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"Dolan, Emily I"
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The Orchestral Revolution
The Orchestral Revolution explores the changing listening culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Delving into Enlightenment philosophy, the nature of instruments, compositional practices and reception history, this book describes the birth of a new form of attention to sonority and uncovers the intimate relationship between the development of modern musical aesthetics and the emergence of orchestration. By focusing upon Joseph Haydn's innovative strategies of orchestration and tracing their reception and influence, Emily Dolan shows that the consolidation of the modern orchestra radically altered how people listened to and thought about the expressive capacity of instruments. The orchestra transformed from a mere gathering of instruments into an ideal community full of diverse, nuanced and expressive characters. In addressing this key moment in the history of music, Dolan demonstrates the importance of the materiality of sound in the formation of the modern musical artwork.
eBook
The Oxford handbook of timbre
\"With essays covering an array of topics including ancient Homeric texts, contemporary sound installations, violin mutes, birdsong, and cochlear implants, this volume reveals the richness of what it means to think and talk about timbre and the materiality of the experience of sound\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Gluck's Orchestra, or The Future of Timbre
Gluck has long been celebrated for his operatic reforms. This article examines the role of the orchestra in Gluck's reformed style. I trace how Gluck's audiences learned new audile techniques in order to understand the role of his instrumental accompaniment. This form of listening posed challenges: some eighteenth-century listeners struggled to understand the role of the orchestra. The ‘naturalness’ so prized in the reformed style was achieved, I argue, by having the orchestra take on a larger role, but one that was rhetorically sublimated to the text. This is naturalised today: from Wagnerian music dramas to contemporary films, orchestral accompaniment often serves as a sonic commentary. The tensions in Gluck's reception, then, point to a seismic shift in the history of listening, showing how audiences came to understand the orchestra as a subtext. Gluck's orchestra offers broader lessons for musicology today, in particular for the burgeoning subfield of timbre studies: the form of ‘orchestral listening’ required for Gluck's operas is a form of timbral listening avant la lettre. While timbre is often invoked in order to escape musicology's traditional disciplinary ideologies, the story of Gluckian operatic drama points to the ways that orchestral listening emerged only through acts of disciplining and restraint.
Journal Article
Musicology in the Garden
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.
Journal Article
Seeing Instruments
[...]scholars interested in scientific practice also began to draw upon anthropological methods, most notably Bruno Latour, who published Laboratory Life: the Social Construction ofScientific Facts in 1979, using ethnographic methods to study the laboratories in the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Latour's interest in the agency and autonomy of non-humans arose, in part, as a counterbalance to the emphasis placed on the constitutive powers of the social sphere emphasized by scholarship in SSK Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1993) is, in part, a direct response to Leviathan and the Air-Pump.60 When scholars take Latour's ideas out of the specific context of navigating the co-construction of nature and society, we risk losing the importance of the sociological that he sought to balance with the agency of nature and things.6 1 Construction and Use ofScientific Instruments One reason these scholarly strands hold so much potential for scholars of musical culture is that the turn to understanding scientific practice also necessitated paying closer attention to the scientific instruments used by scientists. In the 1970s, Albert van Heiden began to publish on the telescope and its invention; Jim Bennett, who directed the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford, carried out extensive work on navigational and mathematical instruments.62 The 1990s saw extensive publications in this area, which had become, in Bennett's words, a \"vogue\" by the early 2000s.63 Much of this scholarship has sought to make instruments visible again, by showing the kinds of work they do. \"64 Of particular interest is scholarship that not only illuminates the role played by scientific instruments in the production of knowledge, but that also focuses on the ways in which scientific instruments often disappear or become transparent in the scientific practices that they help inaugurate, precisely because of their success.65 This is to think about how instruments function as mediators: to ask whether they are opaque or transparent and to explore their relationships-real or imagined-to other instruments and people.66 Science, Technology and Society Questions of instrumental visibility and mediation make up only a fraction of the possible lines of inquiry someone interested in the history of musical instruments might explore by turning to the history of science and technology.
