Variations on the Musical Sublime

Abstract

It can sometimes seem as if musicology is perpetually running late. At least, that is the impression that emerges from two new histories of music and the discourse of the sublime in European culture and aesthetics. Both books stress an imbalance between music and other scholarly fields as a premise for revisiting the long history of the sublime, charting its rise to prominence in the late-seventeenth century with the reception of Peri Hupsous (On Sublimity, attributed to the Greek critic Longinus), to its dominant place in British, German, and French aesthetics and criticism in the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. During this period, the sublime was debated by critics, literary writers, theologians, philosophers and musicians, and used to evoke multiple meanings and applications. Put simply: the sublime was more than a set of intrinsic qualities – such as elevation, grandeur, excess, power, persuasion, innovation and so on – to be located in an external object, style, or mode of expression. It was also an experience and state of mind identified with the (usually male) perceiving subject, an emotional and cognitive confrontation with that which is overwhelming, unknowable, or indescribable.1