From men to machines and back: Automata and the reception of virtuosity in European instrumental art music, c.1815-c.1850 (original) (raw)

philosophy (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Novalis, etc.), but also in literature. Such narratives and, as I argue in this paper, much of contemporary criticism of virtuosity were shaped by the uncanny feeling that the human subject, too, like automata and "automatic" virtuosi, may not be free, contrary to the Enlightenment view o f the human subject in Rousseau, Kant, and others, but actually under the power o f mechanisms beyond itself, operating automatically and not o f its own accord. In contemporary criticism o f virtuosity, the elu sive notions of expression, expressivity, expressive playing and the like, which were de liberately kept under-explained, were then marshalled to preserve the supposedly ineffable or at least ineffably human core of musical performance, in line with the contemporary Romantic view of music as the only means of expressing what is otherwise inexpressible, that is, ineffable.