 481. trans. Mary C. Smith, “What Is Enlightenment? Immanuel Kant,” http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html. 43 Aufklärung?”68 engages in a kind of tête-à-tête with Kant, and more contemporary theorists, including James Webster and Catherine Labio, have questioned the relevance of the term “Enlightenment” as applied to a specific age or duration of time.69 Despite these multivalent interpretations of the Enlightenment as epoch, philosophy, or even myth,70 it is nevertheless useful to understand that with supposed enlightened progressiveness came an epistemological proclivity for classification. The period saw a proliferation of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and musical treatises, many of which called into question the importance of musical notation as it pertained to a composer’s ingenium. As such, we might say that eighteenth-century musicians and theorists across Europe puzzled over the reconciliation of the concept of an unencumbered imagination within the representational episteme. As an unintended echo of the eighteenth century’s propensity to classification, I generate a taxonomy of taxonomies in this section. Tracing the definition of “fantasia” in a variety of dictionaries and related music theory documents, I highlight the free musical fantasia’s transformation under the influence of discourses on aesthetics. The widely circulated (and often quoted) dictionary of Sébastien de Brossard (1703) and Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1756–1768), considered here along with Jean-Philippe Rameau’s corrections to Rousseau’s musical definitions 68 Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” The Foucault Reader (New York, Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50. 69 James Webster, “Between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Music History: ‘First Viennese Modernism’ and the Delayed Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth Century Music 25:2-3 (Spring 2001–02), 108-126; Catherine Labio, Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2004). 70 T.W. Adorno with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 242. 44 (Erreurs sur la Musique dans l’encyclopédie, 1755), form a triptych that elucidates aspects of French theories of the affections, which hinged in many ways on early-modern structures of mimesis and Cartesian metaphysics. Next, I consider musical fantasy in German music theory treatises from the latter half of the eighteenth century. Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–74) exemplifies a reified philosophical outlook on musical imagination and creativity. The emergent empfindsamer Stil of the 1770s and 80s—and its chief exponent, C.P.E. Bach, whose own Versuch über die wahre Art as Clavier zu spielen (1753; 1762) I consider alongside A.F.C. Kollmann’s Essay on Musical Harmony (1796) in a final portion of this section—evinces a reassessment of the free musical fantasia. Whereas the fantastic topos presents as representation in the Baroque, a strained synthesis of improvised ingenuity and notation, creativity in the late-eighteenth century exceeded the bounds of the Classical sign. Music, acknowledged as non-representational, was thus easily assimilated into matters of epistemological curiosity from the previous century, including sensibility and gender. In 1703, Brossard defined the term “fantasia” as “a species of composition that is the pure effect of genius without the composer subjecting himself to a fixed number or particular quality of meter.”71 Brossard’s usage of the word “pure (pur)” in the context of “genius (génie)” signifies an implied ontological and linguistic connection between the free fantasia and unmediated nature. Likewise, the verb “to subject (assujettir)” employed reflexively, connotes a sense of freedom from subjection, as if the insertion of a bar line (“mesure”) into the context of a musical fantasia would be a truly tyrannical gesture. 71 “Une espèce de Composition, qui est le pur effet du génie sans que le Compositeur s’assujettisse à un nombre fixe, ou à une certaine qualité de mesure.” Sébastien de Brossard, “Fantasia,” Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1703). 45 Like that of Brossard, Rousseau’s definition for “fantaisie” in the 1751 publication of the Encyclopédie similarly positions the free musical fantasia as an extemporaneous outgrowth of inspiration.72 And like Brossard, Rousseau also inquires after the representational signification of notated fantasy, evinced by the philosophe’s effort to distinguish the fantasia from the capriccio. “There is this difference of the Capriccio from the Fantasia,” he writes, that the Capriccio is a gathering of unique and disparate ideas that resemble together a heated imagination, while the Fantasia can be a very regular piece, different from others in that one invents it as one executes it … It follows as such that a Capriccio might very well be written down, but never a Fantasia.73 Curiously, via Rousseau’s interpretation, it is the capriccio as defined by the Encyclopédie rather than the free musical fantasia that is the genre characterized by “une imagination échauffée.” I draw a connection between this naturalized biological analogy (literally a “heated” or “warmed” imagination) and that of Brossard’s “pur effet du génie”; the notion of musical fantasy for Rousseau, then, is already rendered at least partly predictable (“régulière” meaning both habitual and “even,” perhaps as a reference to the regularity of the style brisé of many hackneyed, “improvised” preludes of Rousseau’s time) rather than as the sole musical exponent of an unchecked imagination. Rousseau instead hinges the very existence of the free musical fantasia as a style on its 72 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Fantaisie,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 6:403 (Paris, 1751). 73 “Il y a cette différence du Caprice à la Fantaisie que le Caprice est un receuil d’idées singulières et disparates que rassemble une imagination échauffée, au lieu que la Fantaisie peut être une Pièce très régulière, qui ne diffère des autres qu’en ce qu’on l’invente en l’exécutant. … Il fuit de-là qu’un Caprice peut fort bien s’écrire, mais jamais une Fantaisie.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Fantaisie,” Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768). 46 notation, insisting that—whether “régulière” or adventurous—a true fantasia could never be a written piece. The dialectic of opposed signifiers (that is to say of “génie” and notation) in these documents manifests peculiarly in the written representation of several keyboard works of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Indeed, a cursory examination of Louis Couperin’s A-minor Prélude non mesuré à l’imitation de M. Froberger (ca. 1685, Bauyn MS; Paris, Bibl. Nat.) compared with the notated examples found in François Couperin’s L’Art de toucher le clavecin from 1716 reveal much about the evolving conceptualization of the prelude at the dawn of the French Enlightenment.74 Figure 5.1, Louis Couperin, Prélude non mesuré à l’imitation de M. Froberger (ca. 1685) 74 Louis Couperin, Pieces de Clavecin...d'après le manuscrit Bauyn, rev. Thurston Dart (Monaco: L'Oiseau- Lyre, 1959). François Couperin, L’Art de toucher le clavecin (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1716). 