Wednesday, 26 February 2025 – 16:30-18:00 (UK time) │Online
How should we view Romanticism’s contribution to the aesthetics of music, and its legacy to modern musical culture? Answers to this question have long begun by assessing the significance of Romantic instrumental music, particularly Beethoven – in continuity with this repertoire’s place in today’s concert halls. Abandoning an older idea of Beethoven as ‘the man who freed music’, music historians are now more likely to talk of the ‘iron rule of Romanticism’ (Richard Taruskin) and its ideological promotion of the ‘mysteries of an elite art’ (Stephen Rumph), reflecting a more critical view of the classical music culture that began to solidify c.1800 and continues up to the present. This panel discussion attempts to go beyond such interpretations by considering Romantic music aesthetics in a broader frame of reference. Romantic critics embraced opera, incidental music, melodrama, song and church music as well as symphonies. Far from being uniformly elitist in outlook, they considered ‘the people’ as an active force in aesthetics – whether from a left- or right-wing political perspective – and their poetic language frequently concealed a deep engagement with contemporary philosophy, its bold re-evaluations of religion and myth, and its theorisation of knowledge, emotions and rhythm in relation to music.
Contributors
Matthew Pritchard is Lecturer in Musical Aesthetics at the University of Leeds’ School of Music. His first monograph Romantic Music Aesthetics: Creating a Politics of Emotion appeared with Cambridge University Press in November.
Katherine Hambridge is Associate Professor in Musicology at Durham University, specializing in French and German musical life 1800-50. Following The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture 1790-1820 (Chicago, 2018) co-edited with Jonathan Hicks, her monograph Performing Politics: Music and the Berlin Stage c. 1800 is forthcoming in 2026.
Tomás McAuley is Assistant Professor and Head of School at the University College Dublin School of Music. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2021) and his monograph The Music of Philosophy: German Idealism and Musical Thought, from Kant to Schelling, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press later in 2025. The event will be chaired by James Garratt, Professor of Music History and Aesthetics at the University of Manchester and author of Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination (2002). It is co-organised with the Royal Musical Association’s Music and Philosophy Study Group’s online Conversations series, convened by Sam Wilson (Guildhall).
