Where Present and Past Meet: Teaching Romantic Performativity and Reception
The class on Romantic virtuosity in my music history survey begins with a game: Students see multiple sentence-long quotes from reviews of pianists and have to decide whether these were written in the nineteenth century or in the twenty-first. Amused, sometimes surprised, students often find it challenging to distinguish between the examples. The element of the unknown as well as the whimsical and colorful language make this game an engaging in-road into discussing major themes in Romantic reception of virtuosos. But perhaps its most powerful lesson is not that the Romantics wrote colorful language in their reviews, but that many of these nineteenth-century themes color reception of performers in today’s classical music world. At the same time, the game leads to discussion about how subtle, ongoing nineteenth-century performance practices may encourage these kinds of reception.
This paper explores the pedagogical benefits of incorporating the subject of contemporary performance of nineteenth-century music into the music history classroom. It may seem daunting to include yet more content into an already condensed course, but I find that students enjoy analyzing performances from living musicians. As I argue, with examples such as the above-described game and other class assignments, engaging students in analysis of young performers helps them learn historical reception contexts from a more approachable starting point. Having students explain why one contemporary performer might garner more “Romantic” reception than another requires both an understanding of Romantic themes and a critical analysis of that person’s performance—of both music and socio-cultural identity. Thus, the broader goals of this project are to help students develop not only critical listening skills, but also historical and critical thinking skills relating to Romantic perfomativity and reception.
The class on Romantic virtuosity in my music history survey begins with a game: Students see multiple sentence-long quotes from reviews of pianists and have to decide whether these were written in the nineteenth century or in the twenty-first. Amused, sometimes surprised, students often find it challenging to distinguish between the examples. The element of the unknown as well as the whimsical and colorful language make this game an engaging in-road into discussing major themes in Romantic reception of virtuosos. But perhaps its most powerful lesson is not that the Romantics wrote colorful language in their reviews, but that many of these nineteenth-century themes color reception of performers in today’s classical music world. At the same time, the game leads to discussion about how subtle, ongoing nineteenth-century performance practices may encourage these kinds of reception.
This paper explores the pedagogical benefits of incorporating the subject of contemporary performance of nineteenth-century music into the music history classroom. It may seem daunting to include yet more content into an already condensed course, but I find that students enjoy analyzing performances from living musicians. As I argue, with examples such as the above-described game and other class assignments, engaging students in analysis of young performers helps them learn historical reception contexts from a more approachable starting point. Having students explain why one contemporary performer might garner more “Romantic” reception than another requires both an understanding of Romantic themes and a critical analysis of that person’s performance—of both music and socio-cultural identity. Thus, the broader goals of this project are to help students develop not only critical listening skills, but also historical and critical thinking skills relating to Romantic perfomativity and reception.
