Music and the Forms of LifeInventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. Music and the Forms of Life examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series of famous musical works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music invented auditory metaphors for the scientific elements of life (drive, pulse, sensibility, irritability, even metabolism), investigated the affinities and antagonisms between life and mechanism, and explored questions of whether and how mechanisms can come to life. The resulting changes in the conceptions of both life and music had wide cultural resonance at the time, and those concepts continued to evolve long after. A critical part of that evolution was a nineteenth-century shift in focus from moving androids to the projection of life in motion, culminating in the invention of cinema. Weaving together cultural and musical practices, Lawrence Kramer traces these developments through a collection of case studies ranging from classical symphonies to modernist projections of waltzing specters by Mahler and Ravel to a novel linking Bach's Goldberg Variations to the genetic code. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. |
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1812 overtures actor-network theory address form aesthetic Andante androids animation audible automatism Bach Bach’s bass bassoons battle Battle of Vitoria becomes Beethoven Berkeley and London biome body California Press Cambridge chapter chord classical clockwork to pulsation composed dance Denis Diderot Derrida Diderot duck eighteenth century embodiment episode era’s feeling figures flute Foucault funeral march Goldberg Variations grotesque body Haydn hear human instrument invention of subjectivity keyboard Kramer La Valse Lark literally mechanism melody Michel Foucault modern motion Mozart musical biome narrative notes novel orchestra organism Parsifal passage perception performance piano piece play poem Powers’s pulse question quodlibet Ravel Ressler rhythm scene sensation sense sensibility sentient simulation Slavoj Žižek Sonata sound spaced texture strings symbolic Symphony of Victory theme thing timpani tion Titurel train of metaphors trans turn University Press Valse Vaucanson’s flute player vibration violin virtual vitality voice Walter Benjamin waltzing specters Wellington’s Victory York