Literature and Music

The Grammar Of Musical Communication: Two Versions Of Counterpoint In Early Romantic Literature

by Keith Chapin

“The Grammar of Musical Subjectivity: Two Versions of Counterpoint in Early Romantic Literature.” European Romantic Review 13 (2002), 153-60.

At the turn of the 19th c., writers on musical aesthetics often espied a painful gap between a coolly calculated... more At the turn of the 19th c., writers on musical aesthetics often espied a painful gap between a coolly calculated mechanics of musical composition and an ebullient aesthetics of musical experience. The anxieties of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann can be traced in the writings and biographies of their fictional alter-egos, Joseph Berglinger and Johannes Kreisler, and in particular in Berglinger’s and Kreisler’s descriptions of a musical grammar and of counterpoint. But where Wackenroder’s Berglinger could only overcome the gap through death, Hoffmann’s Kreisler found pleasure in the separation. The changes in music aesthetics, as well as in practices of composition, music pedagogy, and listening, that allowed writers to imagine a way to overcome the gap between the mechanical and the aesthetic, are examined.

Lost in Quotation: Nuances behind E. T. A. Hoffmann's Programmatic Statements

by Keith Chapin

“Lost in Quotation: The Nuances behind E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Programmatic Statements.” 19th-Century Music 30, no. 1 (2006), 44-61.

E. T. A. Hoffmann spoke with the conviction of one who thought to reveal the essence of music. However, the bold and... more E. T. A. Hoffmann spoke with the conviction of one who thought to reveal the essence of music. However, the bold and emphatic character of his words masked the subtleties and the variations of his positions. This article examines their nuances from two
perspectives. It first examines the literary techniques he used to present his ideas and to give them substance. He presented his ideas in alternately enthusiastic and satirical tones. He used words connotatively, and he dealt different positions to different narrators and characters. Second, the article discusses the course of his career and the cast of his writings. After he received critiques of his high-handed attitudes in the Fantasiestücke (1814) and after he rejoined the Prussian bureaucracy, he changed the tenor if not the foundations of his positions. In its appendix, the article offers the first English translation of the most striking of the critiques: Jean Paul’s preface to the Fantasiestücke.

Scheibe's Mistake: Sublime Simplicity and the Criteria of Classicism

by Keith Chapin

“Scheibe's Mistake: Sublime Simplicity and the Criteria of Classicism.” Eighteenth-Century Music 5, no. 2 (2008), 165-177.

It is as a classicist that Johann Adolph Scheibe has entered the annals of music history, either as a propagator of... more It is as a classicist that Johann Adolph Scheibe has entered the annals of music history, either as a propagator of the principles of French literary classicism, or as a champion of a ‘galant’ style that later critics would view as a foundation for a German musical classicism. But if Scheibe insisted on a quality of striking simplicity, using words clearly indebted to those of Nicolas Boileau, the doyen of seventeenth-century French critics, he was no classicist according to the French model. While all classicists depend to a certain degree on the regulation of their material – for such regulation aids them in their quest for the perfect fit between parts and whole – they will differ in how they choose to balance the codification of technique and the regulation of style, on the one hand, with the evocation of emphatic or ‘sublime’ experiences, on the other. If Boileau sought the ‘marvellous’ quality that strikes like lightening, Scheibe wished for clarity. Drawing on scholarship in the history of literature, this article first examines the origins and point of French classicist literary aesthetics, then traces the fate of these aesthetics as they were transferred from France to Germany and from literature to music.

Sublime Experience and Ironic Action: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Use of Music for Life

by Keith Chapin

“Sublime Experience and Ironic Action: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Use of Music for Life.” In Musical Meaning and Human Values, ed. Keith Chapin and Lawrence Kramer. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. 32-58.

Examines E.T.A. Hoffmann’s late writings and activities as a judge and writer of fiction to throw light on Hoffmann’s... more Examines E.T.A. Hoffmann’s late writings and activities as a judge and writer of fiction to throw light on Hoffmann’s music aesthetics and politics. It focuses on his actions and writings related to his work at the Prussian High Court during the years 1814-1822 and details Hoffmann’s attempts to resist various attacks on individual rights. It then interprets Hoffmann’s Romantic views on music and his Liberal writings as a judge, as well as Hoffmann’s tendency to distinguish between moods of enthusiasm and skepticism, as two sides of coin stamped by early 19th-c. theories of irony. Hoffmann adapted the dialectic of self-creation and self-destruction sketched by Friedrich Schlegel in his fragments on irony. As a musician and music critic, Hoffmann was a Romantic. He treated ecstatic moods as a sign of an individual’s participation in the Chain of Being and the sublime experience of music as a way briefly to sense wholeness. As a judge, Hoffmann was a Liberal. He insisted upon the individual’s free will and acted upon bitter, skeptical moods to criticize society and its ostensible delusions. Music thus provided the sublime moments of transcendence that energized his skeptical and critical political activities as a judge.

