Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature

Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-520-28737-2
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 348 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 188 mm x 266 mm, Gewicht: 1100 g

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas—cultural, social, and personal—associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Leppert, Richard

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Musikpsychologie, Musiksoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Mediengeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Opernmusik
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatersoziologie, Theaterpsychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Kultursoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Medientheorie, Medienanalyse

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
List of Musical Examples
Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. MODERNITY AND OPERA; NATURE AND REDEMPTION
1. The Civilizing Process: Music and the Aesthetics of Time-Space Relations in The Girl of the Golden West
2. Opera, Aesthetic Violence, and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo

PART II. VOICING SUBJECTIVITY
EXCURSUS: OPERA, MONUMENTALITY, AND LOOKING AT LOOKING
3. Caruso, Phonography, and Operatic Fidelities: Regimes of Musical Listening, 1904–1929
4. Aesthetic Meanderings of the Sonic Psyche: Three Operas, Two Notes, and One Ending at the Boundary of the Great Divide

PART III. MODERNITY, NATURE, AND DYSTOPIA
EXCURSUS: NATURAL BEAUTY / ART BEAUTY
5. Sound, Subjectivity, and Death: Days of Heaven (promesse du bonheur)

Conclusion: Acoustic Invocations of Crisis and Hope
Appendix: Chapter 5 Tables
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Richard Leppert is Regents Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of many books, including The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body and Art and the Committed Eye; he is also the editor of Adorno’s Essays on Music and coeditor of Beyond the Soundtrack.