Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past

FAIN: FT-60457-13

Edmund J. Goehring
University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario N6A 5B8 Canada)

The creative genius as wellspring of art and history--this legacy of nineteenth-century thought has received sustained critiques from numerous disciplines. Important recent Mozart scholarship follows this path in regarding the ingenious Mozart as a Romantic myth that has clouded our understanding of his life and art. Casting aside the concept of genius has brought lasting gains to Mozart studies; even so, my proposal pursues a contrary hypothesis: that some leading objections to genius misread the historical record and raise their own conceptual hurdles. Supporting this counterclaim are early nineteenth-century documents, often little known, that approach Mozart's originality and exemplarity with bewilderment rather than idolatry. The deficiencies of these critiques have several conceptual sources: a tendency to read Kant via Nietzsche, to conflate aesthetic with scientific questions, and to draw too strict a separation between the world of art and that of material culture.

Associated Products

Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past (Book)
Title: Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past
Author: Goehring, Edmund J.
Abstract: For over a generation now, many leading performers, critics, and scholars of Mozart’s music have taken a rejection of transcendence as axiomatic. This essentially modernist, antiromantic orientation attempts to neutralize the sorts of aesthetic experiences that presuppose an enchantment with Mozart’s art, an engagement traditionally articulated by such terms as intention, mimesis, author, and genius. And what is true of much recent Mozart interpretation is often manifest in the interpretation of Western art music more generally. Edmund Goehring’s "Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past" explores what gets lost when the vocabulary of enchantment is abandoned. The book then proceeds to offer an alternative vision of Mozart’s works and of the wider canon of Western art music. A modernized poetics, Goehring argues, reduces art to mechanism or process. It sees less because it excludes a necessary and enlarging human presence: the generative, and receiving, “I.” This fascinating new book-length essay is addressed to any reader interested in the performing arts, visual arts, and literature and their relationship to the broader culture. Goehring draws on seminal thinkers in art criticism and philosophy to propose that such works as Mozart’s radiate an idealism that has human sociability both as its source and its object.
Year: 2018
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781787442849
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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