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SONOROUS SUBLIMES: MUSIC AND SOUND 1670-1850
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND
HUMANITIES (CRASSH), UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, 23-25 JUNE 2015
‘[Music was] a latecomer to the feast of the sublime’, conference convenors
Miranda Stanyon (University of Cambridge) and Sarah Hibberd (University of
Nottingham) observe in their flyer for this imaginative, searching and deeply
interdisciplinary conference, ‘feeding off an established discourse concerned
with the verbal and visual’. In terms of twentieth-century scholarship they
are right, of course. Elsewhere in the humanities, the sublime was suffering
exhaustion when it achieved belated currency in Anglophone musicology in
the 1990s. Writing in 2011 ‘Against the Sublime’, the art historian James
Elkins called for a ‘moratorium’ on a word that – in Costelloe’s paraphrase –
had come to seem ‘anaemic, bourgeois, elitist, feeble, ideological, ineffective’
and so on (see Timothy M. Costelloe, ‘The Sublime: A Short Introduction to a
Long History’ in The Sublime from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Costelloe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1). In this difficult context,
‘sonorous sublimes’ revivified the category, not so much by applying it to
music as by dispersing music and the musical across other media,
animating the literary and the visual with sound, music, voice, performance
and – taking the pluralization to heart -- variety.
The conference began paradoxically with music ‘itself’ set outside the
order of the sublime by Sophie Hache (Université de Lille 3). Having delved
into late seventeenth-century French sermons, Hache reported that the
sublime was not assigned to the sacred music of the church, nor the sounds
of nature, but solely to the divine music of angels and, more abstractly, the
heavenly sphere. Mortal music, even sung with faith, and seeking union
with God, was too lowly to warrant the epithet. The issue warranted more
development and contextualization than time allowed. Arguably, what we
learn from sermons is how theologians and clergy regulated access to the
sublime. It is no surprise – given the context of the absolutism of Louis XIV that clergy, preaching according to their social interests, accorded the arts of
(other) men little purchase on the sublime qua divinity. Surely the musical is
‘inside’ sermons (as oratory) as well as a subject of them. Googling Bossuet,
my first hit suggested he was no stranger to the power of human sounds:
‘[Bossuet possessed] a voice that was deep and sonorous, an imposing
personality, and an animated and graceful style of gesture. [Alphonse de]
Lamartine [1790-1869] says he had “a voice which, like that of the thunder
in the clouds, or the organ in the cathedral, had never been anything but
the medium of power and divine persuasion to the soul”’. (Grenville Kleiser,
‘Bossuet’, in ‘The World’s Great Sermons’
<http://www.authorama.com/worlds-great-sermons-5.html> (30 June
2015)).
Responding to Hache, and to a fascinating though strictly arthistorical paper by Lydia Hamlett (University of Cambridge, Department of
Art History) on ceiling paintings and the sublime before Edmund Burke’s
epochal treatise of 1757, Emma Gilby (University of Cambridge, Department
of French) rescued the sonorous when it seemed to be slipping away in
ingenious comments on silence and voice, awed muteness and address in
Longinus, Rembrandt and prayer. ‘Fiat Lux’, Gilby reminded us, is an
utterance, a voice, not simply a trope of divine illumination. Thus the stock
of the sonorous sublime deflated and then rebounded within the first
session. Towards the end of the first day, Penelope Gouk (University of
Manchester), in a response to my own paper and that of Stinj Bussels
(Universiteit Leiden), was courageous enough to ask some fundamental
questions: isn’t the sublime a romantic aesthetic of music? Why is it being
backed up into earlier periods? What are the sources for linking the sublime
and music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – in what domains or
disciplines are those links made? Is the sublime a necessary term, or could
one be powerfully moved without referring the experience to the sublime?
Fuller answers are likely to emerge as authors reflect on and revise
their papers for the projected book of essays, but some preliminary thoughts
were mooted across the three days or can be floated here (to keep the
conversation going). The romantic metaphysics of instrumental music,
which might usefully be included in the book, represents a historically
specific, if enduring, deployment of the sublime as a sign of music’s
aesthetic autonomy – its transcendence of other media, of (certain kinds of)
social function and of the worldly. Though not the subject of a paper as
such, this topic was embodied for us in the form of Andrew Bowie (Royal
Holloway, University of London) who also gave an improvised talk
emphasizing the ineffability of the sublime in post-Kantian philosophy and
thus the wrong-headedness of trying to define it. That said, Wiebke
Thormählen, responding to papers by Nils Holger Petersen (Københavns
Universitet, Department of Theology) on Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Philip
Shaw (University of Leicester, Department of History) on Beethoven’s
Wellington’s Victory, noted that, as a practice (if not as a philosophical
concept), the sublime around 1800 retained strong affiliations with the
visual and theatrical. Even in romantic contexts, then, the sublime was
neither monolithic nor stable, nor was it ‘about’ autonomy. Roger Parker
(King’s College London) mentioned a debate in London in the 1830s over
what type of music could properly be styled sublime, a subject that would
add much to the book of the conference.
