Musically Sublime

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at Utrecht University and project leader of the VIDI project "Back to the Book" (2011–16), funded by the Dutch Research Council. She is the author of Musically Sublime: Infinity, Indeterminacy, Irresolvability and the editor of Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature through Cinema and Cyberspace (both with Fordham University Press). She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and volumes and is currently preparing a new monograph.

"Contemporary philosophy is badly in need of a new philosophical vocabulary enabling it to shed new light on old problems. This book proves clear that no notion will be more successful here than that of the sublime. And that the sublime is best exemplified by the experience of music. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth wrote a superior book on a fascinating theme. Her book will be landmark in contemporary philosophy." -- -Frank Ankersmit University of Groningen "An excellent textbook on the complex history of the philosophical sublime and an innovative rethinking of musical aesthetics." -- -Peter Szendy University of Paris X, Nanterre "Analyzing critical and philosophical writing from the mid-eighteenth century on, Wurth moves from Burke through Kant and Schopenhauer to Lyotard to posit a complex, multifaceted notion of the sublime, citing music as its crucial source." -- -Annette Richards Cornell University "Wurth does better than merely document the history of the sublime in music. By engaging with the term in its various incarnations, she offers the reader a full sense of the complexities of the term, the scope of various theories, and finally, offers a strong theory of the postmodern sublime." -- -Benjamin Downs Music Research Forum "In the history of Western aesthetics, the beautiful and the sublime have maintained an antipodal relationship: beauty is pleasing and sublime is overpowering, with the former in a dominant position. During the 18th century that position changed because instrumental music became predominant and aestheticians increasingly noted its expressive qualities. The sonata, symphony, and many other purely instrumental forms were expanding rapidly. Without an accompanying text, this music seemed "meaningless" yet full of expressive features. For much music, the sublime might be a more adequate definition if one could expand and enhance its definition. Wurth (comparative literature, Univ. of Utrecht) traces the changing concept of sublime beginning with its classical use in pseudo-Longinus; continuing to important treatises by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Freidrich Nietzsche, Arthur Seidl, et al.; and on to the work of postmodernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. The author presents her own theory of the sublime, using subtexts--"indeterminacy," "infinite," "irresolvability"--as guideposts not only to analysis of today's postmodern music but to music of the late-18th and particularly the 19th century. Readers should have some background in philosophy and music aesthetics to understand this study, which unfortunately lacks an index. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students, researchers." -Choice "Juxtaposes analysis of instrumental music against 18th-and 19th-century ideas of the infinite, the divided self, and unconscious drives." -The Chronicle of Higher Education