No abstract

While there have been growing calls for historians to listen to the past, there are also significant barriers to integrating music in particular into broader historical practice. This article reflects on both the gains and difficulties of this integration, moving from an interrogation of the category of music to three case studies. These concern musical terms, compositional practices and cultures from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, revisiting some key debates in musicology: first, the highly charged language of sweetness deployed in the fifteenth century; second, connections discerned in nineteenth-century music history between medieval polyphony and contemporary attitudes towards time and authority; and, third, debate over the anti-Jewish implications of Handel's music, which we approach through his Dixit Dominus and a history of psalm interpretation stretching back to late antiquity. Through these case studies, we suggest the contribution of music to necessarily interdisciplinary fields including the study of temporality and emotions, but also explore how a historical hermeneutic with a long pedigree – ‘diversity of times’ (diversitas temporum) – might help to reframe arguments about musical interpretation. The article concludes by arguing that the very difficulty and slipperiness of music as a source can encourage properly reflective historical practice.

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Hoffmann's Ritter Gluck portrays music as sublime. Overwhelming and violent, music both engulfs and empowers the subject. Hoffmann's musical sublime works through a dialectical relationship with script: music exists at the opposite end of a spectrum to a finite, material, textual world, yet paradoxically also has form in the physical world. This paradox illuminates the artist's dilemma and the curious status of written music in Ritter Gluck. In its unstable, slippery, self‐reflexive dramatizations of the musical sublime, the tale becomes an account of the aporias of relating the ideal to the real. This points towards an understanding of Hoffmann's engagement with Idealism, and suggests an interpretation of the story's climax, Gluck's sublime performance from an empty score. Inscribing music becomes a figure for representing and embodying the sublime in the finite world and in signs—a task impossible, yet imperative.

Like other spaces of the Enlightenment, the sublime was what Michel de Certeau might have called “a practiced place.” Its rhetorical commonplaces, philosophical terrains, and associated physical environments were cultivated, shaped, and framed by human action and habit. But can the sublime—epiphanic, quasi-spiritual, unmasterable, extraordinary—ever really become a habit? Is it possible, even natural, to become habituated to sublimity? Taking as its point of departure the Aristotelian claim that “habit is a second nature,” this article explores the counterintuitive relationship between habit and the sublime. It focuses not on that eighteenth-century “cultivar,” the natural sublime, but on sonic sublimity, exploring on one hand overwhelming sounds, and on the other a conceptualization of sound itself as a sublime phenomenon stretching beyond audibility to fill all space. As this exploration shows, both the sublime and habit were seen as capable of creating a second nature, and prominent writers connected habit, practice, or repetition to the sublime. Equally, however, there are points of friction between the aesthetic of the sublime and philosophies of habit, especially in the idea that habit dulls or removes sensation. This is a prominent idea in Félix Ravaisson's landmark De l'habitude (1838), a text currently enjoying renewed attention, and one that apparently stems from Enlightenment attempts to explain sensation, consciousness, and freedom. Similar concerns inform the eighteenth-century sublime, yet the logic behind the sublime is at odds with the dulling of sensation. The article closes by touching on the reemergence of “second nature” in contemporary art oriented toward the sublime, and on the revisions of Enlightenment nature this involves.