The Persistence of Voice: Instrumental Music and Romantic Orality (National Cultivation of Culture, 14)

The Persistence of Voice: Instrumental Music and Romantic Orality (National Cultivation of Culture, 14)

This work, completed by Neubauer on the very eve of his death in 2015, complements both his benchmark The Emancipation of Music from Language (Yale UP, 1986) and his History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (John Benjamins, 2004-10). It thematizes Romantic interest in oral speech, its poetical usage in music and musical discourse, and its political usage in the national-communitarian cult of the vernacular community. Subtly and with great erudition, Neubauer traces in different genres and fields the many transnational cross-currents around Romantic cultural criticism and writings on music and language, offering not only fresh analytical insights but also a rich account of the interaction between Romantic aesthetics and cultural nationalism. John Neubauer (Budapest 1933 – Amsterdam 2015) was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Among his works are The Emancipation of Music from Language (1986), The Fin-de-siècle Culture of Adolescence (1992) and the four-volume History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (4 vols., ed. w. M. Cornis-Pope, 2004-10).