6 - Organic “art music” and individual original genius: aestheticizing the folk collective

Summary

The lasting idea of art music has depended on the reconciliation of art-musical works (and their composers) with the notion of genius. This was a basically Romantic reconciliation. In the later eighteenth century, as long as “art” continued to be interchangeable with “artifice,” it remained opposed to the new idea of primal nature, and thus to genius. Even after the idea of genius had gained a new vitality in the 1760s, the term took time to pick up its familiar connotations as part of art. Rousseau, for example, worshiped genius in a rhapsodic way because of his novel insistence that music imitated human nature rather than an unchanging natural order. Still, since Rousseau clung to a version of the mimetic principle (if altered), we cannot expect his influential version of genius to be the nineteenth-century version of artistic genius. William Tytler had closed his 1779 dissertation on Scottish music with an extended quotation on genius from Rousseau's Dictionnaire, and in some respects Tytler's depiction of James I also approached the idealized Romantic artist of the nineteenth century. Whereas those who had made Rizzio the symbolic father of Scottish music had credited the Italian with great craft, Tytler now held up James I for a quality just the opposite of craft: genius – the rejection of rules rather than training in rules.