16 - On masculinity

Summary

What does a man do to maintain his integrity when his nervous system vibrates with a music that can throw him into inactive or hyper-active states of female vice? Musical morality towards the end of the eighteenth century had to be relocated from the female body to the male body. The North Germans demanded a more ‘manly taste’, as Schiller puts it; Johann Hiller advocated the three-movement symphonic structure without minuets because its balance was somehow more masculine; Sulzer wanted the sublime style to invigorate the body with its overpowering masculinity. But what does a music of the male body sound like? Unlike its female counterpart, the male form was supposed to have a certain ‘moral density’, a solid internal organisation that could resist the wiles of female madness; through the mental and physical activities that men performed in Enlightenment society, their fibres were made taut and tough. If music were to have any moral purpose within the male body, it had to firm up the muscles, tighten the fibres and tune the intellect, so that the body could be mobilised for action and not merely sink into female reaction.

In a sense, the aesthetic discourse had always anticipated the feminisation inherent in a somatic rather than a cerebral science. From its very germination in the teutonic soil of Baumgarten's writings, the aesthetic was rooted in the athletic activity of the body, an internal movement that could stimulate the mind to purposeful, rational action.