This chapter examines the formation of a particular rhetoric and constellation of values surround... more This chapter examines the formation of a particular rhetoric and constellation of values surrounding the violin through the lens of comparative tests between new and old violins. Since the nineteenth century, new violins have consistently won out over old ones. This is part of an ongoing process of mutual calibration between old and new violins: the old violins are updated to meet new playing needs; new violins are made as copies of older instruments. The continual blurring of distinctions between new and old produces what this chapter calls mendacious technology: an instrument that lies about its own historicity. Mendacious technology performs a productive, even essential, role within musical history. The violin itself has undergone many significant, though underplayed, technological alterations, but what has endured is the very notion that the instrument has endured. The musical canon—and meaningful access to it—depends on this careful obfuscating of technological history.
At the end of the 18th century, instrumental music, formerly subordinate to vocal music and shack... more At the end of the 18th century, instrumental music, formerly subordinate to vocal music and shackled to the doctrine of imitation, dramatically emerged as a new and powerful form or art, capable of expression. Many scholars today turn to developments in aesthetic philosophy--the ...
Timbre has always been a central element of music and sound, but it is only now emerging as a cen... more Timbre has always been a central element of music and sound, but it is only now emerging as a central dimension in musical thought. Aided by the burgeoning fields of sound studies and critical organology, music studies are taking the “material turn” toward timbre. One of the most urgent tasks of a timbral musicology is to rethink its categories from the ground up and to make space for sound at the foundation of our thinking. This chapter offers an overview of the Handbook, presenting a variety of viewpoints on the multifaceted quality of timbre, covering its histories, philosophies, technologies, and modes of perception. It highlights explorations of timbre that have existed (but were marginalized by our collective timbral deafness) and proposes alternative paths not yet pursued.
The notion of the “ethereal” has a long and surprisingly continuous history in Western art music.... more The notion of the “ethereal” has a long and surprisingly continuous history in Western art music. From the Aeolian harp to early electronic music, listeners have identified certain instruments as producing otherworldly and supernatural sounds. This essay considers the diverse range of technologies that have been frequently identified as “ethereal,” while also delving into the use of the idea of the ethereal within writing about music. This phenomenon is found to be unsurprisingly elusive, in some cases seeming to correlate to certain timbral qualities, such as sustained tones with shimmering upper harmonics or slowly fading envelopes, while in other instances relating instead to circumstances of audition, most famously in the case of the unseen sound sources of “acousmatic” listening. The study of ethereal timbres thus occupies a nexus between the topics of sound technology, listening practices, musical aesthetics, and experimental art.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017
My thanks to Margaret Birley (Horniman Museum and Gardens, London), Darcy Kuronen and Jayme Kurla... more My thanks to Margaret Birley (Horniman Museum and Gardens, London), Darcy Kuronen and Jayme Kurland (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Bradley Strauchen-Scherer (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and especially Norman Rodger (University of Edinburgh) for giving their time to talk to me about MIMO. 1. The international team comprises Jacky MacBeath (
This essay reflects on the role of aesthetics in the birth of musicology and asks to what extent ... more This essay reflects on the role of aesthetics in the birth of musicology and asks to what extent musicology’s turn to materiality, via the work of Bruno Latour, might become a return to the discipline’s foundational principles.
