When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Katherine Hirt

Published by De Gruyter 2010

When Machines Play Chopin

Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Katherine Hirt

Volume 8 in the series Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110232400

Overview
Contents

About this book

When Machines Play Chopin brings together music aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Philosophers defined music as a direct expression of human emotion while soloists competed with one another to display machine-like technical perfection at their instruments. When Machines Play Chopin looks at this paradox between thinking about and practicing music to show what three literary works say about automation and the sublime in art.

Author / Editor information

Katherine Hirt, Seattle, USA.

Reviews

"Densely written and diligently researched, When Machines Play Chopin interweaves literary history, aesthetics, performance history, and the history of technology in new and unexpected ways. [...] By focusing on the literary life of music machines, Hirt presents a compelling narrative on music aesthetics and the mechanical from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, one with important consequences for a contemporary discussion of the place of the human vis-à-vis technologies of sound."
Mary Helen Dupree in: Monatshefte 104/1 2012

Topics

Frontmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	I
Table of Contents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	VII
Chapter One Towards Autonomy: Imitation and Expression at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter Two E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Aesthetics of Music and Musical Machines in “The Automata,” “The Sandman” and Music Reviews Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
Chapter Three Schopenhauer and Hanslick: Toward a Definition of Instrumental Music as an Autonomous Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
Chapter Four Virtuosity and the Experience of Listening in Heinrich Heine’s Music Criticism and “Florentine Nights” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	92
Chapter Five Rilke’s Phonograph: the “Talking Machine” and Imagined Sound Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	122
Backmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Academics, Departments, Libraries
Pages
- Main content: 170
Keywords: Mechanical Musical Instrument; Music/in Literature

eBook

Published: May 26, 2010
ISBN: 9783110232400

Hardcover

Published: May 19, 2010
ISBN: 9783110232394