Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music. By Michael P. Steinberg.

Abstract

One of the appealing aspects of teaching a survey course on nineteenth-century European music history is that it provides an opportunity to introduce students to a time and place where the cultural significance of classical music required, it seems, no special pleading. It figured overtly and prominently in contemporary public social and intellectual life and could claim, as a book title like ‘Listening to Reason’, neatly reminds us, significant attention from philosophers and political theorists. And yet, one might be forgiven for not associating reason pre-eminently with nineteenth-century music; after all, musical Romanticism, like its antecedents in literature and fine art, is commonly understood to be less concerned with the reasonable per se as with the subjective, noumenal, and irrational. Indeed, in the very opening pages of his book, Steinberg argues that the German philosophy, music, and musicology of this time helped promulgate ‘national and ultimately fascist ideology’ (p. 2). Nineteenth-century music has thus remained susceptible to being incorporated into broader historical narratives about the origins of what could well be described as especially unreasonable patterns of thought, such as nationalism and fascism. Whether this music's alleged culpability is merely one of guilt by association, or a sign of a genuinely insidious connection, the academy, Steinberg argues, has had a vested interest in separating nineteenth-century music history from the rest of culture. Today, of course, as the pre-eminence of journals like Nineteenth-Century Music attest, musicologists are only too willing to uncover this music's rich cultural context. Now the problem, however, is that the music survives in our own culture only in an ‘increasingly elite and socially marginal form’ (p. 3).