When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

by Katherine Hirt

Overview

When Machines Play Chopin brings together music aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Philosophers defined music as a direct expression of human emotion while soloists competed with one another to display machine-like technical perfection at their instruments. When Machines Play Chopin looks at this paradox between thinking about and practicing music to show what three literary works say about automation and the sublime in art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110232400
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	05/26/2010
Series:	Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	170
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Katherine Hirt, Seattle, USA.

Editorial Reviews

"Densely written and diligently researched, When Machines Play Chopin interweaves literary history, aesthetics, performance history, and the history of technology in new and unexpected ways. [...] By focusing on the literary life of music machines, Hirt presents a compelling narrative on music aesthetics and the mechanical from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, one with important consequences for a contemporary discussion of the place of the human vis-à-vis technologies of sound."
Mary Helen Dupree in: Monatshefte 104/1 2012

From the Publisher