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  • Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music by Holly Watkins
  • Karen Olson
Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music. By Holly Watkins. (New Material Histories of Music.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. [200 p. ISBN 9780226594705 (hardcover), $40; ISBN 9780226594842 (e-book), price varies]. Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Holly Watkins's Musical Vitalities is a slim volume, but like a carefully packed overnight bag, it holds a surprising amount of material. Combining "roughly equal parts philosophy of music, history of aesthetics, and analytically informed criticism" (p. 2), Watkins explores how twentieth- and twenty-first century studies in biology, cognition, and semiotics can revitalize nineteenth-century aestheticians' struggles to compare humans' experience of music with their experience of nature. In so doing, Watkins refreshes a body of literature and music that might seem worn out while simultaneously addressing many topics of current musicological interest: music and the body, musical cognition, and, of course, ecomusicology—the intersection of music and the natural world.

Watkins explains that Musical Vitalities "[explores] how analogies between musical and natural processes, which appear repeatedly in the [nineteenth century] literature on musical aesthetics, encourage us to develop modes of thinking that challenge presumed divisions between cultural artifacts and natural entities" (p. 11). If the emotive excesses of romanticism overstated the music's transcendent qualities, and the countervailing rigidity of musical formalism failed to account for music's bodily effects, how might modern science fill these nineteenth-century gaps?

The six chapters of Musical Vitalities function largely as stand-alone essays grouped around this question. As such, the book is difficult to summarize; even the individual chapters are so dense as to resist easy summation. The first chapter tackles organicism in nineteenth-century music criticism—the idea that a composer develops a single motivic seed to form a unified work. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory, Watkins explores the self-organization of organicism as expressive of larger systems of composers, performers, and listeners, wherein, just as seeds do not grow without being influenced by their environments, pieces of music are not created in vacuums.

In chapter 2, Watkins offers another plant-based analogy, the arabesque, as a way to expand Eduard Hanslick's well-known Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful; Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel, 1854). Here, the arabesque is not the ballet pose but the stylized leaf design you might see climbing up old wallpaper. Both naturally plant-like and artificially formal, the self-organized repetition displayed in such arabesques is analogous to the self-organized patterns that give structure, purpose, and [End Page 454] vitality to objects and entities in the natural world. In this way, Watkins develops "a mode of criticism attuned to both the formal resemblances between music and other worldly processes and the meanings that arise from that convergence" (p. 44)—that is, the ways the formalist arrangements Hanslick championed as purely human constructions have parallels in the natural world.

Watkins's third chapter turns to Arthur Schopenhauer, reworking his oft-maligned analogy between four-part harmony and the natural order, wherein humans are the soprano melody, the stodge of earth is the supporting bass line, and the organisms in between are the inner voices. Watkins finds this analogy unexpectedly useful because it suggests that music "affords listeners aesthetic access to organic and inorganic dimensions of existence which both inform and extend beyond the human" (p. 68). Schopenhauer, she argues, allows for an ecocentric musical experience, situating and attuning the human mind and body within (not apart from) the broader environment. This is a more holistic transcendence than that usually preached in nineteenth-century romanticism.

Chapter 4 detours from these philosophical abstractions, offering a more straightforward historical interpretation and contextualization of Robert Schumann's Blumenstück (Flower Piece), op. 19. While the plentiful musical, visual, and literary examples mean this chapter is the most accessible to read, it is also the most difficult to situate within the overall trajectory of the volume. The main connection to the previous chapters is the continued emphasis on plants and music as mutual analogs. Watkins explores how the language of flowers popularized by floral guides largely written...

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