As these brief summaries reveal, it is difficult to discern a historical
shape to ‘music and the sublime’ in part because of the varied locations of
sublime discourse and the slipperiness of the term. In so far as the musical
sublime around 1800 was and wasn’t representational, was otherworldly
and theatrical, was met in unruly nature, in the human heart and in the
world to come, was not self-evidently located in ‘works’ but might be
attributed to them, it seems to be largely determined by (the contradictions
of) Romanticism, rather than its own autonomous force. Similarly, theories
of the sublime around 1700 – distinguished by their proximity to ideas
about language and representation – hardly escape, but rather are
structured by then-dominant ways of knowing. Perhaps the sublime walks
hand in hand with histories that we already know, yielding (as it yielded
across the three-days of ‘Sonorous Sublimes’) to chronological narration
because of its historical contingency, not on account of any essential,
transhistorical identity.
The question ‘Does the sublime have a history?’ is obviously
paradoxical, given how often this category has spoken of something ‘beyond’
or outside time. The situation is made poignant for scholars of music,
because their histories speak of music’s ‘emancipation’ from mimesis, of a
movement from the fetters of representation towards the sublime as
disembodied spirit (in the idealist formulation) or forms in motion (in the
positivist retelling). A history of music and the sublime needs to come to
terms with the history of music as the sublime. Enshrined, but also
concealed, in the idea of ‘absolute’ or ‘pure’ music, the sublime was a
foundational truth for musicology – intrinsic to the nature of the art of
music. Musicology not only ‘fed off’ the sublime, but it catered the banquet.
Ironically, musical scholarship started to write about the sublime when it
stopped being of it – when it transcended the discourse of musical
transcendence and recovered a fuller sense of music’s being in the world.
On the basis of ‘Sonorous Sublimes’, it appears that music before
about 1780 was primarily linked to the sublime within the domain of
literature, a point that Miranda Stanyon proposes in her important
forthcoming monograph, and which clearly continued beyond 1800, as her
evocative paper on opera in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater revealed. Thus the epithet ‘musical sublime’ often pointed not
to music’s autonomy but to multimedia. As for the sublime ‘itself’, for most
of the period 1680-1850 it offered not transcendence but various kinds of
emotive and spiritual heightening (which music was well placed to enhance)
such as rhetorical intensification, assent through hierarchies of genre and
style, or lofty association with the (often coterminous) figures of God and
sovereign. For example, Stinj Bussels showed how references to hellish noise
and celestial harmony in laudatory poems for the New Town Hall of
Amsterdam (1655) did more than musicalize architecture: they also linked
this monument to civic power, superhuman achievement and the triumph of
divine order over the forces of evil. My own paper (Matthew Head, King’s
College London), seeking to understand better the discourse of penetration
and ravishment in the reception of pseudo-Longinus in Britain around
1700, suggested that the currency of the sublime was related, dialectically,
to the then peculiarly prominent anxiety about sodomy – those subjects
rubbing shoulders in the writings of the English critic of dramatic poetry
and Italian opera John Dennis. Though the constellation of music, sodomy
and the sublime approaches a conceptual scandal, the connections between
these queerly affiliated terms are worth exploring, I believe, if the sublime is
to transcend euphemistic engagement with human experience and desire.
