Papers by Matthew Pritchard
Journal of Musicology, 2018
This essay argues that musicological interpretations of Immanuel Kant’s music aesthetics tend to ... more This essay argues that musicological interpretations of Immanuel Kant’s music aesthetics tend to misread his stance as a defense of artistic formalism and autonomy—traits that, although present in his account of music, in fact reinforce his peculiarly low estimate of music’s value among the fine arts. Kant's position and its subsequent influence can be grasped more securely by analyzing his dichotomy between “free” and “dependent” beauty. Through an exploration of this opposition’s echoes and applications in the thought of three “Kantian” music critics and aestheticians in the two decades after the appearance of the Critique of Judgement—J. F. Reichardt, an anonymous series of articles commonly attributed to J. K. F. Triest, and C. F. Michaelis—this essay argues that Kantian aesthetics as applied in practice involved close attention to the impact of genre, style, function, and compositional aims on the relevant standards of judgment for an individual musical work. The result was...
Since the growth of translation studies, translators and literary scholars have increasingly come... more Since the growth of translation studies, translators and literary scholars have increasingly come to acknowledge the intense ethical and political, as well as practical, issues involved in preparing, producing and circulating translations of literature
Rabindranath Tagore’s English translations of his Gitanjali secured him global influence and a N... more Rabindranath Tagore’s English translations of his Gitanjali secured him global influence and a Nobel Prize in 1913, but without effective acknowledgement of many of these poems’ prior musical existence, as songs. Subsequent retranslations have done little to correct this, and for historical reasons connected to the epochal transition from Romanticism to modernism around the First World War, translators have also tended to abandon the verse structure of the originals, “level down” the characteristically “high” diction of Tagore’s poetic idiom, and stick to a literal representation of individual images in the text. However, historical practices of translation from the early twentieth century, including those of Tagore himself, were much freer with literal meaning, aiming primarily to communicate a poem’s original emotional “effect” or aesthetic “essence” ( rasa ) – above all when a poem was to be sung in translation. Drawing on my own translations of Tagore, this paper looks at the ...
Passagen. Theorien des Übergangs in Musik und anderen Kunstformen, 2009
Journal of Musicology, 2019
By examining the ideas expressed by the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler in his 1925 essay ‘... more By examining the ideas expressed by the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler in his 1925 essay ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, this article attempts to find precedents in Weimar Germany for a contemporary social conception of music, and to trace the effects of this conception on music history between the wars. Although Besseler’s position is seen to be complex and not wholly consistent, from his ideal of music as an expression of community (Gemeinschaft) arose two influential claims: that the concert was in crisis because it could no longer correspond to that ideal, and that the real source of communal vitality lay in Gebrauchsmusik, music for everyday use. The article explores the immediate political and musical consequences of these claims, both for the German youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) and for Gebrauchsmusik as composed by Weill, Hindemith, and Eisler. It argues that the social aims of the Gebrauchsmusik movement were in fact best met when combined with an earlier understanding, rejected by Besseler himself, of the concert’s own ‘community-forming power’ -- a theoretical combination that was to lead outside Europe to the American musical and the Soviet symphony. By contrast, the sidelining of such ideas in post-war Germany was reflected in Adorno’s outright rejection of musical community, a move which served to confirm only Besseler’s first, negative claim -- thereby establishing as normative an ‘autonomous’ conception of concert music and leaving musicology unable to give any positive account of the concert’s social role.
Zu den Fokusbereichen der aktuellen Forschung gehört auch das Bewusstsein von der wichtigen Stell... more Zu den Fokusbereichen der aktuellen Forschung gehört auch das Bewusstsein von der wichtigen Stellung des Begriffs "surplus" (Überschuss, Überfluss) im Denken Tagores. 1 Im folgenden möchte ich behaupten, dass ein Vergleich zwischen Tagores Ausführungen zu diesem Thema und den Debatten des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts über die wissenschaftlichen, technischen, kulturellen und ökonomischen Grundlagen der modernen Welt manche Voraussetzungen des Humanitätsdenken erhellen kann. Das schlie t natürlich β nicht nur einen indischen, sondern auch einen europäischen Hintergrund ein. Wegen der Breite und des allgemeinen Interesses am Thema "Moderne" werde ich sogar intellektuelle Strömungen wie z.B. die Frankfurter Schule einbeziehen, zu der Tagore persönlich allerdings keinen Kontakt gehabt hat. Doch um zunächst die Entwicklung von Tagores Idee des "Überschusses" vor Augen zu führen, stelle ich kurz deren Umsetzung im Rahmen des Erziehungsprojekts Santiniketan dar, die eng mit der Richtungsänderung von Tagores Denken weg vom HinduNationalismus zum Internationalismus zusammenhängt. Tagores Erziehungsprojekt präsentierte sich ursprünglich in Gestalt einer kleinen, ländlichen Knabenschule in der Nähe eines Familiengutshauses in Santiniketan, rund 150km nördlich von Kalkutta. Dort hatte der Vater Rabindranath Tagores, der "Maharishi" Debendranath, oft auf seinen Reisen in den Himalaya Aufenthalt gemacht. Er nutzte den Ort als Ashram, um weg von der Stadt Ruhe zur Meditation zu finden, und deswegen wurde die Gegend von ihm "Santiniketan" genannt ("Schutzort des Friedens"). Die Schule Rabindranaths war auch als Ashram geplant, mit einer etwas anderen Bedeutung: Brahmacharyasram war der Name für das kleine Internat, dem am Anfang ein traditionelles und moralisch strenges Konzept von Erziehung zu Grunde lag. 1901 gegründet, war die Schule gewissermaßen Rabindranaths Beitrag zur nationalistischen Bewegung. Sie sollte beispielhaft die Ideale des alten, asketischen indischen Waldlebens wieder aufleben lassen, wie sie in der sanskritischen Dichtung beschrieben wurden. Den Jungen wurde kein Luxus erlaubt: Sie durften z.B. keine Schuhe tragen und keine Zahnpasta benutzen. Der Akzent wurde auf Disziplin, Moral und das Studium alter indischen Schriften, der Upanischaden, gelegt, und gerade nicht auf Spiel, Freiheit und Kunst, d.h. jene Aspekte, die die später entwickelte Erziehungsmethode Tagores auszeichneten. 2