„Modello, imitazione e trasformazione: i Zefiro torna di Francesco Petrarca, Ottavio Rinuccini e Claudio Monteverdi“, in: Campi immaginabili. Rivista quadrimestrale di cultura 24 (2001), pp. 5-30

by Linda Maria Koldau

La Asesina de Lady Di: Deseo y Capital en la Argentina de fin de milenio

by Ana Ros

Publicado en Trauma, Historia y Subjetividad, Buenos Aires, Ed. AASM, Serie Conexiones, May 2010.

Les prises de position jazzistiques de Jean-Paul Sartre

by Yan Hamel

Dans  MONTANDON, Frédérique et Aude LOCATELLI (dir.). Réflexions sur la socialité de la musique, Paris, L’Harmattan, coll. « Logiques sociales/musiques et champ social », 2007, p. 185-199.

‘„Nicht wahr, es klingt so schön“. Zur Musik des Walser-Textes’

by Valerie Heffernan

in: Bildersprache Klangfiguren. Spielformen der Intermedialität bei Robert Walser, ed. by Anna Fattori and Margit Gigerl, (München: Fink, 2008), pp. 219–225.

Shakespeare, sound and sense

by Katherine Butler

Book Review

La forma como conducto a la revisión de la historia en Concierto barroco (1974) de Alejo Carpentier

by Maristela Verastegui

„Studi sul contrasto: il sonetto Or che’l ciel et la terra di Francesco Petrarca e la sua musicazione di Claudio Monteverdi“, in: Campi immaginabili. Rivista quadrimestrale di cultura 19–21 (1997), 37–67

by Linda Maria Koldau

Marenzio spirituale: The Sacred Italian Music of Luca Marenzio“, in: Rivista internazionale di musica sacra 20 (1999), 139–198

by Linda Maria Koldau

„Hehre Priesterin und stolze Primadonna: Das Ballett Salammbò (1864) von Lorenzo Viena und Paolo Giorza“, in: Flauberts Salammbô in Musik, Malerei, Literatur und Film. Aufsätze und Texte, ed. Klaus Ley, Tübingen 1998, 90–107

by Linda Maria Koldau

Modello, imitazione e trasformazione: i Zefiro torna di Francesco Petrarca, Ottavio Rinuccini e Claudio Monteverdi

by Linda Maria Koldau

Confined Spaces / Erupted Boundaries: Crowd Behavior in Prokofiev’s The Gambler

by Danielle Sofer

Pergolesi in Mirrorshades

by Marco Lauri

Publiched in "Archivio Barocco" website of the University of Parma.

Live at Bar Maldoror: les chants magnétiques de Lautréamont

by Frédéric Claisse

Close Listening to Kamau Brathwaite

by Jacob Edmond

Approaches to Teaching Kamau Brathwaite. Ed. Elaine Savory. MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature. New York: Modern Languages Association, forthcoming.

Mirrors and reflections: political propaganda in Salah Jahin’s “Ṣoora”

by Alya El Hosseiny

Nasser's regime, established in Egypt between 1954 and 1970, was at once dictatorial and highly popular. This paper... more Nasser's regime, established in Egypt between 1954 and 1970, was at once dictatorial and highly popular. This paper focuses on a propaganda song by Egypt's most popular modern poet, Salah Jahin, promoting it. Jahin produced a large body of work in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, which has received little attention in academia, despite its significance from both a literary and a cultural viewpoint.
The poem is presented as a description of a photograph, and weaves propaganda in with mock objectivity. This paper aims to show how pro-Nasser argumentation is relayed using different means, including the structure of the text, stylistic devices and its performance as a song. It demonstrates how multi-layered rhetoric permeates the poem and how interdisciplinary perspectives help give the text its full meaning.

De la investigación universitaria a la aplicación escolar: introducción de la canción improvisada en una escuela primaria

by Albert Casals Ibáñez

Co-autored with Mercè Vilar.
Actas CEIMUS (2008)