47 Figure 5.2, François Couperin, Premier Prélude from L’Art de toucher le clavecin (1716), mm. 1–11 The obvious discontinuities between these ostensibly “free” keyboard works are easily itemized: Louis Couperin’s Prélude is devoid of a prescribed meter or any conventional indication of note duration (the Prélude is written entirely in whole-notes). By contrast, François Couperin’s own C-major Prélude from L’Art de toucher le clavecin is notated in a strict duple meter, and features a prominent hierarchical division between the left and right hands, with the former characterized by a fairly simple two-voice counterpoint and the latter outlining an ornamental, though rhythmically precise melodic texture. The “soprano” voice of the Prélude might even be analyzed as a diminution of the slower moving “tenor” line, which is notated in tied half-notes. The performative aspects of Louis’s unmeasured prelude can only be conjectured, however Davitt Moroney insists that the phenomenon of musical ex tempore connoted by the composer’s “loose” 48 notation is exclusively visual rather than aural. “It is thus apparent,” he writes, “that many notationally unmeasured preludes can be affiliated to notationally measured genres. The notational dress disguises this musical fact, but the difference is for the player’s eye not the listener’s ear.”75 It is indeed the “dress” of these two preludes, though, that is of significance to the eighteenth-century conceptualization of musical fantasy; the ultimate performance of these representative works may have, in fact, been strikingly similar, as Rousseau reminds us and Moroney underscores. The semiotics of indeterminacy embodied by Louis Couperin’s quintessentially seventeenth-century logography and its intended wholesale correspondence between sign and signified, however, is a gesture that may be situated well within the tenets of Cartesian metaphysics. As a visual phenomenon, then, the A-minor Prélude encapsulates the notion of extemporaneity as affect. This one-to-one correspondence disintegrates with François Couperin’s L’Art de toucher le clavecin, in which the composer offers the following paraphrase of Brossard in conjunction with his own preludes, and in turn explicates his systematization of improvisatory maneuvers: A prelude is a free composition, where the imagination gives itself over to anything and everything that presents. But, as it is quite rare to find geniuses capable of producing in the moment, it is necessary that those who avail themselves of these ruled preludes play them in an easy manner, not too focused on the precision of movement, unless I have expressly indicated the word measured. Thus, one might hazard to say that as in many things, music (compared to poetry) has its prose and its verse.76 75 Davitt Moroney, “The Performance of Unmeasured Harpsichord Preludes,” Early Music 4:2 (April 1976): 147. 76 “[Une] prélude est une composition libre, où l’imagination se livre à tout ce qui se présente à elle. Mais, comme il est assez rare de trouver des génies capables de produire dans l’instant, il faut que ceux qui auront recourt à ces préludes réglés les jouent d’une manière aisée trop s’attacher à la précision des mouvements, à moins que je ne l’aie marqué exprès par le mot de mesuré [italics original]. Ainsi, on peut hazarder de dire que dans beaucoup de choses, la musique (par comparaison à la poésie) a sa prose, et ses vers.” Couperin, L’Art de toucher le clavecin, 1716. 49 The publication and dissemination of François Couperin’s treatise evinces a growing epistemological propensity to supplant previously agreeable notational vagaries within representative taxonomic constraints. Considered alongside his catalogue of agréments, the above quotation illustrates an era of inchoate “rationality”: the composer acquiesces to a long tradition of musical invention whereby the imagination “se livre,” or would give itself over to whatever whim or fancy it chose, but curiously excises individual will from the phenomenon of preluding, and provides rules (“préludes réglés”) for merely approximating this style in a more determined and accessible fashion. The result conscribes to characteristics of the free musical fantasia topos—a representation of compositional and performative ingenuity perplexingly contained within notations’ immutable signs and maneuvers. Matters of musical imagination and its representation, like that demonstrated in the keyboard works of Louis and François Couperin, were of the utmost importance to Enlightenment philosophes like Brossard, Diderot, and Rousseau. Indeed, with the prominence of the Académie Royale des Sciences at this time (it was founded in 1666), as well as music’s long-standing association with mathematics (dating back to the Ancient quadrivium), French academics contributed heartily to discourses on harmony, acoustics, and tuning throughout the eighteenth century. As such, considerations of musical ingenuity and fantasia—modulation to distantly related key areas and striking experimentation with enharmonicity and chromaticism, for example—were tantalizingly open to debate by many high-minded Parisian thinkers, desperate to theorize a single governing principle for music’s phenomenology. At the root of this agitated attention to music and its relationship to the science of the age was Newton’s Opticks (1703), which 50 Thomas Christensen highlights as signaling a paradigm shift in natural philosophy.** Voltaire’s Élémens de la philosophie de Newton, published in 1738, cultivated an empiricist outlook in eighteenth-century France (and elsewhere), while an ethos of scientific experimentation and calculus came to be favored over the deductive rationalism of Descartes.*' Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose eighteenth-century sobriquet, the “Newton of Music,” reads today as an ironic misapprehension, is an illuminating point of reflection in my brief excursion on French Cartesianism. Jairo Moreno has demonstrated that Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie from 1722 is in many ways an extension of Descartes’ Compendium: the cognition that characterized the seventeenth-century musical subject comes to bear directly on issues that concerned practicing musicians in Rameau’s day. In many ways then, the composer’s writings on accompaniment in the Traité, although not explicitly related to the fantastic topos but certainly connected to similar philosophical concepts, operate in opposition to the empiricist milieu of eighteenth-century French academia. Harmonic sequences, for example, coupled with Rameau’s instantiation of rules for thoroughbass realization, become “troped as musical motion,” and “henceforth [throughout the eighteenth century] accompany the perception and cognition of other progressions like a spectral presence, a vestige of the perfect model in the less-than- perfect instances sometimes found in practice.”*# But the inertia of harmonic sequences 77 For more on Newton’s Opticks and its reception in France, see Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143. 78 Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet], Élémens de la philosophie de Newton (Paris: A. Neuchatel, 1738). 79 Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects, 117. 51 also engenders an empty Classical signification without the listening and feeling subject’s “bon goût” to mediate this metaphor for musical motion. In the Traité, a composer’s inegnium thus assumes intrinsic properties vis-à-vis music’s very structure: thoroughbass figures are not notes, and the performer does much of the work of executing these figures in his or her mind.'