Ancient beliefs in the power of music gained urgency during the mid to late 18th century. The period saw an efflorescence of Orpheus-themed musical works, including operas by Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn. Orpheus as archmusician also emerged as a key trope in aesthetic, literary, critical, and historical thought. Yet this widespread interest in musical utility (called Orphic discourse) seems to conflict with the notion of aesthetic autonomy that emerged around the same time. The confluence of these apparently antithetical positions casts doubt on the widespread view that there was an aesthetic-phi ... More

Ancient beliefs in the power of music gained urgency during the mid to late 18th century. The period saw an efflorescence of Orpheus-themed musical works, including operas by Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn. Orpheus as archmusician also emerged as a key trope in aesthetic, literary, critical, and historical thought. Yet this widespread interest in musical utility (called Orphic discourse) seems to conflict with the notion of aesthetic autonomy that emerged around the same time. The confluence of these apparently antithetical positions casts doubt on the widespread view that there was an aesthetic-philosophical break between the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, this book exposes the hidden instrumentality that is typically disavowed by aesthetic disinterest and concludes that musical utility is a site of discursive continuity within modernity. Focusing on the English traveler and music historian Charles Burney's 1772 journey through the Netherlands and central Europe — soon to be the home of aesthetic autonomy — the book examines the scholarly discussions and social practices that characterize the Enlightenment as an age of Orpheus. It argues that aesthetic autonomy went hand in hand with the late 18th-century insistence on music's moral, social, and political utility. It argues that the foregrounding of alterity, like the new historicization of music, arose within the context of the late 18th century's increased mobility and its burgeoning cross-cultural encounters. The traveler's exposure to new listeners and new musical vernaculars posed critical challenges to classical ideas about what music could do. Understanding the broader function of Orphic discourse thus necessitates a transnational approach that coheres with the cosmopolitan character of serious music and music scholarship. Such an approach exposes the ways in which Orphic discourse made claims about music acting at the margins in order to promote specific class, professional, and national interests.