Benedict Taylor
Benedict is Professor of the Analysis and Philosophy of Music at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh. For 2019-2020 he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) Berlin. He received his MA and PhD from Cambridge, subsequently holding fellowships at Heidelberg, Princeton, Berlin, and Hamburg, and worked previously at Oxford as Lecturer in Music and Senior Research Fellow at New College.
Benedict’s research and teaching interests include musical temporality and subjectivity, theory and analysis (especially 19th-century form and late-Romantic harmonic practice), philosophy, and the history of music c. 1770–1945 (with particular focus on Mendelssohn and Hensel, besides German Romanticism, British music, and later nineteenth-century music). He is the author of six monographs: the first, Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011, offers the first substantial account of the development of cyclic form in the nineteenth century. The second, The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era, is an analytical and philosophical study of the relation between music and time from Beethoven and Schubert to Franck and Elgar, published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Another ongoing project explores the harmonic usage of late 19th-century composers outside or on the periphery of the Austro-German tradition, extending recent work in neo-Riemannian theory and the geometries of tonality into wider cultural issues pertaining to nationalist discourses and historiography. Some of this work was published in late 2016 as an RMA Monograph, Towards a Harmonic Grammar of Grieg’s Late Piano Music: Nature and Nationalism. Arthur Sullivan: A Musical Reappraisal, a pioneering study of the music of the ever-popular but long critically neglected English composer, appeared in 2017 in Routledge’s Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series. The fifth, Music and Subjectivity, and Schumann, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022: it offers a long-overdue critical examination of the notion of musical subjectivity, seeking to provide a critical refinement of this concept and to elucidate both its importance and limits. His most recent book is on Fanny Hensel's String Quartet for the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series. He has edited several further books, including Rethinking Mendelssohn (Oxford, 2020), The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism (2021), and Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context (with Thomas Schmidt; Cambridge, forthcoming 2025), and was the co-editor of a special issue of 19th-Century Music on subjectivity and song (spring 2017). In addition, he has published on a broad range of music from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in leading journals such as 19th-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Analysis, Journal of Music Theory, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Music.
Benedict has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations, and is the recipient of the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association for the article ‘Cyclic Form, Time and Memory in Mendelssohn's A minor Quartet, Op. 13’, Musical Quarterly, 93/1 (2010), which explored the relationship between musical form, time and memory from a phenomenological perspective. Forthcoming and future projects include a volume on Coleridge-Taylor's 'Hiawatha' trilogy for the 2025 anniversary (published in OUP's Keynotes series) and a large-scale collaborative study of instrumental form in the nineteenth century. He is currently editor of Music & Letters, series editor for Cambridge University Press's Music in Context series, and serves on the editorial boards of Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, and Romance, Revolution & Reform. He is always happy to hear from scholars interested in publishing in Music in Context.
Benedict’s research and teaching interests include musical temporality and subjectivity, theory and analysis (especially 19th-century form and late-Romantic harmonic practice), philosophy, and the history of music c. 1770–1945 (with particular focus on Mendelssohn and Hensel, besides German Romanticism, British music, and later nineteenth-century music). He is the author of six monographs: the first, Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011, offers the first substantial account of the development of cyclic form in the nineteenth century. The second, The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era, is an analytical and philosophical study of the relation between music and time from Beethoven and Schubert to Franck and Elgar, published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Another ongoing project explores the harmonic usage of late 19th-century composers outside or on the periphery of the Austro-German tradition, extending recent work in neo-Riemannian theory and the geometries of tonality into wider cultural issues pertaining to nationalist discourses and historiography. Some of this work was published in late 2016 as an RMA Monograph, Towards a Harmonic Grammar of Grieg’s Late Piano Music: Nature and Nationalism. Arthur Sullivan: A Musical Reappraisal, a pioneering study of the music of the ever-popular but long critically neglected English composer, appeared in 2017 in Routledge’s Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series. The fifth, Music and Subjectivity, and Schumann, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022: it offers a long-overdue critical examination of the notion of musical subjectivity, seeking to provide a critical refinement of this concept and to elucidate both its importance and limits. His most recent book is on Fanny Hensel's String Quartet for the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series. He has edited several further books, including Rethinking Mendelssohn (Oxford, 2020), The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism (2021), and Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context (with Thomas Schmidt; Cambridge, forthcoming 2025), and was the co-editor of a special issue of 19th-Century Music on subjectivity and song (spring 2017). In addition, he has published on a broad range of music from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in leading journals such as 19th-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Analysis, Journal of Music Theory, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Music.