Journal Article
‘… This little ukulele tells the truth’: indie pop and kitsch authenticity
Indie pop, like rock and other independent genres more generally, has had a complicated relationship with mass culture. It both depends upon and simultaneously deconstructs notions of authenticity and truth. Independent genres have invited scholarly analysis and critique that often seek to unmask indie as ‘elite’ or to show the extent to which indie musics are, ironically, defined and shaped by consumer capitalism. Using songwriter Stephin Merritt's music and career as a case study, this essay explores the kinds of authenticities at work in indie pop. Indie pop, I argue, is a genre especially adept at generating ‘personal authenticity’. It is useful to turn to the concept of kitsch, understood here as an aesthetic and not a synonym for ‘bad’. Kitsch functions to cultivate personal attachment in the face of impersonal mass culture; it is this aesthetic, I argue, that indie pop has cultivated through its lo-fi and often nostalgic sound world and through its dissemination, which has relied upon dedicated collectors. The ‘honesty’ of this music does not arise from an illusion of unmediated communication, but instead from the emphasis on the process of mediation, which stresses the materiality of the music and the actual experience of listening.
Journal Article
E. T. A. HOFFMANN AND THE ETHEREAL TECHNOLOGIES OF ‘NATURE MUSIC’
In 1814, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his short story, Die
Automate. The story concerns the dealings of two friends and a fortune-telling
automaton, the Turk, whose prophetic utterances seem to reveal a supernatural and psychic ability. Although the story first appeared in the Allegemeine musikalische Zeitung, it has been mostly overlooked by music scholars. In addition to the lengthy passages dealing with artificial intelligence, the story includes an extensive discussion of music performance and music instruments. The instruments they discuss – machines capable of bringing forth the voice of nature – perhaps appear as fantastical creations of Hoffmann’s imagination. However, he refers to real instruments that played an established role in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture. This period saw the frenzied production of many novel and bizarre instruments such as the euphon, aiuton, aenomochord, xänorphica and the harmonichord. Though these instruments are all but forgotten today, they testify to a widespread preoccupation with timbre and instrumental sonority. The consolidation of the orchestra as a concept, musical body and institution in the eighteenth century went hand in hand with the notion that individual instrumental sonorities had distinct expressive characters. By the early nineteenth century, this idea manifested itself in two distinct traditions: an orchestral one, in which composers increasingly took advantage of the ever-growing palette of instruments, giving rise to the modern concept of orchestration and the romantic symphony, and an instrument-oriented one, in which musicians, scientists and inventors attempted to capture ‘ideal sonorities’ (usually timbres resembling the human voice) in specially designed instruments. These creations offer a missing link between idealist aesthetics of the period and musical practice. Though ultimately ephemeral, they represent a kind of ‘absolute’ music that was founded purely in ethereal sonorities rather than in musical formalism.
Journal Article
The Work of the Orchestra in Haydn's Creation
Crucial to the spectacular effects of Joseph Haydn's Creation (1798) are his precise manipulations of his orchestra. From the brilliant moment of light to the colorful depictions of animals, these moments depended upon the new status of the orchestra in the late eighteenth century. Haydn's ability to control his instrumental forces so diversely reflected the consolidation of the modern orchestra as a concept, institution, and musical body. This article uses the Creation as a starting point to explore dramatic changes to late Enlightenment music and musical discourse from a material perspective of instrumentation. The transformation of the orchestra created the possibility for new styles of orchestration that engaged in precise and nuanced ways with instrumental sonority; no longer was the orchestra a blunt force, but rather an autonomous community of “envoiced” instruments capable of a variety of expressive nuances. Looked at more broadly, this consolidation also allowed for the increased circulation of large orchestral compositions around Europe, which in turn contributed to the idea of the modern musical work. Approaching the music of this period from the perspective of orchestration also invites a reconsideration of Haydn's “Vorstellung des Chaos”: rather than transgressing the boundaries of form, melody, or harmony, Haydn undoes the fabric of the orchestra, creating chaos out of the inchoate gestures of the instruments. His representation of chaos is a process by which disparate instruments coalesce to become a unified ensemble; the creation of light is at once the creation of an orchestra.
Journal Article
Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science
The Renaissance genre of organological treatises inventoried the forms and functions of musical instruments. This article proposes an update and expansion of the organological tradition, examining the discourses and practices surrounding both musical and scientific instruments. Drawing on examples from many periods and genres, we aim to capture instruments’ diverse ways of life. To that end we propose and describe a comparative “ethics of instruments”: an analysis of instruments’ material configurations, social and institutional locations, degrees of freedom, and teleologies. This perspective makes it possible to trace the intersecting and at times divergent histories of science and music: their shared material practices, aesthetic commitments, and attitudes toward technology, as well as their impact on understandings of human agency and the order of nature.
Journal Article