all generously read and commented on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank... more all generously read and commented on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank Lawrence Kramer and the anonymous reviewer for their many helpful suggestions. 1
The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre. By Emily I. Dolan. Cambridge: Ca... more The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre. By Emily I. Dolan. Cambridge: Cam - bridge University Press, 2013. [xiii, 290 p. ISBN 9781107028258. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index."What still remains to be contributed to Haydn studies?" is the question one always poses when seeing that a new book has appeared about the composer. Along with the steady trickle of biographies, subjects of recent books tend to focus on lesser-studied aspects of his life and works, such as the place of Jews in his operas (Caryl Clark, Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009]) and the composer's time in Britain (Richard Chesser and David Wyn Jones, The Land of Oppor - tunity: Joseph Haydn and Britain [London: The British Library, 2013]); one book touches on everything from string quartet fingerings to Haydn's reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Mary Hunter's and Richard Will's edited volume of essays Engaging Haydn: Culture, Context, and Criticism [Cam - bridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2012]).Emily Dolan's The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre is one of the latest additions to the groaning shelves of Haydn scholarship. Overall, it is a welcome one. There is much to admire in the book, though it is not without short - comings, as I note below. Well written throughout and richly illustrated, Dolan's volume is a pleasure to read. Its thesis is as yet relatively unplowed ground in Haydn scholarship (which is certainly saying something)-unplowed ground because it counters prevailing notions of Haydn and his music.In a forceful and compelling introduction, Dolan charges that scholarship on Haydn has for too long been removed from the materiality of music as sounds produced by humans playing instruments- that is, writers have tended to regard his music as intellectually satisfying aesthetic forms that can be fully appreciated even divorced from the processes that produce sound. Dolan's book is of a piece with studies published in the past few decades that have challenged dominant discourses of Haydn's music as intellectual art, as Hans - lick's abstract "tonally moving forms." Dolan contends that by conceiving of his music as abstract form to be seen in score and thought about rather than as immediate materiality of sound to be heard and felt in the moment, most scholars and critics up to now have distorted the view of his music and its legacy. The conventional view implies that Haydn cannot be perceived as being overly concerned with surface effect-as, say, Rossini might be accused of-but rather with underlying structure and form. There seems to be an unstated assumption for some musicologists and music theorists, even in the present day, that analysis should be done without "resorting to" discussions of timbre or other sensuous qualities of music, as if those musical aspects were less worthy of consideration than formal analysis and Schenkerian graphs. Her point is well taken: anyone attending university music history courses in the U.S. can attest to this fact, and this view of the composer is rarely challenged.As the book progresses, Dolan illustrates more broadly that Haydn's career coincided with a new interest in sonority in the eighteenth century reflected in writings by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and subsequent acoustic studies in the nineteenth century by Hermann von Helmholtz. In this context she posits the notion that we must reexamine Haydn's oeuvre with an eye to the emergence of interest in instrumental timbre. Offering examples such as the ocular harpsichord, the piano de chats, and the glass harmonica, Dolan shows how the eighteenth-century public was enamored of novelty instruments of unusual timbre and how attentive they were to tone color.Of course, Berlioz turns up in relation to his treatise on orchestration, but the author rightly calls into question his usually unchallenged role as originator of modern orchestration. …
This chapter examines the formation of a particular rhetoric and constellation of values surround... more This chapter examines the formation of a particular rhetoric and constellation of values surrounding the violin through the lens of comparative tests between new and old violins. Since the nineteenth century, new violins have consistently won out over old ones. This is part of an ongoing process of mutual calibration between old and new violins: the old violins are updated to meet new playing needs; new violins are made as copies of older instruments. The continual blurring of distinctions between new and old produces what this chapter calls mendacious technology: an instrument that lies about its own historicity. Mendacious technology performs a productive, even essential, role within musical history. The violin itself has undergone many significant, though underplayed, technological alterations, but what has endured is the very notion that the instrument has endured. The musical canon—and meaningful access to it—depends on this careful obfuscating of technological history.
At the end of the 18th century, instrumental music, formerly subordinate to vocal music and shack... more At the end of the 18th century, instrumental music, formerly subordinate to vocal music and shackled to the doctrine of imitation, dramatically emerged as a new and powerful form or art, capable of expression. Many scholars today turn to developments in aesthetic philosophy--the ...
Timbre has always been a central element of music and sound, but it is only now emerging as a cen... more Timbre has always been a central element of music and sound, but it is only now emerging as a central dimension in musical thought. Aided by the burgeoning fields of sound studies and critical organology, music studies are taking the “material turn” toward timbre. One of the most urgent tasks of a timbral musicology is to rethink its categories from the ground up and to make space for sound at the foundation of our thinking. This chapter offers an overview of the Handbook, presenting a variety of viewpoints on the multifaceted quality of timbre, covering its histories, philosophies, technologies, and modes of perception. It highlights explorations of timbre that have existed (but were marginalized by our collective timbral deafness) and proposes alternative paths not yet pursued.