& As was the case of Rameau’s harmonic sequence, musical figures intertwine practice and theory in a fraught dialectic, with the composer’s “génie” enlisted to negotiate between the two processes.'" Similarly, the Cartesian system to which we might ascribe the Traité explicated well the mimetic models of seventeenth-century affect, which in many ways persisted into the eighteenth century despite the influence of Newtonian empiricism.'$ For musical practitioners like Rameau, Newton’s Opticks and the methodology it exemplified, though attractive 80 “In the end, the imagination acts as a kind of interface between theory and practice, between the incomplete given and the complete created, between uninformed fact and informed possibility.” Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects, 124. 81 “We hardly see any rules that teach composition as it so well executed today; there is no man, even, confessing that his knowledge is owed to his experience only, skilled enough to achieve perfection in this manner; and cultivating this perfection in others, he is often forced in lessons to offer the following familiar proverb to other musicians: “practice makes perfect.” It is true that there are certain perfections that depend on genius and taste; as such, experience is more beneficial than science. But that doesn’t mean striving for perfection and knowledge should not still enlighten us, even when we fear that this experience might fool us. When we struggle to apply principles without acknowledging what effects they produce in us, we neglect to realize that this knowledge must be used to implement genius and taste. Without it, they would become but useless talents.” “On n'a point encore vû de regles qui enseignent la composition dans la perfection où elle est aujourd'hui; il n'y a pas même un habile homme dans ce genre, qui n'avouë sincerement qu'il doit presque toutes ses connoissances à sa seule experience; et lorsqu'il veut les procurer aux autres, il se trouve souvent contrains d'ajoûter à ses leçons ce Proverbe familier aux Musiciens, Caetera docebit usus. Il est vrai qu'il y a de certaines perfections qui dépendent du genie et du goût, ausquelles l'experience est encore plus avantageuse que la science même: Mais cela n'empêche pas qu'une parfaite connoissance ne doive toûjours nous éclairer, crainte que cette experience ne nous trompe; quand ce ne seroit que pour sçavoir appliquer à leur veritable principe, les nouveautez qu'elle pourroit nous faire produire: D'ailleurs cette parfaite connoissance sert à faire mettre en oeuvre le genie et le goût, qui sans elle deviendroient souvent des talens inutils.” Jean-Philippe Rameau, Traité de l’harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels (Paris: Ballard, 1722), Preface. 82 “For eighteenth-century science, a certain amount of mathematical abstraction and disregard for physical evidence proved highly productive; by analyzing physical phenomena as a Cartesian problem of matter and impact, and quantifying such concepts as mass and force, the scientist may operate with a rigorous mathematical methodology without recourse to experimentation.” Christensen, Rameau, 157. 52 intellectual currency in Parisian academic circles, proved poor substitutes for the feeling subject’s intuition, and by extension, imagination. In response to Rousseau’s definitions for musical terms in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for example, Rameau issued a compilation of errata and his corrections in a 1755 document entitled Erreurs sur la Musique dans l’Encyclopédie. In it, the composer levies serious complaints against the objectivity of pervasive empiricism as it pertained to music. He writes, When we discover that an interval exists in the same chord, or in two chords in the same key, this effect is nothing special unless it aids the actor. The interval from C to F-sharp, for example, can work equally well in quotes, questions, exclamations, affirmations, negations; but depending on the key, it is in that relationship that we feel—based on this same interval formed by these two pitches, mind you—almost innumerable expressions that might be found in such keys. These expressions can convey tenderness, sadness, sluggishness, frightfulness, pleasantry, joy, threat, horror, all depending on whether the interval of the fifth is formed above, or below, whether the key is major or minor, but only in a musical gesture appropriate for the situation.') Rameau’s investment in both representation and imagination in the Traité and the Erreurs therefore privileges not only the musical subject’s cognition, but more importantly, the subject’s own subjectivity. While Rameau does not directly address the issue of “fantaisie” as a compositional tactic in either document, his insistence on a dialogue between musical intuition and the science of harmony in thoroughbass realization implicates the feeling subject in nexus of musical hermeneutics. With the French Enlightenment’s zeal for empiricist taxonomy opposed to this interpretative act, 83 “Dès qu’un intervalle éxiste dans le même accord, ou dans deux accords d'une même mode, son effet n’a rien particulier, si ce n'est qu'à l’aide de l’acteur, l’intervalle d’ut à fa diéze, par éxemple, peut servier à des apostrophes, interrogations, exclamations, affirmations, négations; mais lorsque le mode change d’un son à l'autre, c’est pour lors qu’on sent, dans le même intervalle formé par ces deux sons, presque autant de différentes expressions qu’il y a de rapport différents entre les deux modes qui s’y succédent, ces expressions tenant même du tendre, du triste, du lugubre, de l’affruex, de plaisant, du joyeux, du menaçant, de l'horrible selon que le passage se fait à la quinte au-dessus, ou au-dessous, et que les modes sont majeurs ou mineurs, en les secondant d'un mouvement convenable à la situation.” Jean-Philippe Rameau, Erreurs sur la Musique dans l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Jorry, 1755), 53. 53 the Traité presses against the Classical episteme. For the supposed “Newton of Music,” then, a composer’s genius or creativity could never be verified within any measurable musical paradigm—it was intrinsic to music’s very nature. The epistemological difficulty of this conflation of genius and subjectivity came to bear poignantly on issues concerning instrumental music in the eighteenth century. Instrumental music’s resistance to explication within any mimetic principles of the era (to say nothing of the more troubling matter of improvised instrumental music) was perhaps best summarized by the following entreaty, attributed to Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, member of the French Académie: “Sonate, que me veux-tu?”'! Sonata, what do you want of me? The question, posed by the preeminent philosophe of his day, plagued a broad swath of music theorists and critics throughout the Enlightenment. With the publication of Alexander Baumgarten’s Meditationes (1735) and Aesthetica (1750), concern over non-mimetic musical meaning mounted in connection with the emergence of aesthetics as a discrete discipline in mid-eighteenth century Berlin.'% Without words to indicate feeling, Enlightenment thinkers wondered, could music really express anything? Many scholars (Descartes, Kircher, and Mattheson among them) explicated music’s expressiveness within the paradigm of semiotics in elaborate, though often insufficient structures of representation. Assisted to their expressive content by text and the Affektenlehre, musical topoi—including fantasia—emerge from these structures as 84 For more on Fontenelle’s famed question, see Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4–6. 85 Stefanie Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment: The Art of Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 122. 