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7 - Music and Technology

from Part II - Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
John Tresch
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

Romantic music has often been seen as an exploration of ideal, disembodied realms of spirit and feeling. It has also been presented as a consolation against the violent changes, profound uncertainties, and fierce social tensions of industrial modernity. Yet technical inventions and adaptions, such as new and improved instruments and new lighting and staging techniques, were at the heart of many of the defining characteristics of Romantic music: these included the sense of wild, dangerous, creative energies in both nature and human arts, the exploration of the most exalted and sombre of human emotions and states, restless formal invention, and appeals to both the intimacy of the individual soul and to vast audiences. Romantic music was bound up with industrialisation, urbanisation, and imperial expansion. Through its dependence on technology, and its ability to reflect upon technology’s consequences, Romantic music was an exemplary manifestation of its age.

Keywords

technologyscienceindustrialisationurbanisationimperialisminstrumental developmentstagecraft
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 110 - 126
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Davies, James Q., and Lockhart, Ellen (eds.). Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Dolan, Emily. The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Dolan, Emily I., and Tresch, John. ‘A Sublime Invasion: Meyerbeer, Balzac, and the Opera Machine’, The Opera Quarterly, 27/1 (2011), 4–31.Google Scholar
Henson, Karen (ed.). Technology and the Diva: Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Hibberd, Sarah (ed.). 19th-Century Music, 39/2 (2015), special issue: ‘Music and Science in London and Paris’.Google Scholar
Hibberd, Sarah. ‘Le Naufrage de la Méduse and operatic spectacle in 1830s Paris’, 19th-Century Music, 36/3 (2013), 248–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hui, Alexandra, Kursell, Julia, and Jackson, Myles W. (eds.). Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750–1980, Osiris, 28/1 (2013).Google Scholar
Kreuzer, Gundula. Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loughridge, Deirdre. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Müller-Sievers, Helmut. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Tresch, John. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Trippett, David, and Walton, Benjamin (eds.). Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).Google Scholar

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