Papers by Craig A Comen
University of Virginia, 2019
This dissertation chronicles the early history of music criticism over the course of the long eig... more This dissertation chronicles the early history of music criticism over the course of the long eighteenth century, focusing on the emergence of the interpretive close-reading of musical works-what is now called music analysis, a practice ubiquitous across the academic discipline of musicology. The first music analysts were a wide-ranging group of intellectuals and critics who collectively formulated a science of music, complete with a set of scholarly practices and institutions that continues to influence scholarship today. To catalogue and evaluate new music publications, critics interpreted music's complex structures by fracturing the compositions into parts and attempting to figure out how they related to the whole, resulting in the first structural interpretations-or, in a modern sense, a "critique"-of musical texts. Analysts carved a space for themselves in the emergent disciplinary discourse of musicology, establishing and developing the proprietary knowledge necessary for rationalizing music as a coherent system and playing a pivotal role in establishing its new epistemology.
Music & Letters, 2019
While the writings of Donald Francis Tovey have been celebrated for their sensitive treatment of ... more While the writings of Donald Francis Tovey have been celebrated for their sensitive treatment of the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, their methodology has evaded systematic reconstruction. This study argues that at the heart of Tovey’s critical oeuvre there lies a coherent framework, one indebted to the philosophy of German idealism. First, Tovey embeds himself in its aesthetic tradition by articulating a claim about what it means for music to be modern, most evident in his essay ‘Haydn’s Chamber Music’, where he presents the composer as responsible for initiating what he calls the ‘Copernican revolution’ of the ‘sonata style’. Second, Tovey’s analytical approaches rely on Hegelian dialectical thinking. A prime example is found in his early essay on Haydn’s E flat keyboard sonata, in which he elaborates his conception of the sonata style and presents a sophisticated method to analyse the music of Haydn and his successors.
Around 1800 a group of critics worried that new music was in danger of losing its social relevanc... more Around 1800 a group of critics worried that new music was in danger of losing its social relevance. In their eyes music had become severed from the religious practices which had formerly provided its purpose and now exhibited a mercurial style that threatened its intelligibility, leading to a host of anxieties about its role in the contemporary world. This article argues that these concerns form the basis of an elegiac discourse of musical modernity, one resonating with broader philosophical concerns of the period. Taking Hoffmann's ' Alte und neue Kirchenmusik' as the central text, my narrative explores how he and others sought to rehabilitate modern music in the wake of a perceived social upheaval. This rehabilitation chiefly occurred at the hands of critics, who approached the complexities of new musical works by attempting to elucidate them through analysis. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony belongs in this narrative as a characteristic attempt to secure new music's meaning.
Book Reviews by Craig A Comen
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Papers by Craig A Comen
Book Reviews by Craig A Comen