54 signs unto themselves. But with connections between a composer’s ingenium and systems of representation becoming ever more diffuse, the issue of a “fantasy” demanded revisiting. In his aesthetic encyclopedia, the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771), Johann Georg Sulzer offered the following insight concerning matters of representation in poetry: Actually, the poet shows his object not as it exists in the world, but as his fertile genius depicts it, as his imagination adorns it, and how his sentimental heart still feels it, such that he can be free to enjoy it with us. We value the poet by scenes that occupy his imagination and heart, like scenes from Nature.'( In a peculiar reversal, Sulzer’s appraisal of a poet’s “empfindungsvolles Herz” would seem to trump representation, evoking a subjective sentimentality that, by extension, might be applied to other non-representational arts, like music. On the matter of instrumental music, however, Sulzer comes down against supposedly meaningless images, noting The invention of a concerto, trio, solo, sonata and the like, all of which have no specific purpose, is left almost entirely to chance. One can understand how a man of genius may arrive at some invention when he has something in front of himself that he can hold on to. But where it is not possible to say what he is to create, or what he should have in mind, then he seems to work only by good luck. … He can help himself by seeking out poetry that is pathetic, fiery, or tender in nature, and declaim it in an appropriate tone, and after that sketch out his composition following this sentiment. He must never forget that music that expresses no kind of passion or sentiment in a comprehensible language is nothing but sheer noise.'* 86 “Denn eigentlich zeigt der Dichter seinen Gegenstand nicht, wie er in der Welt vorhanden ist, sondern wie sein fruchtbares Genie ihn bildet, wie seine Phantasie ihn schmückt, und was sein empfindungsvolles Herz noch dabei empfindet, lässt er uns mit genießen. Wir sehen durch ihn mehr die Szenen, die seine Phantasie und sein Herz beschäftigen als Szenen der Natur.” Johann Georg Sulzer, “Poesie,” in Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Weidmann: 1792), 620. 87 Sulzer, “Instrumental Music,” in Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, 670. Trans. Thomas Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment, ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 97. 55 By Sulzer’s definition, instrumental music was empty signification without representation to govern its meaning. By extension, the free musical fantasia as Baroque topos—its improvisatory pedigree conflated with this dissolution of Classical semiotics—might likewise be considered a distorted type of mimesis. Predicated on the listener’s expectations, the fantasia was designed to reflect the caprices of human imagination as an outward-mandated rather than inward-driven force.88 Curiously, however, the allure of improvisatory or improvisation-inspired performance as a function of a type of musical Einbuldingskraft coalesced with the fantasia into a peculiar duality in the late-eighteenth century—an almost occult conception of genius mired in an obsessive devotion to musical introspection. Annette Richards postulates a gendered interpretation of eighteenth-century An die Clavier songs as a manifestation of this empfindsamer Stil’s dichotomy. “[The clavichord] and its songs,” she writes, “suited both the confines of female domesticity as well as the curiously repressive emotionalism of the contemporary culture of sensibility, with its version of the male hero the effeminate and tearful Man of Sentiment.”89 No better eighteenth-century hero could be found than C.P.E. Bach, whose “improvisations at the clavichord and fortepiano contributed not a little to his status as North Germany’s 88 “The same may be true of such improvisatory keyboard genres as the sixteenth-century fantasia and ricercare, of the nineteenth-century prelude and rhapsody. Conversely, the purpose of improvised fugues, variations, and fantasias on given material, in the eighteenth century, was surely that listeners should evaluate the performer’s skill on the terms of written compositions. In this sense, improvisation and composition can also be viewed, over and above the strictly technical distinction between them, as musical styles distinguished by the degree to which they give the appearance of performative spontaneity or authorial planning.” Bruno Nettl, et al., “Improvisation,” Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed May 29, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/13738pg2. 89 Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 170. 56 greatest musical Originalgenie.”90 Richards continues her analysis by recounting Burney’s famous description of one of C.P.E. Bach’s tour-de-force, supposedly ex tempore performances of a free musical fantasia, in which the composer “became animated and possessed ‘drops of effervescence distilled from his countenance.’”91 This manifestation of C.P.E. Bach’s genius as perspiration bespeaks an eighteenth-century fascination with the creative process, and this process’s subsequent resistance to explication within the paradigm of Cartesian reasoning.92 C.P.E. Bach’s ingenuity, its chief musical outlet the composer’s highly regarded free fantasias, would also seem to operate in contrast to matters of representation, like Sulzer’s poet and the execution of Rameau’s thoroughbass. In a review of Bach’s 1779 Clavier-Sonaten für Kenner und Liebhaber, for example, Johann Schulz (who penned several articles for Sulzer’s encyclopedia) marveled at “the inexhaustibility of the sublime [Bach’s] ideas and the wealth of his Phantasie, which seems to renew itself in every new work.”#) However, in his own composition manual, the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen from 1762, C.P.E. Bach had cautioned his reader against fantastical harmonic modulations that were too far-flung, and offered concrete musical examples of appropriate and tasteful means of moving from one key to another. The composer summarized the free musical fantasia thus: 90 Richards, The Free Fantasia, 56. 91 Ibid. 92 Such pronouncements, Richards notes, “borrowed the vocabulary of contemporary theories of genius, as the entranced musician generated a sweat that seemed almost to be a condensation of inspiration itself.” Ibid. 93 Review of C.P.E. Bach’s Clavier=Sonaten und freye Fantasien nebst einigen Rondos fürs Fortepiano für Kenner und Liebhaber, Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek LXXII/1 (1787), 165. In Morrow, German Music Criticism, 136. 57 A fantasy is called free when it contains no regular distribution of bars, and modulates to more keys than is usual in other kinds of pieces which are either composed or improvised in a regular meter.94 Unlike the definitions of the French Académie, C.P.E. Bach’s conceptualization of the fantasia makes no mention of a “beheizt” imagination; the focus of this portion of the composer’s treatise is, by contrast, entirely devoted to the genre’s reasonable notation. He continues, A free fantasy consists of varied harmonic passages which can be executed in all kinds of figures and divisions. In doing so, one must establish a key with which to begin and end. Although no meter is established in such fantasies, the ear nevertheless demands a certain proportion in the alternation and duration of the harmonies among themselves … the eye a relation in the note values, so that one’s ideas can be written down.95 The significance of C.P.E. Bach’s introduction of the synecdochic “Ohr” and “Auge” into the music-theoretical discourse in his Versuch indicates a change in eighteenth-century philosophy, and is reminiscent of the epistemological reassessment Jairo Moreno reads in Gottfried Weber’s own Versuch of 1832.96 Theoretically, though, by C.P.E. Bach’s understanding, we are still wedded to the indissoluble relationship between compositional 94 “Eine Fantasie nennet man frey, wenn sie keine abgemessene Tacteintheilung enthält, und in mehrere Tonarten ausweichet, als bey andern Sücken zu geschehen pfleget, welche nach einer Tacteintheilung gesetzet sind, oder aus dem Stegreif erfunden werden.” