Nancy Baker, Thomas Christensen, eds. Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xii + 210 pp. $41.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-03509-5; $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-36035-7.

Reviewed by Ryan Plumley (Department of History, Cornell University)
Published on H-German (January, 2008)

Music Meets Aesthetics

Too often scholars who work on music and scholars who work on other kinds of texts have little to say to one another. Their backgrounds and training are too disparate. This was not the case in eighteenth-century Germany, where musical literacy was quite high among the educated classes, and cross-fertilization among fields was more normal. Thomas Christensen and Nancy Baker have contributed to opening a conversation between our modern disciplines by providing a selection of translations and useful introductions to the works of two Enlightenment theorists whose works demonstrate a confluence of musical and philosophical thought: Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch. The result, a book first published in 1995 and now reprinted in paperback, gives readers across disciplines the occasion to reflect on the relationship between music theory, aesthetic theory, and other fields of intellectual life in eighteenth-century Germany. Although the volume, like the series of which it is part, is directed at music scholars--musicologists, historians of music, theoreticians of music, and so on--technical discussion is kept to a minimum in the two introductions. The general reader interested in eighteenth-century aesthetics, in the history of ideas, or related fields will find much of interest in the selected writings of Sulzer and Koch.

Koch's "Introductory Essay on Composition" (1787) was intended as a pedagogical work that would bring together state-of-the-art theory as well as practical advice on how beginning composers might develop their skills and thinking about music. For his conception and elucidation of the process of musical composition, Koch drew heavily from Sulzer's more general handbook on aesthetics and art, the General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771-74). The selected translations are taken from these two texts. Sulzer's book was compiled as an encyclopedia, and Christensen has included the entries from which Koch drew most heavily or directly quoted in his work: "Aesthetic," "Sentiment," "Inspiration," "Invention," "Composition," and so on.

In the General Theory, Sulzer proposed a rationalized framework of artistic production--including invention (closely linked to inspiration), a layout or plan, realization, and finally elaboration--that should apply to any fine art. However inconsistent he was in his usage of specific terms, most of them drawn from traditional rhetoric, Sulzer tried to systematize artistic creation into a practicable, tripartite agenda that allowed for moments of fiery inspiration, sustained work, and finally sober reflection and evaluation. As Christensen points out, Sulzer's interest in rhetoric derived from the eighteenth-century shift in aesthetic thinking away from the external art object and towards the internal psychology of reception. Received, neo-classical categories of artistic evaluation, such as the unities and the theory of mimesis, lost much of their authority and relevance when the center of aesthetic concern moved into the audience, and a renewed theoretical effort was required to account for the internal, emotional, and psychological effect of art. Indeed, though in many other ways a conservative, Sulzer stood at the forefront of the application of empirical psychology to the theory of art. Rhetoric as the art of persuasion appeared to him to be a kind of fundamental model for the fine arts in general, since the task of the artist was to affect and to move an audience.

Koch adopted and partially adapted Sulzer's model in his attempt to provide the beginning composer with guidelines for (self-)education. In particular, Koch took up the broadly tripartite conception of composition. Baker explains that the two authors differed subtly on which parts of artistic creation corresponded with which idealized moments because Koch, unlike Sulzer, was concerned exclusively with music. Broadly speaking, Koch's treatise simply specifies Sulzer's theory for the purposes of training a musical composer.

But his "Essay" was also a good deal more than this. Baker describes it as a "comprehensive study of the art of music" that offers "an invaluable window on musical thought of the time" (p. 114). Koch tried to provide significant reflection on the state of music as he saw it, on its theory and the genres of music. For instance, innovatively incorporating the most recent scholarship, he weighed in on the important eighteenth-century debate over the preeminence of melody or harmony. He described music as composed of tones used either simultaneously (producing harmony) or in sequence (producing melody). Harmony did not precede melody, or the other way around. Rather, the "Urstoff" of music preceded them both and they were both equally important to its usage and elaboration into music.

In addition to their shared interest in producing and disseminating what they perceived as advancements in aesthetic theory, both Sulzer and Koch were motivated by the conviction that art's purpose was fundamentally moral. This moralism was linked to "sentiment" (Empfindung) in a way derived from pietism, as Christensen notes. In brief, naive feelings were seen as expressions of moral truth, and in turn, appropriate sentiments were seen as signs of ethical propriety in intention and in comportment. Art's highest purpose, in their view, was to arouse noble sentiments in its audience. Moreover, Sulzer and Koch celebrated music as the art form that acted most directly on the soul. Hence, they were united in trying to use morality to resolve the tension between the sensualist psychology of reception and the neo-classical and received standards of artistic appreciation.

Baker and Christensen do an admirable job of contextualizing their translations in and among the competing theories of aesthetics and music from the period. They give ample time to basic problems, debates, and questions that concerned eighteenth-century minds: the tension between the rational and the imaginative as well as between theory and practice, the role of genius, neo-classical ideals and artistic formulas, standards of artistic reception and appreciation, and the incorporation of British "sensualism" derived from Locke. They also provide useful biographical information about the authors. Baker gives an extended interpretation of Koch's own analysis of a piece of music, which should be of interest to specialists. But both introductory essays lack a social or cultural perspective that would give the reader some sense of how Sulzer's and Koch's theories of music and of composition related to broader issues. Some account of musical practices from the period would have been helpful to an uninitiated reader. How, when, and why was music encountered? How might it have been understood or experienced, irrespective of sensualist or other theories of reception? To what uses it was put, intentionally or inadvertently? What identities, institutions, or power structures did it sustain or disrupt? For instance, Christensen describes Sulzer's participation in the court of Frederick II ("the Great") in Berlin, but he does little to explain music's distinctive role in the pre-eminent enlightened monarchy of the period. Likewise, Baker's fascination with the details of Koch's theory and his subtle divergences from Sulzer leaves little space for reflection on the composer's role as a social agent.

Fortunately, what is lacking in the introductions is present in the translations. Although not exactly rich in reportage on the social life surrounding music in the eighteenth century, the translated texts are peppered with tantalizing indications of the roles music played in the lives of at least the upper classes. This world is alive with dangers that the translators' exclusive focus on theory tends to suppress. Sulzer repeatedly worries that "sentiment" (Empfindung), the raison d'être and the goal of all art in his view, might boil over into feminine and feminizing excess. Eighteenth-century studies have made much of the gendered nature of "sentimentality" as used in the period, and one wonders how Christensen can ignore this problem in Sulzer's work.

Likewise, in Koch's text, fascinating moments of doubt about his theory emerge. Koch encourages the composer to imagine an idealized and utterly abstract listener who has no internal impediments or distractions from the emotional effect of music. Yet, he acknowledges that the concert hall is at least as often an occasion for courtships and trysts as it is a purely aesthetic experience. Koch himself was a composer of occasional music for the court in Rudolstadt: a chorale book and birthday and mourning cantatas. And he seems more self-conscious than his translator of music's function in the formal expression of sovereign power and religious authority in the period. Indeed, Koch complains that music is demeaned when used in a purely pedestrian way at "the tables of the great" and should be reserved for festive days "to augment the pomp and the magnificence" (p. 157).

Nonetheless, the limitations of Baker's and Christensen's introductions are also the marks of the success of their translations. The selections from Sulzer and Koch are substantive enough to sustain the reader's reflection on a variety of problems related to aesthetics, music, and philosophy. Hopefully, they will also encourage a more developed conversation across disciplines about the important role of music in the eighteenth century.

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Citation: Ryan Plumley. Review of Baker, Nancy; Christensen, Thomas, eds., Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14100

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