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  • Music and Philosophy:The Enlightenment and Beyond
  • Stephen Rumph (bio)
Elisabeth Le Guin , Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xxiv + 350 pp. ISBN 978 0 520 24017 9.
Matthew Riley , Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder, and Astonishment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004. ix + 188 pp. ISBN 978 0 7546 3267 2.
Michael P. Steinberg , Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth Century Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xiv + 246 pp. ISBN 978 0 691 12616 6.
Michael Spitzer , Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006. 369 pp. ISBN 978 0 253 34724 4.

What is Enlightenment? A benevolent scientific revolution, or the juggernaut of instrumental reason? The dawn of political and religious freedom, or the triumph of bourgeois ideology? The old question has taken on new urgency as musicologists continue to absorb the ideas of Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno and other critics of the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment has not attracted solely, or even primarily, eighteenth-century scholars. Students of Renaissance, Romantic, modernist and popular music have turned to the eighteenth century to define their particular episteme or dialectical moment. The Enlightenment beckons as a sort of intellectual Orient, terrible and alluring in its utopian hubris.

Like any exoticism, the Age of Reason thrives on a certain critical distance. The more closely one peers into the eighteenth century, the more it begins to resemble any other age, with its own complexities and contradictions. The monolithic Enlightenment quickly resolves into multiple enlightenments - French, German and Scottish, rationalist and empiricist, early and late, Catholic and Protestant. Yet historicist research cannot break the spell of this peculiar epoch. For the Enlightenment is our Classical age. It provides the mirror for modernity, just as Greco-Roman antiquity did for the eighteenth century. Whether studied as a past epoch or enlisted in an ongoing narrative, the Enlightenment crackles with live issues of modern (and postmodern) identity.

The four books under review provide a counterpoint of outsider and 'native' perspectives. Elisabeth Le Guin and Matthew Riley write as dix-huitièmistes, determined to engage the Enlightenment on its own terms. For Michael Spitzer and Michael P. Steinberg, it serves as an origin for narratives that terminate in the twentieth century. This dichotomy, of course, breaks down in practice. Le Guin and Riley call into question entrenched listening habits inherited from the nineteenth century, [End Page 128] while Spitzer and Steinberg unearth the eighteenth-century roots of later dialectics. At their best, the four scholars model the supple dialogue between past and present that makes historical scholarship a joyous, transformative discipline.

Elisabeth Le Guin carries historicism to an extreme in Boccherini's Body. She aims at nothing less than reincarnation, offering up her own flesh as the vessel. Her 'carnal musicology' seeks to reconstruct the kinaesthetic meanings of Boccherini's music that account for its distinctive (and chronically undervalued) character. Le Guin approaches musical embodiment intuitively, steering clear of 'hard' empirical or semiotic research. She gleans her insights instead from eighteenth-century theatre, ballet, art criticism, medicine and, above all, her own experience as a period-instrument cellist (the accompanying CD features stylish excerpts by her own ensemble, the Artaria String Quartet). Boccherini's Body offers a history of musical feeling, an account of how composers, performers and listeners experienced music in the flesh.

Not surprisingly, Le Guin pays close attention to the sensationist philosophy of the French encyclopedists. She begins with the most famous bodily metaphor of the Enlightenment, the waking statue of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac's Traité des sensations (1754). Condillac had posited a sentiment fondamental underlying the statue's diverse perceptions, 'that feeling she has of the action of the parts of her body one upon the other - above all the movement of respiration' (p. 7). Boccherini's music evinces a similar sense of bodily ease with its tendency towards inert, repetitive patterns. As Le Guin argues, 'both Condillac and Boccherini exemplify the hopefulness of their era by presenting the self's fundamental state as a pleasant one' (p. 9).

The opening chapter ('"Cello-and-Bow Thinking"') applies this insight to...

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