Romantic Music Aesthetics

Romantic music aesthetics has often been reduced to tired clichés of ineffable feeling and art for art's sake. This book instead explores the groundbreaking philosophical insights and radical politics that Romantic thinkers applied to music – both popular and classical – and the emotions it inspires.

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This book reassesses the place of politics and emotion within Romantic music aesthetics. Drawing together insights from the history of emotions, cultural history, and studies of philosophical idealism, 'affective relationality' – the channelling of emotion through music's social and cultural synergies – emerges as key to Romantic aesthetic thought. Now familiar concepts such as theatrical illusion, genius, poetic criticism, and the renewed connection of art to mythology and religion opened new spaces for audiences' feelings, as thinkers such as Rousseau, Herder, Germaine de Staël, Joseph Mainzer, Pierre Leroux and George Sand sought alternatives to the political status quo. Building on the sentimental tradition in eighteenth-century art and politics, the Romantics created ways of listening to music imbued not just with melancholic longing for transcendence but also with humour, gothic fantasy, satire, and political solidarity. The consequences have extended far beyond the classical concert hall into numerous domains of popular culture from melodrama, romances and political songwriting to musical theatre and film.