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When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

2012; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mon.2012.0026

1934-2810

Mary Helen Dupree,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

Reviewed by: When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature Mary Helen Dupree When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature. By Katherine Hirt. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2010. 170 pages. €79,95. Katherine Hirt's study investigates shifts in the relationship between matter and spirit in music aesthetics and literature through an exploration of depictions of music machines in texts from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Through readings of literary works such as E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" and Heinrich Heine's "Florentinische Nächte" together with non-literary texts and contemporary performance practices, Hirt isolates the question of automation in musical performance: what constitutes an "automatic" instrument, and what distinguishes it from a musical performance controlled by a human being? Against a twentieth-century tendency to read musical automata and music machines as trivial, Hirt successfully demonstrates their influence on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century music practices, which in turn had an impact on music aesthetics. For example, she emphasizes the way in which the "rhythmic exactness" of the machines became the norm for musical performance in the nineteenth century (27). In the book's introductory chapter, Hirt argues that a split occurred around 1800 between the mechanical and expressive aspects of music. This split amounted to a departure from the Baroque model of the Affektenlehre, in which music was seen as an imitation of feelings in the Platonic tradition; closely related to this idea was the notion that the voice was superior to instrumental music, because only it could provide a link between music and text (5-6). In the works of writers and intellectuals around 1800, however, Hirt identifies a shift towards a view of music as autonomous and expressive rather than imitative. As a direct expression of nature, rather than its imitation, music no longer had to be linked to a text in order to have meaning. At the same time, Romantic texts on music often postulated an opposition between "mechanical" performances and the inner workings of the soul, over and against the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers such as La Mettrie, who understood feelings and the soul as part of the body's "machine" (9). [End Page 120] The Romantic rejection of the Affektenlehre and Enlightenment mechanism form the background of Hirt's reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann's literary depictions of automata in the second chapter. Hirt interprets Hoffmann's novella "Die Automaten" not as a simple critique of the grotesque aspects of automata, but rather as a nuanced reflection on the aesthetic and philosophical implications of musical automata with strong thematic and generic links to Hoffmann's works of music criticism. In "Die Automaten," Hirt argues, it is the imitation of human activity by anthropomorphic automata that makes them grotesque; by contrast, Hoffmann embraces the project of making music by means of mechanical instruments (45). Both in "Die Automaten" and in "Der Sandmann," Hoffmann moves beyond the Baroque opposition between vocal and instrumental music by conceptualizing the human voice as an instrument that can be corrected and improved by means of instruments, such as the glass harmonica. Hirt delves further into nineteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy in the book's dense third chapter, which examines the critiques of music as an autonomous art form made by Schopenhauer and the music critic Eduard Hanslick. As Hirt shows, both of these thinkers reveal the profound influence of Hegel on nineteenth-century music aesthetics. Whereas Hegel criticizes music's excessive subjectivity, for example, Schopenhauer turns this argument around; by bypassing the realm of ideas, he argues, music has the power to express the Will more directly than any of the other arts (66). Meanwhile, Hanslick pushes back against Romantic approaches to music by dethroning feeling as a criterion for musical performance and by formulating a new concept of "musical ideas" that considers content and form as part of the same creative unity (78-80). By placing human creativity at the center of his definition of music as art, Hanslick makes room for a more positive view of music machines, which he argues are more capable of producing music than a...