Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
I. Argonaut Orpheus
II. Music's Empire
III. Anti-Orpheus
Conclusion
Notes
Vanessa Agnew studied music in Australia and is an Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan
"Vanessa Agnew is the first since James Cook to take seriously the
Royal Society's emphasis on the importance of playing music to
natives as a way of soothing and rendering them receptive to their
visitors. She gives detailed descriptions of chants and dances in
the voyages of discovery in the South Seas, not just as pastimes
and amusements but as deliberate elements of a colonial enterprise.
To notice this has been Agnew's first triumph. To consider how
native music contributes to a comparative critique of a national
standard of music is her second. Thus 'earwitnessing' is conceived
of in the same terms as Mary Louise Pratt's eyewitnessing, namely a
far
from disinterested aesthetic activity that has many colonial jobs
to perform. That local musical scales were actually used in systems
of racial classification I find a truly astounding fact. Agnew has
taken the study of Pacific exploration into new waters."-- Jonathan
Lamb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt
University
"With rare geographic breadth and deft archival digging, Agnew
teaches her readers to hear Enlightenment debates anew. By
recovering the connections between world travelers' reports and
European musical theory, she provides an ingeniously realized model
for thinking about the global shaping of modern European
culture."--Harry Liebersohn, Professor of History, University of
Illinois, and author of The Travelers' World
"Enlightenment Orpheus investigates the extraordinarily complex and
convoluted relationship that Western societies have maintained
towards music from Plato and his forebears onwards. What Agnew has
accomplished, simply stated, is considerable. Agnew deftly outlines
the politics of travel, the politics of music, and the discursive
conjunctions both share in common."--Richard Leppert, Samuel
Russell Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of
Minnesota
"A fascinating journey into Enlightenment thought...Agnew's book
not only makes an innovative contribution to research on alterity,
the Enlightenment, and the cultural history of music, it also can
be profitably read by a non-specialist audience with an interest in
music."--H-Net
"Necessary reading for scholars of eighteenth-century music.
Agnew's study does more than chart a new history of the music
aesthetics and cultural ideals that preceded the apotheosis of
Germanic music...She gives a strikingly original account that
emphasizes the transnational and ven imperial matrix of this rise
and, by implication, that of the period's most cherished ideals of
music, which represents a high achievement indeed."
--Eighteenth-Century
Music
"A very significant and original contribution to 18th-century
cultural history, as notable for its scholarship as for its
theoretical acuity and critical insight. Like the waiata admired by
Burney and Forster, this book induces both melancholy--for
harmonies invoked and dissipated--and admiration."--Journal of
Pacific History
"A marvelous book...We can be thankful that we have as nimble a
travel guide as Agnew." --American Historical Review
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