Urban Space, Spectacle, Memory and Music in Nineteenth-Century Vienna

October 23, 2014

Nicholas Mathew, Associate Professor in the Department of Music, will give a presentation on the role of music and sound in the emergence of modern civic sensibilities in Napoleonic Vienna, and how printed music came to shape a new politics of urban pedestrianism.

Professor Mathew's published work has focused on the relationships between music and politics: the place of music in political institutions, the role of music in the public sphere, and the ways in which music constructs identity and subjectivity – as well as issues of appropriation, subversion, musical trashiness, and political kitsch.  His books include Political Beethoven and The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini, edited with Benjamin Walton.

The complete PowerPoint presentation can be viewed here.
Video of the presentation can be viewed here.
Beethoven's Wellington's Victory (1813), which was played during the presentation, can be heard here.

Readings:

Roger Parker, Two styles in 1830s London: "The form and order of a perspicuous unity"

For further reading in sound studies:

Sterne, Jonathan.  The Audible Past:  Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.

Sterne, Jonathan.  The Sound Studies Reader.

Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity:  Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933.

Related Blog Posts:

An Engaged Populace Through Music by Matthew Goodman
The Sound of Urban Spectacle by Swetha Vijayakumar
Power and the Audiovisual by Brandon Harrell