Download or read book Disdain for Dance, Disdain for France written by Chantal Stillman Frankenbach and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines attitudes to dance in German music criticism from the 1760s to the mid twentieth century. During this span, categories of "serious" and "popular" music formed alongside beliefs about musical perception that positioned serious listening as an activity of inwardness, and dancing as its social antithesis. By the end of the eighteenth century, opposing ideals of serious and popular music could be reliably identified by the inclusion or exclusion of dance. My study shows how German beliefs about listening, often used to lay national claims on serious music, arose out of perceptions of dance as frivolous, feminine, and French. In Chapter 1, I discuss modernism as a period in which dance disappears from serious music and listening emerges as a self-consciously inward, cerebral activity. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, I survey German thinkers' tendency to identify "activity" as a mental construct and "passivity" as an absence of mental rigor. In this view, "movement" is transferred from the physical to the spiritual realm of human experience and thought to be most natural to the active, long-ranging intellect of males: especially German males. In the remaining chapters, I review German critics' hostility to dance music to explain their deep-seated bias against dancing as a legitimate form of listening. The discipline of music criticism emerged in Germany alongside the Viennese sonata genres. As a result, German critics champion the symphony as a noble, masculine, and particularly German art in contrast to the French minuet. In Chapter 2, I examine how critics from Friedrich Nicolai to E.T.A. Hoffmann encourage listeners to trade the physical pleasures of dance for an inward, psychological experience of music. Forkel and Sulzer go so far as to invoke the crudities of the uncivilized savage to extol musical harmony--and its engagement of temporally extended attention--over the simple, brutish, "natural" impulses of rhythm. In addition, I show how theorists and pedagogues treat the minuet as a prototype for longer, more serious, and more worthy compositions. This chapter concludes with analyses of minuets from Lully to Schoenberg, aiming to identify how composers renounced the dance values inherent in the musical minuet. In the nineteenth century, critical denunciations of dance turn to the waltz. My examination of Eduard Hanslick's criticism in Chapter 3 establishes that eighteenth-century preferences for inner "movement" were fundamental to his theory of musical beauty. Comparing Hanslick's treatise, The Beautiful in Music, with his work as a feuilletonist, I find his belief in formal musical development--and the serious listening it requires--consistently overrides his surprisingly amiable sentiments about dance and dance music. Hanslick's influence in Vienna, where the popularity of the waltz challenged serious listening protocols, can be found in the writing of Arnold Schoenberg and Otto Weininger, who treat "circular" dance music as a moral affront to serious, inward listening that seeks linear progress in music. In Chapter 4, I turn to theater dance in German music criticism, focusing on Richard Wagner's writing about dance in the context of his music drama and the "music of the future." I analyze Wagner's label for Beethoven's Seventh Symphony -- "the apotheosis of the dance"--The standpoint of his anti-French sentiments and his agenda for German musical progress. In his essays, "The Art-Work of the Future," "Beethoven," and "Music of the Future," Wagner offers a history of European music in which the influence of French dance is overturned by a reunion of harmony, rhythm, and speech in Beethoven's symphonies. My study concludes with Adorno's denunciations of Stravinsky's ballet music in Philosophy of New Music. I present Adorno's hostility to dance as a culmination of two centuries of critical disdain for the temporal structures of French dance music.