Dissertation Abstracts in Music - 2

Hannu Juhani Salmi (hansalmi@utu.fi)
Thu, 25 Jan 1996 07:57:52 +0200 (EET)


Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 07:57:52 +0200 (EET)
From: Hannu Juhani Salmi <hansalmi@utu.fi>
To: h-verkko@sara.cc.utu.fi
Subject: Dissertation Abstracts in Music - 2

http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/Music/Archive/Disserts/pederson.html > [Back to index]
>
> Pederson, Sanna
>
> Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800-1850
>
> Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1995
> (spederso@sas.upenn.edu)
>
> Factors that helped consolidate music criticism in crucial ways--the
> concept of aesthetic autonomy, the idea of a public sphere, and a
> national ideology--all started emerging around 1800. Fifty years
> later the concept of criticism in its "strong," philosophical sense
> collapsed along with Hegelian idealist philosophy. At that time, the
> failure of the 1848 revolutions marked a significant crisis not only
> for the nation but also for the institutions of art and criticism.
>
> During this period, music criticism maintained some basic premises.
> For Friedrich Rochlitz and his Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung,
> music criticism functioned as part of the Enlightenment project to
> disseminate information and to promote reasoned debate. The
> foundational principle of the public sphere--that is, the
> ideological space between the state and the private home, where
> indviduals would be free to meet and discuss matters of common
> interest--was not rejected by later critics. However, the
> contradictions inherent in the concept of the public sphere also
> remained constant; particularly enduring issues involved what
> qualified the critic to overrule the public, and what criticism was
> supposed to do for composers and their music. The criticism of A. B.
> Marx and Robert Schumann finessed these problems and made
> authoritative critical judgments not by invoking the Kantian sensus
> communis of all human beings, but rather the sensus communis of the
> German nation. This nationalistic approach to questions of aesthetic
> value had two components: it positioned foreign music as "other" or
> inimical to the values of German music, and it consolidated German
> music as a central feature of German identity.