19th-Century Music 

About: 19th-Century Music is an academic journal published by University of California Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Musical & Opera. It has an ISSN identifier of 0148-2076. Over the lifetime, 1093 publications have been published receiving 9225 citations. The journal is also known as: Nineteenth Century Music & 19th century music.

On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity

Abstract: This article develops a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, building on the work of Theodor Adorno, Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. It begins by suggesting that Lydia Goehr’s account of the work concept requires such a perspective. Drawing on Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art, the article outlines an approach to mediation that incorporates understandings of music’s social, technological and temporal dimensions. It suggests that music’s mediations have taken a number of historical forms, which cohere into assemblages, and that we should be alert to shifts in the dominant forms of musical assemblage. In the latter part of the article, these tools are used to conceptualize changing forms of musical creativity that emerged over the twentieth century. A comparison is made between the work concept and jazz and improvised electronic musics. Three contemporary digital music experiments are discussed in detail, demonstrating the concepts of the provisional work and of social, distributed and relayed creativity. Throughout, key motifs are mediation, creativity, and the negotiation of difference.

Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience

Abstract: other has proceeded side by side with research on the conception and function of music and language in particular historical contexts. How (and, of course, by whom and for whom) was music actually talked about and described in the past? Reception history and the history of music theory too rarely have sought to unravel carefully the interior logic of the discourse about music even from a putatively ahistorical philosophical perspective, let alone from the point of view of the past. What might a historically contingent set of assumptions, buried in the use of particular language to talk about music, look like? What influence on musical life might specific language use about music itself have exerted on the course of music history? Structuralist and semiological theories have been utilized in an effort to differentiate theoretical notions about meaning and communication in music from empirical usages. JeanJacques Nattiez's tripartite distinction of the poetic, neutral, and aesthetic levels in musical situations provides a useful theory about how one might distinguish between a composer's intent, a musical text, its realization in time directly (performance) or indirectly (acoustic realization through the playing of recordings)and the reactions of varying types of listeners.'

Once More Between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann's Second Symphony

Abstract: For recent critics, Schumann's Second Symphony has been a refractory text. While the nineteenth century judged it to be one of his highest achievements, the twentieth is generally puzzled by it and tends to reject it as defective. Clearly it is not the text, but our way of understanding the text, that has changed. This suggests that our problems with the piece may be rooted in current analytical tools for absolute music. Other ways of approach may permit us to make a better argument for the symphony, and to restore it to its former place in the canon. Music for Schumann was an expressive enterprise and a form of communication, reflecting in some way the experience of its creator. Not that his music sets out to describe external

Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques

Abstract: This article offers clarifications and critiques of actor-network theory and its usefulness for music historiography. Reviewing the work of ANT theorists Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, and other social theorists (such as Georgina Born and Anna Tsing), the author explains that ANT is a methodology, not a theory. As a general introduction, the author outlines ANT's methodological presuppositions about human and non-human agency, action, ontology, and performance. He then examines how these methodological principles affect three concerns of music-historical interest: influence, genre, and context. In conclusion, he addresses problems related to temporality, critique, and reflexivity. He draws on music-historical examples after 1960: John Cage, the Jazz Composer's Guild, Henry Cow, Iggy Pop, and the Velvet Underground.

As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert

Abstract: been grateful to a dull description that faithfully guides me to the places where great artistic experiences await."' So rhapsodized Donald Francis Tovey at the end of his 1928 essay entitled "Tonality"--later reprinted as "Tonality in Schubert"-in response to his own description of the D-minor passage preceding the recapitulation of the first movement of the BPMajor Piano Sonata, D. 960, of 1828. Although we will gaze on this music in due time, our telescope first takes the measure of Tovey's metaphor, which is striking for reasons that Tovey probably did not intend. The traditional metaphorical source for tonal relations is the ola system, where positions are determined relative to a central unifying element.2 A star cluster evokes a network of elements and rela-