Benedict has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations, and is the recipient of the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association for the article ‘Cyclic Form, Time and Memory in Mendelssohn's A minor Quartet, Op. 13’, Musical Quarterly, 93/1 (2010), which explored the relationship between musical form, time and memory from a phenomenological perspective. Forthcoming and future projects include a volume on Coleridge-Taylor's 'Hiawatha' trilogy for the 2025 anniversary (published in OUP's Keynotes series) and a large-scale collaborative study of instrumental form in the nineteenth century. He is currently editor of Music & Letters, series editor for Cambridge University Press's Music in Context series, and serves on the editorial boards of Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, and Romance, Revolution & Reform. He is always happy to hear from scholars interested in publishing in Music in Context.
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Books by Benedict Taylor
Keywords: Mendelssohn; Cyclic Form; Octet, Op. 20; Piano Sonata in E, Op. 6; String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13; String Quartet in E flat, Op. 12; Symphony No. 3 in A minor ('Scottish')
• Presents the most extended consideration of cyclic form yet, allowing full consideration of this important nineteenth-century idea
• Considers music in relation to notions of subjectivity, time, history and memory, providing a significant contribution towards the current interest in these topics
• Connects Mendelssohn's music to wider cultural and philosophical ideas
Contents
Introduction
1. The idea of cyclic form
2. Musical history and self-consciousness: the Octet, Op. 20
3. Returning home: the E major Piano Sonata, Op. 6
4. In search of lost time: the A minor Quartet, Op. 13
5. Overcoming the past: the E flat Quartet, Op. 12
6. Cyclicism in Mendelssohn's mature music
This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time. Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music. They chart the development across the course of the nineteenth century of music’s capacity to convey the manifold nuances of time, revealing how music would finally become seen as the ideal instantiation of time and human existence itself. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.
Articles by Benedict Taylor
the early nineteenth century, it is far from clear analytically or phenomenologically how the predominantly aural and temporal experience of music might convey a sense of visual space that would appear central to the perception of landscape. This article explores Mendelssohn’s archetypal example of the musical seascape in order to unravel these concerns. After briefly charting the philosophical reefs that
encircle this issue, I examine how the aural may nevertheless translate to the visual, and thus how music might create its own, virtual landscape. Traveling beyond this, however, we reach the limits of mimesis and the visual for explaining Mendelssohn’s overture, uncovering his music’s implications for mythic-historical and personal memory, synaesthesia, and the embodied subject. Ultimately I argue for a more ecomusicological understanding of Mendelssohn’s work as embodying a critical reading of a fragile human subjectivity within nature, an immersive projection of the wild, northern sublime.
Keywords: Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture, musical landscape, embodied subject, musical ecology,
Keywords: Mendelssohn; Cyclic Form; Octet, Op. 20; Piano Sonata in E, Op. 6; String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13; String Quartet in E flat, Op. 12; Symphony No. 3 in A minor ('Scottish')
• Presents the most extended consideration of cyclic form yet, allowing full consideration of this important nineteenth-century idea
• Considers music in relation to notions of subjectivity, time, history and memory, providing a significant contribution towards the current interest in these topics
• Connects Mendelssohn's music to wider cultural and philosophical ideas
Contents
Introduction
1. The idea of cyclic form
2. Musical history and self-consciousness: the Octet, Op. 20
3. Returning home: the E major Piano Sonata, Op. 6
4. In search of lost time: the A minor Quartet, Op. 13
5. Overcoming the past: the E flat Quartet, Op. 12
6. Cyclicism in Mendelssohn's mature music
This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time. Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music. They chart the development across the course of the nineteenth century of music’s capacity to convey the manifold nuances of time, revealing how music would finally become seen as the ideal instantiation of time and human existence itself. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.
