Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch

by Heinrich Christoph Koch , Johann Georg Sulzer , Edited by Nancy Baker , Thomas Christensen

• ISBN13: 9780521360357
• ISBN10: 0521360358
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-03-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Can an abstract theory of Empfindsamkeit aesthetics have any value to a musician wishing to study composition in the classical style? The eighteenth-century German theorist and pedagogue Heinrich Koch showed how this question could be answered with a resounding yes. Starting with the systematic aesthetic theory of the Swiss encyclopedist Johann Sulzer, Koch was creatively able to adapt Sulzer's conservative ideas on ethical mimesis and rhetoric to concrete problems of music analysis and composition. In this collaborative study, Thomas Christensen and Nancy Baker have translated and analysed selected writings of Sulzer and Koch respectively, bringing to life a little-known confluence of philosophical and musical thought from the German Enlightenment. Koch's appropriation of Sulzer's ideas to the service of music represents an important development in the evolution of Western musical thought.

Table of Contents

Part I. Johann Georg Sulzer: General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771-74): selected articles, translated and edited by Thomas Christensen

Introduction

1. Aesthetic foundations

2. The creative process

3. Musical issues

Part II. Heinrich Christoph Koch: Introductory Essay on Composition, Vol. II (1787), translated and edited by Nancy Kovaleff Baker

Introduction

1. The aim and the inner nature of compositions and, above all, the way in which they arise.