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1 results

  • 11 - Musical Sublimes

  • from Part II - Romantic Sublimes
  • Edited by Cian Duffy, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime
    Published online:
    06 July 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023, pp 141-153

  • Summary

    This chapter introduces the wide range of music bound up with the sublime in the Romantic period. This is a time often associated with the triumph of music – and especially ‘autonomous’ instrumental music – as the most sublime of the arts, and with a canon of overwhelming, ground-breaking, transgressive works by great (mostly German) composers. These associations are important, not least as a way of understanding the unease and sometimes controversy that has surrounded the musical sublime since the later twentieth century. Yet equally important to understanding the sublime in the Romantic period is to look beyond monumental instrumental compositions to see how smaller-scale genres and vocal music, alongside performers, listeners and other agents, shaped and contested the sublimity of music, sound and hearing, and left an indelible mark on the broader aesthetic category of the sublime itself.