E. T. A. hoffmann and the ethereal technologies of ⇘nature music⇔

Eighteenth-Century Music

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 7-26

  Dolan, Emily I ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85011338659     PISSN: 14785706     EISSN: 14785714     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1478570608001176     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Hans von Müller and Friedrich Schnapp, eds., E. T. A. Hoffmanns Briefwechsel, volume 1 (Munich: Winkler-Verlag, 1967), 436
2. translated in Johanna C. Stahlin, ed., Selected Letters of E. T. A. Hoffmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 217.
3. Die Zeitung für die elegante Welt 14/68–75 (7–16 April 1814)
4. E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Die Automate’, in Die Serapions Brüder, ed. Wulf Segebrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001), 410.
5. The term ‘orchestrion’ denoted a range of instruments in this period. Here, however, it is clear that Hoffmann refers to mechanical instruments designed to imitate the sounds of an orchestra.Idiscuss instrumentsof this type in'The Origin of the Orchestra Machine’, Current Musicology 76 (Fall 2003), 7–23.
6. Wolfgang von Kempelen createda famous hoax, The Turk,a chess-playing ‘automaton’. Not only did the machine play chess, but it often beat its human opponents. For an eighteenth-century account of the machine, see Karl Gottlieb Windisch, Briefe über den Schachspieler des Hrn. von Kempelen (Basel, 1783), translated as Inanimate Reason; or a circumstantial account of that astonishing piece of mechanism, M. de Kempelen's chess player (London, 1784).
7. For a marvellous modern account of the Turk, see Tom Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (New York: Walker, 2002).
8. See David Charlton, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
9. and Abigail Chantler, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
10. Hoffmann, ‘Die Automate’, 410. The translations are my own, in collaboration with Thomas Schneller.
11. Eighteenth-century views of machine performance were not as negatively charged as Hoffmann's. See for example Adelheid Voskhul, ‘Motions and Passions: Music-playing Women Automata and Cultural Commentary in Late 18th-Century Germany’, in Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. Jessica Riskin (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), 293–320
12. David Yearsley, ‘Bach the Machine’, in Bach and Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
13. and Annette Richards, ‘Automatic Genius: Mozart and the Mechanical Sublime’, Music and Letters 80 (1999), 366–389.
14. E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Die Automate’, 420.
15. E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Die Automate’, 422.
16. ‘Saiten auf ganz andere als die gewöhnliche Weise vibrieren und ertönen zu lassen…’, E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Die Automate’, 420.
17. ‘Dies ist kein anderes … als die Auffindung des vollkommensten Tons’, E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Die Automate’, 421.
18. The earliest treatises on composing for orchestral instruments are Valentin Roeser, Essai d'instruction à l'usage de ceux composent pour la clarinette et le cor (1764)
19. Louis Joseph Francoeur, Diapason général de tous les instruments à vent (1772)
20. and Othon Vandenbroeck, Traité général de tous les instrument à vent (1793).
21. Other treatises occasionally contained sections devoted to composing for the different instruments, such as A.F.C.Kollmann, An Essay on Practical Musical Composition (1799, revised 1812).
22. For discussions of these treatises, see Hans Bartenstein, ‘Die frühen Instrumentationslehren bis zu Berlioz’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 28 (1971), 97–118
23. John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 504–506
24. and Emily I. Dolan, ‘The Idea of Timbre in the Age of Haydn’ (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2006), Chapter 2, ‘The Birth of Timbre’.
25. ‘Il y a même des instruments, tells que le clavecin, qui sont à -la-fois sourds & aigres, & c'est le plus mauvais tymbre.’ Rousseau, ‘Tymbre’, in Encyclopédie, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Rond D'Alembert (Paris, 1751–1765)
26. Sulzer, ‘Instrumentalmusik’, in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, translated in Thomas Christensen and Nancy Kovaleff Baker, eds., Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 97.
27. The growing fascination with the Aeolian harp is evident in publications such as Henry Thorowgood, A Description of the Aeolian-harp, or Harp of Aeolus from the Earliest Account to the Present Time (London, 1754?), which is a collection of earlier descriptions of, and poetry dedicated to, the instrument.
28. See Andrew Brown, Aeolian Harp, volume 3, The Aeolian Harp in European Literature 1591–1892 (Cambridge: Bois de Boulogne, 1970)
29. Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman, ‘The Aeolian Harp and the Romantic Quest for Nature’, in Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 86–112
30. and Matthew Riley, ‘Rustling Reeds and Lofty Pines: Elgar and the Music of Nature’, 19th-Century Music 26/2 (2002), 155–177.
31. Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (1778)’, in Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, volume 2 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1987), 674
32. translated in Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 196.
33. Samuel Coleridge, ‘Effusion XXV (composed August 20th, 1795) [The Eolian Harp]’, in Coleridge's Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson and Raimonda Modiano (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004), 18.
34. Anon. ‘Sixth Concert: 17th March 1794. Mr. Salomon's Concert. Hanover Square’, The Morning Chronicle (18 March 1794)
35. quoted in H. C. Robbins-Landon, The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn (London: Universal Edition, 1955), 515.
36. Heather Hadlock, ‘Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 53/3 (2000), 507–540.