the early nineteenth century, it is far from clear analytically or phenomenologically how the predominantly aural and temporal experience of music might convey a sense of visual space that would appear central to the perception of landscape. This article explores Mendelssohn’s archetypal example of the musical seascape in order to unravel these concerns. After briefly charting the philosophical reefs that
encircle this issue, I examine how the aural may nevertheless translate to the visual, and thus how music might create its own, virtual landscape. Traveling beyond this, however, we reach the limits of mimesis and the visual for explaining Mendelssohn’s overture, uncovering his music’s implications for mythic-historical and personal memory, synaesthesia, and the embodied subject. Ultimately I argue for a more ecomusicological understanding of Mendelssohn’s work as embodying a critical reading of a fragile human subjectivity within nature, an immersive projection of the wild, northern sublime.
Keywords: Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture, musical landscape, embodied subject, musical ecology,
This paper examines the scherzo of the E flat Quartet, Op. 44 No. 3 (1837–8) from the perspective of current debates in the ‘New Formenlehre’, considering both the formal play observable at the smaller-scale level of syntax and phrase construction and the playing with expectations at the larger level of the movement. Conspicuous throughout this scherzo is the continual reinterpretation of the formal functions of passages (analogous to Schmalfeldt’s ‘Becoming’ or Horton’s ‘proliferation’), the music continually suggesting and denying plausible formal expectations raised by its suggestions of rounded binary and sonata design. Observable here is a characteristic Mendelssohnian technique of the theme ‘out of place’ – an interpolated theme enigmatically present in the wrong part of the form, as well as pronounced elision across larger points of structural divide, epitomised in the covert recapitulation over an active bass progression. Above all, though, the fusion of primary- and secondary-group material in the recapitulation creates an ambiguity between structural cadences (Hepokoski and Darcy’s ‘ESC’) and ongoing larger rotational parallels that highlights the controversial notion of the ‘reverse recapitulation’.
The result is a movement that in many ways rewards analysis through Sonata Theory concepts, and yet questions other aspects of this theory, especially when placed in the context of Mendelssohn’s other scherzi from this period. This points in turn to larger conclusions concerning the differing syntactic and contextual interpretations that can be given to otherwise similar schematic designs or formal ‘deformations’. To this extent, building up deformational families of common structural conceits deployed is only telling half the story. What is also crucial to consider is the context in which such departures from generic formal expectations operate at the level of function and syntax: superficial similarity at the level of generic formal scheme can mask quite distinct reinterpretation of internal functions within such outlines.
Part of ‘Rethinking Romantic Form: Mendelssohn’s Sonata-Form Practice’, panel I co-convened with Steven Vande Moortele, presented at the Society for Music Theory Annual Meeting, Vancouver, 6th November 2016.
Forthcoming in 'Rethinking Mendelssohn', ed. Benedict Taylor and Angela Mace Christian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
This paper explores the rotational formal designs of Mendelssohn’s late chamber music, viewed as part of a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between theme, texture and timbre in his music of the later 1840s. Both the B-flat major Quintet (1845) and F minor Quartet (1847) have been received as examples of a putative ‘late style’ in their downplaying of organic thematic interconnection, violent contrasts, and new focus on athemetic figuration, texture, and sonority. Focussing on the first movement of Op. 80, this paper examines the abrupt juxtaposition of intrathematic groups and the role of figuration, texture and timbre as formally articulatory devices, showing how these elements are drawn into the strongly rotational tendencies of the movement. In this, Mendelssohn is both continuing his own ‘middle-period’ techniques and Beethovenian precedent, but differing quite substantially in his music’s syntactical implications. If syntactic radicality and parametric non-congruence lie under the ostensibly smooth surface of Mendelssohn’s middle-period works, the late example examined here openly flaunts such discontinuities, albeit still in the service of a larger teleology whereby the rotational cycling through an ordered series of opposed thematic events attains a tragic telos.
Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides or Fingal’s Cave is regularly considered the musical landscape (or seascape) painting par excellence. Scarcely another work has such an unerring capacity to suggest the wide horizons, delicate nuances of changing colour and light, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean breakers and freedom of the sea. Nevertheless, it is far from clear how non-representational music can paint a landscape: certainly not by mimesis, by any direct representation. This paper explores Mendelssohn’s archetypal example of the musical seascape in order to unravel these concerns. After briefly charting the philosophical reefs that encircle this issue, I examine how the aural may nevertheless translate to the visual, and thus how music might create its own, virtual landscape. Travelling beyond this, however, we reach the limits of mimesis and the visual for explaining Mendelssohn’s overture, uncovering his music’s implications for mythic-historical and personal memory, synaesthesia, and the embodied subject. I suggest that over and above its evident aural quality and more metaphorical visual properties this music is bodily, working on the audience through a mixture of senses and modes of apprehension which may not be entirely reduced to the passive cognition of sound. Ultimately I argue for a more ecomusicological understanding of Mendelssohn’s work as embodying a critical reading of a fragile human subjectivity within nature, an immersive projection of the wild, northern sublime. Indeed, my paper might be said to take its bearings from Daniel Grimley’s recent assertion that what may be “commonly heard as exemplars of the picturesque, or as evocative local color, images of nature in Nordic music invite more radical interpretations that pose questions about the relationship between humans, sound, and nature.”
I argue that what is most distinctive about the Saint-Saëns Sonata is the way in which the F major second subject – Proust’s original petite phrase – is heard in the first movement’s recapitulation in such a manner as to make itself felt as paradoxically absent even while it is being stated. Unconvincingly reprised here in the flat supertonic E-flat, it is only in the latter stages of the finale that the theme is suddenly reencountered and at last tonally resolved into the sonata’s home key of D. The subtlety of the music’s suggestion of presence and absence, of expectations left unsatisfied and finally fulfilled when almost forgotten and no longer sought, is fully worthy of the Proustian context that it unknowingly helped create.
This paper examines the musical constitution of landscape in two of Enescu’s lesser-known orchestral works – the Romanian Rhapsody No. 2 (1902) and the Orchestral Suite No. 1, Op. 9 (1903). The background context is the problematic of how we can ground the common perception of landscape in music from what may be a purely auditory phenomenon (given such claims as Kant’s that “time can no more be intuited externally than space can be intuited as something in us”). In particular I examine the metaphor of musical motion that connects the temporal and spatial intrinsically together and the role of repetition and variation (techniques customarily handled in idiosyncratic fashion by Enescu) in creating this sense of musical space. The process of the Second Romanian Rhapsody suggests a motion deeper into the sonic space opened up by the threefold statement of its opening folk-tune, becoming lost or enfolded inside this auditory landscape, followed by an ecstatic epiphany in which the opening is regained at a higher level. In the extraordinary Prélude a l’unison to the First Orchestral Suite, meanwhile, the musical aesthetics of Deleuze and Guattari suggest a profitable hermeneutic application in their idea of the ‘refrain’, the music’s projection out into an unknown territory and its transverse becoming into the ensuing Menuet lent.
This paper examines music’s capacity through its temporal nature to model subjective self-consciousness, as outlined in the philosophy of Schelling (further touching on Hegel’s later, more famous formulation of this link and the almost contemporaneous poetic expression of these themes in Wackenroder’s Phantasien über die Kunst). In fact, within the terms of Schelling’s early philosophy of art I construct an argument (undeveloped by Schelling) that shows music to be the closest thing to Kant’s famous transcendental unity of apperception, a means of viewing an other as the self, ostensibly bridging the ineliminable split in the self’s apperception and the ‘Holy Grail’ of Idealist philosophising. Though there are arguably philosophical implications here that may still be useful to present day attempts at understanding the self, my emphasis is more modestly historical, in showing what structures of thought were present in the early nineteenth century that would enable music to be seen as uniquely akin to self-consciousness. Thus it can be shown that the rise in the notion of musical subjectivity or ‘persona’ around the nineteenth century relates to a deeper metaphysical conception of both music and the self.