The notion of the “ethereal” has a long and surprisingly continuous history in Western art music.... more The notion of the “ethereal” has a long and surprisingly continuous history in Western art music. From the Aeolian harp to early electronic music, listeners have identified certain instruments as producing otherworldly and supernatural sounds. This essay considers the diverse range of technologies that have been frequently identified as “ethereal,” while also delving into the use of the idea of the ethereal within writing about music. This phenomenon is found to be unsurprisingly elusive, in some cases seeming to correlate to certain timbral qualities, such as sustained tones with shimmering upper harmonics or slowly fading envelopes, while in other instances relating instead to circumstances of audition, most famously in the case of the unseen sound sources of “acousmatic” listening. The study of ethereal timbres thus occupies a nexus between the topics of sound technology, listening practices, musical aesthetics, and experimental art.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017
My thanks to Margaret Birley (Horniman Museum and Gardens, London), Darcy Kuronen and Jayme Kurla... more My thanks to Margaret Birley (Horniman Museum and Gardens, London), Darcy Kuronen and Jayme Kurland (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Bradley Strauchen-Scherer (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and especially Norman Rodger (University of Edinburgh) for giving their time to talk to me about MIMO. 1. The international team comprises Jacky MacBeath (
This essay reflects on the role of aesthetics in the birth of musicology and asks to what extent ... more This essay reflects on the role of aesthetics in the birth of musicology and asks to what extent musicology’s turn to materiality, via the work of Bruno Latour, might become a return to the discipline’s foundational principles.
all generously read and commented on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank... more all generously read and commented on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank Lawrence Kramer and the anonymous reviewer for their many helpful suggestions. 1
The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre. By Emily I. Dolan. Cambridge: Ca... more The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre. By Emily I. Dolan. Cambridge: Cam - bridge University Press, 2013. [xiii, 290 p. ISBN 9781107028258. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index."What still remains to be contributed to Haydn studies?" is the question one always poses when seeing that a new book has appeared about the composer. Along with the steady trickle of biographies, subjects of recent books tend to focus on lesser-studied aspects of his life and works, such as the place of Jews in his operas (Caryl Clark, Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009]) and the composer's time in Britain (Richard Chesser and David Wyn Jones, The Land of Oppor - tunity: Joseph Haydn and Britain [London: The British Library, 2013]); one book touches on everything from string quartet fingerings to Haydn's reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Mary Hunter's and Richard Will's edited volume of essays Engaging Haydn: Culture, Context, and Criticism [Cam - bridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2012]).Emily Dolan's The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre is one of the latest additions to the groaning shelves of Haydn scholarship. Overall, it is a welcome one. There is much to admire in the book, though it is not without short - comings, as I note below. Well written throughout and richly illustrated, Dolan's volume is a pleasure to read. Its thesis is as yet relatively unplowed ground in Haydn scholarship (which is certainly saying something)-unplowed ground because it counters prevailing notions of Haydn and his music.In a forceful and compelling introduction, Dolan charges that scholarship on Haydn has for too long been removed from the materiality of music as sounds produced by humans playing instruments- that is, writers have tended to regard his music as intellectually satisfying aesthetic forms that can be fully appreciated even divorced from the processes that produce sound. Dolan's book is of a piece with studies published in the past few decades that have challenged dominant discourses of Haydn's music as intellectual art, as Hans - lick's abstract "tonally moving forms." Dolan contends that by conceiving of his music as abstract form to be seen in score and thought about rather than as immediate materiality of sound to be heard and felt in the moment, most scholars and critics up to now have distorted the view of his music and its legacy. The conventional view implies that Haydn cannot be perceived as being overly concerned with surface effect-as, say, Rossini might be accused of-but rather with underlying structure and form. There seems to be an unstated assumption for some musicologists and music theorists, even in the present day, that analysis should be done without "resorting to" discussions of timbre or other sensuous qualities of music, as if those musical aspects were less worthy of consideration than formal analysis and Schenkerian graphs. Her point is well taken: anyone attending university music history courses in the U.S. can attest to this fact, and this view of the composer is rarely challenged.As the book progresses, Dolan illustrates more broadly that Haydn's career coincided with a new interest in sonority in the eighteenth century reflected in writings by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and subsequent acoustic studies in the nineteenth century by Hermann von Helmholtz. In this context she posits the notion that we must reexamine Haydn's oeuvre with an eye to the emergence of interest in instrumental timbre. Offering examples such as the ocular harpsichord, the piano de chats, and the glass harmonica, Dolan shows how the eighteenth-century public was enamored of novelty instruments of unusual timbre and how attentive they were to tone color.Of course, Berlioz turns up in relation to his treatise on orchestration, but the author rightly calls into question his usually unchallenged role as originator of modern orchestration. …
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