In light of recent attempts to defend the role of the arts in education against the effects of po... more In light of recent attempts to defend the role of the arts in education against the effects of policies based on utilitarian principles, this paper examines the arts educational writings and practical projects of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) at Santiniketan in West Bengal, showing how they were motivated by a Romantic and Upanishadic philosophy centred on the anti-utilitarian concept of ‘surplus’. While the development of Santiniketan’s present arts and music departments away from Tagore’s original ideals is acknowledged and traced, the paper argues that Tagore’s aesthetic and educational philosophy still contains much to challenge us. In many ways, his thought can be seen as more compatible with progressive and liberal arts education than the ideology of high modernism that developed at the same period in Europe.
The terms ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ... more The terms ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have usually been thought of as having had rather limited significance, often being restricted in application to ‘picturesque’ or ‘realistic’ genres such as the romantic ‘character piece’ or ‘characteristic symphony’. Through a re-examination of Christian Gottfried Körner's 1795 essay ‘On the Representation of Character in Music’ and other contemporary texts, I argue that, on the contrary, these terms are conceptually fundamental to the classical German idealist project of defending music's dignity as a true and morally beneficial fine art. Although persistently misread during the twentieth century as a disguise for concerns with stylistic or thematic unity, the metaphor of ‘character’ was in fact a sophisticated hermeneutic tool and a means of equal discursive engagement for performers, composers and critics. It was only the rise of politically oriented criticism and Wagnerian polemics that undermined the legitimacy of the ‘characteristic’ – a concept that may have a better claim than ‘absolute music’ to be considered the leading idea of the classical and romantic eras in music aesthetics.
Sangeet Natak 46:1-4, 2012
Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2009
The question weahther Buddhism is really a suitable path to ultimate happiness or spiritual awake... more The question weahther Buddhism is really a suitable path to ultimate happiness or spiritual awakening for the West or not, cannot be answered without looking to the supreme path for the West which is art.
Talks by Matthew Pritchard
Read at the International Musicological Society Congress in Zürich, 2007; subsequently published ... more Read at the International Musicological Society Congress in Zürich, 2007; subsequently published in German translation (by Juliane Dorsch) in Passagen. Theorien des Übergangs in Musik und anderen Kunstformen, ed. Christian Utz und Martin Zenck, 2009
It is not possible to be free and to be alone in a political - and also in a personal sense. An ... more It is not possible to be free and to be alone in a political - and also in a personal sense. An open speech, held in 2015
Special Issues / Edited Volumes by Matthew Pritchard
Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook , 2020
This chapter identifies theoretical anticipations of Nicholas Cook’s ideas, and more broadly of a... more This chapter identifies theoretical anticipations of Nicholas Cook’s ideas, and more broadly of a number of current themes in critical musicology, in the work of the early twentieth-century German music critic Paul Bekker (1882-1937). Encapsulating Bekker’s, and Cook’s, predominating attitude as one of “epistemological humility”, I argue that tensions between music theory and criticism in Germany around World War I foreshadow much of the struggle over the status of music theory within New and critical musicology since the interventions of Joseph Kerman. Bekker’s scepticism towards the definitive claims of both musical texts and our discourse about them was combined with an explicitly sociological analysis of performance, listening, and the “socially formative power” of music. This based itself on the idea (first presented in Bekker’s 1916 book Das deutsche Musikleben) that musical “form” qua value is not a compositional attribute, but the product of an interactive process between the performed “sound image” of a work, its social and spatial context of performance, and the collective perceptions and expectations of its audience. Unfolding the consequences of this central insight resulted in a body of work which, when noticed at all by contemporary musicologists, has generally been interpreted in relation to later twentieth-century German aestheticians and theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus – but which arguably embodies a much more ontologically flexible and pluralist conception of music and its aesthetic foundations.
Book Reviews by Matthew Pritchard
British Journal of Aesthetics, 2020
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Papers by Matthew Pritchard
Talks by Matthew Pritchard
Special Issues / Edited Volumes by Matthew Pritchard
Book Reviews by Matthew Pritchard