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 2. Theil. (Berlin: George Ludewig, 1762). English translation in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, trans. William J. Mitchell (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1948), 430. 95 “Eine freye Fantasie bestehet aus abwechselnden harmonischen Sätzen, welche in allerhand Figuren und Zergliederungen ausgeführet werden können. Man muß hierbey eine Tonart festsetzen, mit welcher man anfänget und endiget. Ohngeachtet in solchen Fantasien keine Tacteintheilung Statt findet, so verlanget dennoch das Ohr, wie wir weiter unten hören werden, ein gewisses Verhältniß in der Abwechselung und Dauer der Harmonien unter sich, und das Auge ein Verhältniß in der Geltung der Noten, damit man seine Gedanken aufschrieben könne.” English translation in Mitchell, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, 434. 96 Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects, 131. 58 gesture and affect, as manifested in his own notated representation of the free musical fantasia (a fantasia accompanies the Versuch; see Figure 5.3). Figure 5.3, C.P.E. Bach, Fantasia in D major, Wq. 117/14, H. 160 (ca. 1763) 59 Like Louis Couperin’s Prélude non mesuré, the fantastical nature of C.P.E. Bach’s notation is situated uneasily between visual stimulus and perceived musical message. By the composer’s estimation, true artistry could only be ascertained by the composer via the negotiation of this dialectic, whereupon, “what an endless vista of harmonic variety unfolds before us!”97 As such, Bach’s definition of fantasia in the Versuch, coupled with the composer’s notated example, might be considered attempts to distill meaning from a musical semiotics on the verge of collapse. By the late-eighteenth century, composition treatises like C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch were outpaced by an influx of music criticism and the growth of a musical consumer culture. Mary Sue Morrow notes that by this time, Creative genius, in all its manifestations, from simple invention to the imagination and Phantasie, had completely captured the market … More than two decades of emphasis on originality, novelty, and individual style had definitely had an effect, so that instrumental composition without them (however they were defined) could not hope for success with the musical public.#' The 1796 Essay on Musical Harmony of A.F.C. Kollmann, a student of Johann Philipp Kirnberger, presents a positing of musical policies and procedures similar to C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch that belies the period’s cult of sentimentality: “The rules of harmony must be observed,” Kollmann insists. “Fixed measure must be understood,” “modulation must not be so free as to be without any plan,” and so forth.99 Subsequently in the Essay, Kollmann inserts a composer’s Phantasie into the construction of the free fantasia, and in turn, subverts it. “Though it is impossible to teach a person what he shall fancy,” the 97 C.P.E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, trans. Mitchell, 438. 98 Morrow, German Music Criticism, 137. 99 Augustus Frederic Christopher Kollmann, An Essay on Musical Harmony (London, 1796), 121. 60 author writes, “this fancy may be assisted in taking a proper, or prevented from taking an improper direction, by certain rules.”100 The commercial demand for musical inventiveness and, by extension, the associated concepts of introspection, sentimentality, and female domesticity, intensified near the end of the eighteenth century. In epistemological contrast to this shift, the free musical fantasia Baroque topos as Kollmann and C.P.E. Bach conceived it had ossified into a notated, rationalized musical conceit. In the following section, I offer two case studies—examples of early fantastic narratives—that invoke musical improvisation as a function of the construction of gender. In connection with eighteenth-century technological advancements and the Enlightenment’s aspirational ethos, the intersection of literary and musical fantasia around the year 1800 interfaces with the Classical episteme’s realization of the limits of representation and taxonomy. This convergence plays out in literary depictions of women making music. 100 Kollmann, An Essay on Musical Harmony, 120. 61 CHAPTER VI LE DIABLE AMOUREUX AND DER SANDMANN: THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION In Descartes’ Traité de l’homme (1664), the author writes, I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us. Thus God not only gives it externally the colours [sic.] and shapes of all the parts of our bodies, but also places inside it all the parts required to make it walk, eat, breathe, and indeed to imitate all those of our functions which can be imagined to proceed from matter and to depend solely on the disposition of our organs."&" Descartes’ description of human physiology in mechanistic terms is a peculiarity of his mind-body dualism. As shown in the preceding sections, the mathesis that resulted from his rationalism defined emotion in biological relationships—the affections—and engendered an epistemological taxonomic impulse across a variety of disciplines, including music. Roughly a century after Descartes’ posthumous Traité was published, Johann Gottfried von Herder initiated the following reassessment of musical science, questioning the technological worldview that had come to pervade issues of human sensibility in the eighteenth century: So we do not have a science of music? Who would suspect that? The Eulers and d’Alemberts and Diderots and Mersennes and Gravesandes and Sauveurs have brought the physics and mathematics of music to a degree of perfection that only the optics of colors has been able to attain. They have computed the varying 101 “Je suppose que le corps n’est autre chose qu’une statue ou machine de terre, que Dieu forme tout exprès, pour la rendre la plus semblable à nous qu’il est possible: en sorte que, non seulement il lui donne au dehors la couleur et la figure de tous nos membres, mais aussi qu’il met au dedans toutes les pièces qui sont requises pour faire qu’elle marche, qu’elle mange, qu’elle respire, et enfin qu’elle imite toutes celles de nos fonctions qui peuvent être imaginées procéder de la matière, et ne dépendre que de la disposition des organes.” René Descartes, Traité de l’homme (Paris: Angot, 1664), 1. English translation as “Treatise of Man,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1. 62 number of a string’s vibrations according to its length, strength, and weight, and on this basis they have calculated tones and hence the relations of tones and hence harmony and hence the rules of composition right up to the level of algebra. … Conversely, who is not familiar with the excellent practical guides to the arts of hearing that Germans in particular have, in their own way raised almost to the same exalted heights? … Both ends of musical science, the most abstract part above and the practical part below, are therefore perfect. But is there nothing in between? I think there is indeed! And it in this vast and empty middle ground that we shall find the as-yet-undeveloped portion we were seeking."