When Machines Play Chopin

Katherine Hirt, Seattle, USA.

"Densely written and diligently researched, When Machines Play Chopin interweaves literary history, aesthetics, performance history, and the history of technology in new and unexpected ways. [...] By focusing on the literary life of music machines, Hirt presents a compelling narrative on music aesthetics and the mechanical from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, one with important consequences for a contemporary discussion of the place of the human vis-a-vis technologies of sound."Mary Helen Dupree in: Monatshefte 104/1 2012