Overview

The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn’s career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven’s, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, when audiences started to revel in the sounds of the concert hall. But the latter half of the eighteenth century also saw proliferating optical technologies—including magnifying instruments, magic lanterns, peepshows, and shadow-plays—that offered new performance tools, fostered musical innovation, and shaped the very idea of “pure” music. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow is a fascinating exploration of the early romantic blending of sight and sound as encountered in popular science, street entertainments, opera, and music criticism. Deirdre Loughridge reveals that allusions in musical writings to optical technologies reflect their spread from fairgrounds and laboratories into public consciousness and a range of discourses, including that of music. She demonstrates how concrete points of intersection—composers’ treatments of telescopes and peepshows in opera, for instance, or a shadow-play performance of a ballad—could then fuel new modes of listening that aimed to extend the senses. An illuminating look at romantic musical practices and aesthetics, this book yields surprising relations between the past and present and offers insight into our own contemporary audiovisual culture.

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9780226337098

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Reviews

This is an important, ambitious, and timely study. It uncovers fascinating source material and weaves together original ideas about practice that challenge our understanding of musical romanticism and some of its core repertory and encourage us to think about nineteenth-century culture in fresh ways. <i>Haydn s Sunrise, Beethoven s Shadow</i> will have strong appeal to specialists across fields, as well as to the broader public. --Sarah Hibberd, University of Nottingham

This is an important, ambitious, and timely study. It uncovers fascinating source material and weaves together original ideas about practice that challenge our understanding of musical romanticism and some of its core repertory and encourage us to think about nineteenth-century culture in fresh ways. Haydn s Sunrise, Beethoven s Shadow will have strong appeal to specialists across fields, as well as to the broader public. --Sarah Hibberd, University of Nottingham

This work compellingly argues that the marriage between visual and audio cultures is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon, but has roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By drawing upon a plethora of technical devices deployed in operas and popular performances, Loughridge demonstrates how listeners' practices and thought were shaped by numerous mechanical contraptions and scientific instruments. This book represents a significant contribution to both musicology and the history of science. --Myles W. Jackson, New York University

Author Information

Deirdre Loughridge is assistant professor in the Department of Music at Northeastern University.

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