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A historically situated study of the relationship between music, sound and the sublime, this book embraces familiar works and composers, such as Handel, C. P. E. Bach, Haydn and Wagner, but also explores less familiar repertory and source material. Performers and audiences are also considered as agents and sites of sublime experience.
List of contents
Sonorous sublimes: an introduction Sarah Hibberd and Miranda Stanyon; 1. Thunder or celestial harmony: French theological debates on the sonorous sublime Sophie Hache; 2. 'A pleasing rape': John Dennis, music and the queer sublime Matthew Head; 3. The idea of the past in eighteenth-century British music Suzanne Aspden; 4. C. P. E. Bach and the neoclassical sublime: revisions of a concept Keith Chapin; 5. Cherubini's Médée and sublime vengeance Sarah Hibberd; 6. When does the sublime stop? Cavatinas and quotations in Haydn's Seasons Elaine Sisman; 7. Counterfeits, contraltos and consonance in De Quincey's sublime Miranda Stanyon; 8. The consecration of sound: sublime musical creation in Haydn, Weber and Spohr Benedict Taylor; 9. Commanding performances: opera, surrogation and the royal sublime in 1848 Dana Gooley; 10. Wagner's sublime effects: bells, cannon and the perception of heavy sound David Trippett.
About the author
Sarah Hibberd holds the Stanley Hugh Badock Chair of Music at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on opera and other forms of music theatre in Paris and London during the first half of the nineteenth century, and her publications include French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2009). She is co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.Miranda Stanyon is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London. She works on eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century literary culture and has published widely on music and sound, aesthetics, and emotions history, including articles for Modern Philology, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Huntington Library Quarterly, German Quarterly and Studies in Romanticism.