The emergence of notions of genius and the God-artist ideology in the
later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – familiar to musicologists from
the reception of Handel, C. P. E. Bach and Haydn – seems to represent a
mediating step between the ‘early modern’ and romantic phases of music
and the sublime. During this phase a set of readily intelligible musical
signifiers for sublimity was developed as part of the bourgeois public sphere
that could be deployed as part of a relatively accessible communicative
process. Suzanne Aspden (University of Oxford), taking a fresh look at the
English-born followers of Handel, argued against such period witnesses as
John Potter and Charles Burney, that native composers ‘cited’ rather than
copied Handel, and did so productively, to elevate themselves, the art of
music and an emerging national identity. Keith Chapin (Cardiff University),
concerned with sublimity as a component of compositional technique,
explored the tension between simplicity and complexity, or nature and
artifice, in the music of C. P. E. Bach and in its reception. Rightly refusing to
resolve this tension, Chapin suggested it involved a discrepancy between the
‘neo-Classical’ literary sublime, promulgated by Nicolas Boileau, and
musicians’ more rhetorical, Longinean mind-set. (Whether complexity or
simplicity is the route to the sublime was later addressed by Stanyon, who
explored how that evasive term ‘harmony’ could point up sublime
transcendence, a state of Concordia discours in De Quincey’s Confessions, a
text that culminates in a scene of the narrator’s infinite repose, in the face of
death, by a tranquil sea.) Finally, in a richly illustrated and warmly received
keynote address, Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) extended her recent
work on Haydn’s solar poetics into a nuanced reading of ocular metaphors
and word-setting in The Seasons. Linking breath and light, quotation and
memorialization, ear and eye, Sisman problematized the clear boundaries
surrounding the musical sublime when it is reduced to a Ratnerian topic,
revealing that just as the sublime has no clear beginning, so ambiguity
surrounds its end.
With the sublime a buzzword in the nineteenth century, scholars face
a different kind of challenge than those seeking to discover it in earlier
periods. In an incisive paper on Cherubini’s Médée, Hibberd provided the
necessary new angle: performance. Against a backdrop in which the French
Revolution and its orators were figured as sublime, and given an opera
whose lead character has often been linked to the Terror, contemporary
reviewers discovered the sublime above all in the performance of Mlle Scio
(Médée) – less so in the opera ‘itself’, even though its storms, fires and
overwhelming orchestral effects amount to a lexicon of the sublime. Drawing
on the notion of danger at a safe distance, Hibberd traced a double
emphasis in reviews on revengeful and violent passions, on the one hand,
and the performer’s physical fragility on the other, a duality that insulated
the audience even as it offered them a cathartic experience of revolutionary
barbarity. In a subtle and wide-ranging paper, David Trippett (University of
Bristol) returned to Schopenhauer to understand the place of industrial and
revolutionary noises in Wagner’s soundscapes, discovering in the orchestral
mediation of ‘the real’ that quintessential tenet of post-Kantian philosophy:
the world in all its vastness exists for us only as perception and only in time.
Expanding this beyond customary reference to Wagner’s endless melody and
techniques of transition, Trippett distinguished attempts by the likes of
Christian Michaelis to formulate the sublime as a musical style from that
‘mode of perception’ – serene in the face of pain – that echoes through works
like Das Rheingold.
Happily, papers did not observe the cut-off date of 1850, and in later
sessions it became clear that music’s privileged, if contradictory, place in the
order of the sublime is still with us. Tom McAuley seemed to get at this in
his responses to papers by Corinna Russell (University of Cambridge,
Department of English) and Trippett, projecting clips of (Fiuza-Carrilho)
Wagner in the British talent show X Factor. Though offering this material
under the heading of the ridiculous, McAuley’s comments suggested that the
formal and performative techniques of sublimity enjoy currency in mass
entertainment, not least because music – when not pulling on heart strings
in a pathetic mode – typically seeks to uplift, electrify and (in the older
parlance) transport. At the same time, this currency surely performs a
critique of the high-art and high-bourgeois pretensions of the sublime by
suggesting that the boundary between the neighbouring categories of the
sublime and the ridiculous may be impossible to maintain across different
times, media and interpretive communities. Kiene Brillenburg-Wurth
(Universiteit Utrecht) put postmodernism to work in her paper on ‘the
posthuman sublime’, which explored the affinity of musical minimalism with
‘the database aesthetic’ – a kind of Kantian mathematical sublime robbed of
wonder in which lists, lacking narrative shape, are infinitely searchable but
not knowable in their entirety. Implicit in this argument about minimalism
as (in Burke’s terms) an ‘artificial infinite’ are questions such as: is the
sublime (sometimes) boring? Is the experience of the sublime an experience
of transcendence or of being trapped? If we identified the elusive sublime,
would we want it anymore? These and other questions thrown up by papers
and responses focusing on sublimity today can help the topic to achieve that
freshness and preciseness that James Elkins lamented and which ‘Sonorous
Sublimes’ did so much to recover.
MATTHEW HEAD
<[email protected]>