Using Aesthetics to Help Students Recognize the Long Reach of Romanticism in Music
Music philosophy and aesthetics provide fresh alternatives to more standard, chronological presentations of nineteenth-century masterworks, cultures, and geniuses of art music. Such classes foreground conversations about musical meaning and the nature of its influence over humans. Texts for my nineteenth-century music class include original writings by—and published commentaries on—Burke (sublime/beautiful, 1757), Kant (genius, judgment, 1790), Schopenhauer (hierarchy of the Will vis à vis music, 1818/19), Hanslick (formalism, 1854), journalistic criticism, letters, or memoirs of Berlioz, Robert Schumann, and Wagner, and Brahms. This presentation details the end-of-term project:
• Choose a nineteenth-century aesthetic principle or dialectic and a work in which it appears (e.g., judgment, program/absolute music, beautiful/sublime, narrative, Romanticism/anti-Romanticism), locate that principle in a 20th- or 21st-century work from any genre, and write a philosophical argument supporting the resonance you see among the Romantic principle and your two musical choices.
• Structure your argument using the six-part arrangement of a classical oration: Introduction, Statement of Facts, Division, Proof, Refutation, Conclusion (http://rhetoric.byu.edu)
This assignment imparts better understandings of the ways earlier philosophical principles (rhetoric) and Romantic era ideals remain relevant today. Abstracts from student papers will evidence the successful extension of nineteenth-century musical principles beyond the “long” century.
Music philosophy and aesthetics provide fresh alternatives to more standard, chronological presentations of nineteenth-century masterworks, cultures, and geniuses of art music. Such classes foreground conversations about musical meaning and the nature of its influence over humans. Texts for my nineteenth-century music class include original writings by—and published commentaries on—Burke (sublime/beautiful, 1757), Kant (genius, judgment, 1790), Schopenhauer (hierarchy of the Will vis à vis music, 1818/19), Hanslick (formalism, 1854), journalistic criticism, letters, or memoirs of Berlioz, Robert Schumann, and Wagner, and Brahms. This presentation details the end-of-term project:
• Choose a nineteenth-century aesthetic principle or dialectic and a work in which it appears (e.g., judgment, program/absolute music, beautiful/sublime, narrative, Romanticism/anti-Romanticism), locate that principle in a 20th- or 21st-century work from any genre, and write a philosophical argument supporting the resonance you see among the Romantic principle and your two musical choices.
• Structure your argument using the six-part arrangement of a classical oration: Introduction, Statement of Facts, Division, Proof, Refutation, Conclusion (http://rhetoric.byu.edu)
This assignment imparts better understandings of the ways earlier philosophical principles (rhetoric) and Romantic era ideals remain relevant today. Abstracts from student papers will evidence the successful extension of nineteenth-century musical principles beyond the “long” century.