37. For a thorough discussion of the history of the Tastenharmonika and similar instruments, see Peter Sterki, Klingende Gläser (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 53ff. Sterki's studyis an invaluable resource for the history of the harmonica and other glass instruments.
38. E. Lydiatt, Letter to the Editor, Monthly Magazine, number 206, volume 30/5 (Dec. 1810), 411–412.
39. Clagget later tried to make an ‘Ever-tuned Piano forte’ that used hammers to strike the same style of tuning forks. This instrument never succeeded, because the force with which the hammers needed to strike the forks was so great that when ‘the tone came out … it was preceded by one discordant and insufferably distinct, occasioned by the necessary momentum of the blow’. (E. Lydiatt, Letter to the Editor, Monthly Magazine number 209, volume 31 (Feb. 1811), 28.)
40. Myles Jackson, in his recent book Harmonious Triads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), explores Chladni and ethereal instrument building from the perspective of the history of science.
41. See also Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, ‘Science since Babel: Graphs, Automatic Recording Devices, and the Universal Language of Instruments’, in Science and Imagination, 113–147.
42. His major work to discuss this is Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1787).
43. In a review in the London journal The Philosophical Magazine, for example, the author remarked: ‘In the month of February last, Dr. Chladni of Wittenberg … performed on a new instrument he has invented, and to which he gives the name of Euphon. This instrument has nothing in common with the Harmonica but the glass. In consists of forty-one immoveable parallel cylinders of glass, of equal length and thickness. Its construction, tone, and the method of playing it, are totally different from those of the Harmonica.’ ‘On a New Musical Instrument invented by Dr. Chladni; with some Experiments on the Vibrations of Sonorous Bodies’, The Philosophical Magazine 2 (December 1798), 315.
44. E. F. F. Chladni, ‘Nachricht von dem Clavicylinder, einem neuerfundenen Instrumente
45. von E. F. F. Chladni, enthaltend Bemerkungen über einige etwas damit verwandte Tastaturinstrumente’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 18 (January 1800), 305–313.
46. Birgit Heise of the Museum für Musikinstrumente der Universität Leipzig recently published an organological discussion of the clavicylinder and like instruments: ‘Chladni's Clavicylinder and Some Imitations’, The European Physical Journal - Special Topics 145 (2007), 3–14.
47. See also ‘Zweyte Nachricht von dem Clavicylinder’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 3 (February 1801), 386–387
48. ‘Ueber einige wesentliche Vervollkommungen des Clavicylinders’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 6 (December 1804), 221–223.
49. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 201.
50. Charles Batteux: ‘What would one say of a painter who was content to throw onto the canvas bold strokes and masses of the most vivid colors with no resemblance to a known object? The application to music speaks for itself.’ (Les Beaux-arts réduits à un meme princip (Paris: Durand, 1746)
51. translated in Peter le Huray and James Day, eds., Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49.
52. Similar criticisms were made specifically against the musicin the so-called ‘Italian’ style.J. A. P.Schulz found such pieces to be ‘a cacophony of arbitrarily connected tones without any further purpose than that of pleasing the ears of insensible amateurs, bizarre and sudden changes in character from joy to despair, from the pathetic to the trivial, without one knowing what the composer has in mind’. (‘Sonate [Sonata]’, in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, translated in Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 102).
53. On the terms ‘orchestration’ and ‘instrumentation’, see Spitzer and Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra, 501–506.
54. Johann Gottfried Herder,Werke, ed. Wolfgang Pross, volume 2:Herder und die Anthropologie der Aufklärung(Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1987), 147.
55. ‘Die Musik spielt in uns ein Clavichord, das unsre eigne innigste Natur ist’, Herder, Kalligone (1800), Werke, volume 8 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 703.
56. ‘Keine Farbe ist so romantisch als ein Ton’: Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik (Sämtliche Werke, sixth edition, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1995), section1, volume 5), 466
57. quoted and translated in Nikolaus Bacht, ‘Jean Paul's Listeners’, Eighteenth-Century Music 3/2 (2006), 204.
58. Wihlem Wackenroder [with Ludwig Tieck], Werke und Briefe (Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1967), 236
59. quoted and translated in Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 68–69. Dahlhaus dismisses Tieck's prose here as mere romantic rhetoric. Though expressedin undeniably florid prose, Tieck's position assumes the musical medium has an elevated aesthetic status.
60. ‘Orpheus Lyra öffnete die Thore des Orcus’, E. T. A. Hoffmann, review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12 (July 1810), 630–42, 652–59, 631.
61. Hoffmann, ‘Die Automate’, 421.
62. Hoffmann, ‘Briefe über Tonkunst un Berlin. Erster Brief ’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (January 1815), 17–27
63. translated in David Charlton, ed., E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings, 394.
64. Hoffmann, ‘Briefe über Tonkunst in Berlin’, 18–19
65. translated in Charlton, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings, 389.
66. ‘Beethovens Musik bewegt die Hebel des Schauers, der Furcht, des Entsetzens, des Schmerzes, und erweckt jene unendliche Sehnsucht, die das Wesen der Romantik ist’, E. T. A. Hoffmann, review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 633
67. translated in Charlton, ed., E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings, 238.