&$ Herder’s entreaty speaks on behalf of late-eighteenth century philosophers and aestheticians, whose dictionaries and encyclopedias strained to convey adequate meaning under the constraints of representation. If neither music’s science nor its practice were sufficiently capable of explaining why music can stir our passions, what semiotics could be discerned from the fact that music—and more troublingly, music without words— could be beautiful and moving? In response to this question, the “empty middle ground” Herder uncovers is an apt point of reflection. Around the year 1800, the alterity of musical extemporaneity, already gendered female by this time, assumes prominent focus in texts that themselves limn the space between the real and the imaginary. This liminal space, in Foucault’s analysis, had already been the site of an epistemological upheaval, in which Renaissance resemblances gave way to the technologizing of the written word. Meaning in the modern episteme, he contends, using Cervantes’ Don Quixote as an example, is likewise found in the space between sign and signification. “Don Quixote’s truth,” Foucault writes, “is not in the relation of the words to the world but in that slender and constant relation woven between themselves by verbal signs. The hollow fiction of epic exploits has become the 102 Johann Gottfried von Herder, “Critical Forests: Fourth Grove,” in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 236. 63 representative power of language. Words have swallowed up their own nature as signs.”"&) We might even say that modernity itself, initiated by print technology and amplified by cognition, revels in metaphysical interstices, made legible only in the understanding of their limitations and ultimate dissolution. The literary fantastic, defined by Diderot and d’Alembert in their Encyclopédie as “the disordering of the imagination or the debauch of genius,” had by 1761 come to connote fragmentation, evocative, perhaps, of this epistemological acknowledgment. “It is that assemblage,” they continue, “of the most distant genres and of the most disparate forms, without progression, without proportion, [and] without nuance.”"&! Significantly, the musical fantastic topos and its extemporal façade, absorbed by this time into music as a sign unto itself, was likewise uneasily positioned in Herder’s “empty middle ground,” between music’s science (or notation, even) and its practice. The fragmentation that characterized the free fantasia—its seemingly random concatenations of tempo, meter, harmony, and affect that were so resisted by C.P.E. Bach and Kollmann in their treatises—became layered with additional meaning in concordance with language. Freed from their categorization within the fantasia as musical genre (like resemblances from their words in Don Quixote), these parameters achieve a new symbology in their depiction in literature vis-à-vis technology: as caprice, as sentiment, and as femininity. It 103 Foucault, The Order of Things, 48. 104 “Le déréglement de l’imagination, ou, si l’on veut, la débauche du génie n’a eu que la barriere des convenances à franchir. Le premier étoit le mélange des especes voisines; le second est l’assemblage des genres les plus éloignés & des formes les plus disparates, sans progressions, sans proportions, & sans nuances.” Diderot and d’Alembert, “Fantastique,” Encyclopédie, 6:682. Translation in Deborah A. Harter, Bodies in Pieces: Fantastic Narrative and the Poetics of Fragment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 133. 64 is thus around 1800 in the limitations of representation that fantaisie and fantastique were synthesized. In what follows, we will see how the liminal space in which the fantastic topos and female music making became intertwined corresponds to the growing trench between words and their meanings throughout the representational episteme. The ternary structure formed by the connections between improvisation, femininity, and machines is thus coopted by the fantastic narrative to signify otherness and the dissolution of the Classical sign. Depictions of musical performances by women in Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772) and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816), presented here as prototype and archetype of the literary fantastic respectively, signal a cultural reassessment of extemporaneity and ingenium. Texts like these highlight and, one might say, satirize the Enlightenment’s link between technology and sentiment along with their presentation of this same technology’s curiosity and failings. Terry Castle notes that the disparate notions of calculable, empirical data (that which could be measured) and human behavior (that which could not be measured) had by the late-seventeenth century converged in the invention and subsequent ubiquity of weatherglasses. “On the most abstract level,” she writes, Traditional theories describing the effect of weather on human nature provided a philosophical basis for connecting human emotions with the state of the air … Even more influential, perhaps, in fixing this connection with human psychology was the purported resemblance between the fluctuations of the mercury in the weatherglass and the recently discovered movements of the blood in the bloodstream.105 105 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 26. 65 Parallels between the measurable and immeasurable like these suggest to us that Enlightenment thinkers believed that science had the capacity to explicate the subtleties of human nature. This, in turn, meant that those subtleties were not so readily quantified,106 including gender difference, quickly became the subject of lore and fantasy. One such manifestation of the attempt to quantify human nature presents in the depiction of Bonnell Thornton’s “Female Thermometer” from the essayist’s entry in a 1754 issue of The Connoisseur. Terry Castle summarizes: “Perfected by an ‘ingenious friend,’ the Female Thermometer was an invention for measuring ‘the exact temperature of a lady’s passions.’ The calibrations [from ‘hottest’ to ‘coldest’] were as follows: Abandoned impudence, Gallantry, Loose Behaviour [sic.], Innocent Freedoms, Indiscretions, Inviolable Modesty.”107 As such, the epistemological realization of the limits of representation, empiricism, and taxonomy—and, by extension, technology—reified throughout the course of the Enlightenment, came by the dawn of the nineteenth century to be depicted in fictional accounts of technology gone mad.108 In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann from 1816, for example, in which the protagonist witnesses a musical performance by a female automaton, the author writes, Olimpia played the piano with great dexterity and, with equal skill, performed a bravura aria in a bright, almost cutting voice resembling musical glasses. Nathanael was totally enraptured; he stood in the back row and could not 106 Indeed, what Foucault calls “those never entirely representable representations.” The Order of Things, 244. 107 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer, 21. 108 “The last years of the eighteenth century are broken by a discontinuity similar to that which destroyed Renaissance thought at the beginning of the seventeenth; then, the great circular forms in which similitude was enclosed were dislocated and opened so that the table of identities could be unfolded; and that table is now about to be destroyed in turn.” Foucault, The Order of Things, 217. 