Technologies of the invisible: Optical instruments and musical Romanticism

Romantic musical discourse routinely claimed that music "communicates the invisible" or "opens an unknown realm." Such phrases reflect a radical reorientation in musical listening and aesthetics. Whereas Enlightenment era aestheticians expected music, like the other fine arts, to imitate familiar phenomena of nature, early Romantics instead heard music in relation to another, transcendent world. Musicologists have traditionally appealed to philosophical discourses to account for this shift, and thus have missed its connections to contemporary material culture. In parallel with the vogue for idealist philosophy in the eighteenth century, optical instruments became ever more popular in education and entertainment. Rather than vaguely intimating an abstract beyond, these devices revealed specific otherworldly realms through the magnifying lenses of telescopes, microscopes, and peepboxes, or the projected images of magic lanterns and shadow-plays. Familiar as artifacts of visual culture, these technologies also were used and experienced in audiovisual contexts that included opera, fairgrounds, and the new technology-driven entertainments of the late eighteenth century. Restoring sound to optical instruments and examining the role of optical instruments in musical discourse uncovers the formation of a new listener-spectator who became the romantic listener of the concert hall. It also permits a new mode of musical analysis -- particularly applicable to Beethoven's works -- that ties the meaning of certain acoustic effects to the otherworldly appearances produced by optical instruments. Tracing audiovisual developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries demonstrates that music acquired metaphysical significance not by virtue of its vagueness, but rather in relation to an instrumentally revealed world.