66 recognize Olimpia’s features perfectly in the dazzling candlelight. Therefore, completely unnoticed, he pulled out Coppola’s glass and directed it at the beautiful Olimpia. Ah!—then he became aware that she was looking at him in deep longing, that each note of hers only attained full clarity when combined with that loving look which pierced and inflamed his heart.109 Here, we witness a twofold commentary on musical technology: Nathanael’s beloved Olimpia, a technological construction, beguiles with her tour-de-force performance at the piano, itself a machine and signifier of expression. To this, I add Nathanael’s usage of a glass, a technological manifestation of the proverbial “male gaze,” through which the reader may, too, assume a voyeuristic position in this feminine-as-technology figuration.110 The reflexivity of Hoffmann’s depiction of Olimpia the automaton, insofar as she becomes the object of Nathanael’s obsessive adoration and is ultimately destroyed by it, is evocative of the metaphysical dissolution of the Classical episteme in the face of modernity. As Hoffmann's Olimpia is shown to be a mere “lifeless doll,”111 subverting, in a sense, her human representation, so does Nathanael’s representation within the literary paradigm reach its own limitations; the tale catapults to its conclusion, ending with the protagonist’s madness, death, and his expulsion from the narrative. Tzvetan Todorov 109 “Olimpia spielte den Flügel mit großer Fertigkeit und trug ebenso eine Bravour-Arie mit heller, beinahe schneidender Glasglockenstimme vor. Nathanael war ganz entzückt; er stand in der hintersten Reihe und konnte im blendenden Kerzenlicht Olimpias Züge nicht ganz erkennen. Ganz unvermerkt nahm er deshalb Coppolas Glas hervor und schaute hin nach der schönen Olimpia. Ach! - da wurde er gewahr, wie sie voll Sehnsucht nach ihm herübersah, wie jeder Ton erst deutlich aufging in dem Liebesblick, der zündend sein Inneres durchdrang.” Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Der Sandmann (1816). Original German and English translation in Stanley Appelbaum, “The Sand-Man,” Five Great German Short Stories = Fünf Deutsche Meistererzählungen, (New York: Dover, 1993), 82–83. 110 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975), 6–18. 111 “Erstarrt stand Nathanael - nur zu deutlich hatte er gesehen, Olimpias toderbleichtes Wachsgesicht hatte keine Augen, statt ihrer schwarze Höhlen; sie war eine leblose Puppe.” Hoffmann, Der Sandmann (1816) in Stanley Appelbaum, “The Sand-Man,” Five Great German Short Stories, 94–95. 67 identifies this type of rupture in Hoffmann as the site of literary fantasy. He writes, “‘I nearly reached the point of believing’: that is the formula which sums up the spirit of the fantastic. Either total faith or total incredulity would lead us beyond the fantastic: it is hesitation which sustains its life.”112 Technology, manifested as a female curiosity (poignantly reminiscent of the sixteenth-century courtesan), becomes in Hoffmann’s narrative intertwined with the male protagonist’s unraveling; in both instances, the connoting of the inexplicable is relegated to the realm of fantasy. A similar example of this technophobia appears in Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux, wherein the notions of musical improvisation, genius, and technology converge in the portrayal of Biondetta, the devil-as-woman, and her homemade harpsichord. Biondetta’s position in the narrative represents a changing conception of technology as it pertained to man’s undoing (if not simply the undoing of masculinity) at the close of the Enlightenment and the dawn of the Romantic era. As such, Terry Castle notes, “We might speak of the feminization of human nature itself [at this time] … Characteristics once seen as belonging only to women—moodiness, heightened sensitivity, susceptibility to hysteria, and so on—come increasingly to be perceived as belonging to both sexes.”113 Toward the end of the novel, Biondetta experiences a bout of melancholia that, in turn, becomes linked with her subconscious (as manifested by her “dreamlike state,” as Cazotte writes), and which takes the form of a musical improvisation. Cazotte juxtaposes the curiosity of Biondetta’s extemporal performance—on a harpsichord of her own construction—with the courtesan’s emotional upheaval. In so doing, the author interlaces 112 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 31. 113 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer, 34. 68 the inexplicability of human psychology (as represented by womanly sentiment) with a generalized technophobia. Cazotte writes, Passion overtook her, and her tears appeared to suffocate her. She gets up, goes to take a handkerchief, wipes [her nose] and approaches the instrument; she wants to sit down again, but as she finds the low height of the seat to be bothersome, she takes the book that was on the stand, places it on the stool, sits down and preludes once more.114 Poignantly, Alvaro’s observing this gesture through a keyhole—a vantage point that simultaneously engenders a sexual-ideological construct, and is reminiscent of, perhaps, the assumed posture of a scientist using a microscope—is what anticipates this reconfiguration of gender roles. After he flees from the keyhole, acknowledging the fantastic nature of Biondetta’s performance, the protagonist witnesses the courtesan’s attempted murder, whereupon he descends into his own type of effeminate despair. He exclaims, Once she was undressed and I saw this beautiful, bleeding body afflicted by two enormous wounds that seemed surely to attack both sources of life, I said and did a thousand extravagances. Biondetta, presumably unconscious, must not have heard them; but the innkeeper and his men, a surgeon, and two doctors judged it too dangerous to leave me near the wounded woman. They took me out of the room. They left my men near me; but one of them having the indecency to tell me that his faculties had determined her wounds to be fatal, I let out shrill cries. Finally fatigued by my outburst, I fell into a despondency that was followed by sleep.115 114 “La passion l’emportait, et les larmes semblaient la suffoquer. Elle se lève, va prendre un mouchoir, s’essuie et se rapproche de l’instrument; elle veut se rasseoir, et, comme si le peu de hauteur du siège l’eût tenue ci-devant dans une attitude trop gênée, elle prend le livre qui était sur son pupitre, le met sur le tabouret, s’assied et prélude de nouveau.” Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux, 79. 115 “Quand on l’eut déshabillée, quand je vis ce beau corps sanglant atteint de deux énormes blessures, qui semblaient devoir attaquer toutes deux les sources de la vie, je dis, je fis mille extravagances. Biondetta, présumée sans connaissance, ne devait pas les entendre; mais l’aubergiste et ses gens, un chirurgien, deux médecins, appelés, jugèrent qu’il était dangereux pour la blessée qu’on me laissât auprès d’elle. On m’entraîna hors de la chambre. On laissa mes gens près de moi; mais un d’eux ayant eu la maladresse de me dire que la faculté avait jugé les blessures mortelles, je poussai des cris aigus. Fatigué enfin par mes emportements, je tombai dans un abattement qui fut suivi du sommeil.” Ibid., 86. 69 Biondetta’s near-death coincides with a scientific, “indecent” diagnosis of her mortality, one that is ultimately subverted by the narrative’s fantastic nature: she lives. Alvaro’s femininity, in turn, rises and falls as the courtesan wavers between life and death in Cazotte’s narrative. “If you die, object most worthy of being cherished,” the protagonist remarks, and I not having recognized your gifts, I do not want to survive you. … If you are returned to me, I will be yours; I will recognize your kindnesses; I will crown your virtues, your patience, I am bound by indissoluble ties, and will do my duty to make you happy by the blind sacrifice of my feelings and wishes.116 Alvaro’s self-effacing comments in the face of Biondetta’s potential expulsion from the narrative, therefore, reverse the two characters’ initial power dynamic. Biondetta’s survival causes Alvaro to become hysterical, delirious, and even paranoid in a “swoon of [womanly] tenderness”117 as the courtesan regains her physical strength. With this, we are reminded of the literal deconstruction of Hoffmann’s Olimpia at the end of Der Sandmann as it pertains to Nathanael’s masculinity. In a sense, Hoffmann hinges Nathanael’s fate and, ultimately, the fate of all men on the technological failure of the protagonist’s beloved Olimpia. The author writes, “The history of this automaton had sunk deeply into [men’s] souls, and an absurd mistrust of human figures began to prevail. Several lovers required that their mistress should sing and dance a little out of time, 116 “Si tu meurs, objet le plus digne d’être chéri, et dont j’ai si indignement reconnu les bontés, je ne veux pas te survivre. Je mourrai après avoir sacrifié sur ta tombe la barbare Olympia! Si tu m’es rendue, je serai à toi; je reconnaîtrai tes bienfaits; je couronnerai tes vertus, ta patience, je me lie par des liens indissolubles, et ferai mon devoir de te rendre heureuse par le sacrifice aveugle de mes sentiments et de mes volontés.” Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux, 89. 117 Ibid. 70 should embroider or knit or play with her little pug, etc.”118 Nathanael’s death, then, becomes a literary representation of his character’s inability (even, perhaps, the inability of mankind) to exist within the episteme of rationalized thought and Classical signs: his “total faith” in Olimpia, to invoke Todorov, effeminizes him while his “total incredulity” engenders his madness.119 Descartes’ proclamation that “the body [is] nothing but a statue or machine made of earth” attains a new poignancy at the dawn of the Romantic era. The two- dimensionality of this physiology—that like cogs in clockwork, bodily organs have singular functions with singular results—resounds in a haunting echo in Olimpia’s roulades and Biondetta’s prelude. As tangible and earthly machines, the harpsichord and Olimpia, who meet their eventual destruction and fragmentation within the literary paradigm via a revealing of their limitations, invite the dissolution of the Classical sign: two dimensions become three. The liminal space occupied by a pairing of musical fantasia—itself characterized by fragmentary “capriciousness”—and female music making becomes a reflection of the gap between natural signs and their meanings. Herder’s “empty middle ground” may therefore be filled with musical symbols extrinsic to their affective capabilities or reasonable execution; in the modern episteme, they become metaphors. 118 “Aber viele hochzuverehrende Herren beruhigten sich nicht dabei; die Geschichte mit dem Automat hatte tief in ihrer Seele Wurzel gefaßt und es schlich sich in der Tat abscheuliches Mißtrauen gegen menschliche Figuren ein. Um nun ganz überzeugt zu werden, daß man keine Holzpuppe liebe, wurde von mehrern Liebhabern verlangt, daß die Geliebte etwas taktlos singe und tanze, daß sie beim Vorlesen sticke, stricke, mit dem Möpschen spiele usw.” Hoffmann, Der Sandmann (1816) in Appelbaum, “The Sand- Man,” Five Great German Short Stories, 96–97. 119 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 31. 71 CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION Using Hoffmann’s Olimpia and Cazotte’s Biondetta as case studies, I have drawn a connection between the literary fantastic and the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth- century conceptualization of female music making. To wit, I cite the Enlightenment’s codification of the free musical fantasia in the documents of French philosophes and German music theorists as some examples of a generation of thinkers anxiously reconciling extemporal performance with rationalized, notated music. Around 1800, lingering concerns over inexplicable, unclassifiable musical fantasy become intertwined with “feminine music as other,” which is, in turn, signified by a growing technophobia. This is due to an acknowledgement of the limits of representation and taxonomy, a cultural awareness of the subconscious, and a fascination with musical ingenium. Hoffmann’s disquisition on Beethoven’s instrumental music, which appeared in 1814 in Die Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung as part of the author’s Kreisleriana essays, is an appropriate point of arrival for this trajectory. As a sensitive music critic, a composer, and author of some of the Romantic period’s most treasured tales, Hoffmann embodied the Zeitgeist of the early-nineteenth century, and leaves to us ample documentation of the era’s epistemological turn. “The genuine artist,” he proclaimed, throws himself into the work, which he first comprehends from the point-of-view of the composer, and then interprets. He scorns the exploitation of his personality in any way whatever, and all his poetic imagination and intellectual understanding are bent towards the object of calling forth into active life, with all the brilliant colors at his command, the noble and enchanting images and visions which the Master with magic power has shut up in his work, that they may surround 72 mankind in bright sparkling rings and, enflaming his fancy and his innermost feelings, carry him in wild flights into the distant spirit kingdom of sound."$& Like the author’s Olimpia, imbued with “active life” by Spalanzani within the literary paradigm, so does Olimpia’s meaning—as the site on which representation is projected and destroyed—hinge on Hoffmann’s command of “noble and enchanting images.” This fantasy, with the linguistic signification of image at its core, once the imaginative impulse of the composer bridled by representation and taxonomy, becomes in Hoffmann’s interpretation the very essence of freedom; “innermost feelings” assume primacy over outward-mandated mathesis. By the time Freud published his article on the uncanny in 1919, some one hundred years after the publication of Hoffmann’s fantastic narrative, the Enlightenment’s peculiar inexplicability of Olimpia—namely Nathanael’s discovery of the automaton’s mechanical eyes lying on the ground next to her—becomes even more poignantly associated with demasculinization. Freud writes, “a study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration.”121 With this further turn away from the Classical sign, fantasy is supplanted by psychoanalysis; the representational regime disintegrates for good, and we find new explanation for what was previously relegated to the occult. Similarly, the nineteenth century ushered in a new age for musical aesthetics, as Mark Evan Bonds notes, “All aesthetic contemplation, 120 Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music from ‘Kreisleriana,’” trans. Arthur Ware Locke, The Musical Quarterly 3:1 (January 1917): 133. 121 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” Imago Bd. V (Berlin, 1919). 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