Ohr und Auge -- Klang und Form

Herder is probably most familiar to musicologists as one of the formative figures in the musical nationalism of nineteenth-century Europe. His work on the national characteristics of the Volkslied is typically credited with initiating the discourse on national musical style and its roots in ‘folk’ tradition. In Ohr und Auge — Klang und Form (Ear and Eye—Sound and Form) Arne Stollberg outlines a less familiar perspective, one that detects Herder's ideas within some of the most pressing debates in the aesthetics of music from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The challenge, as Stollberg concedes, is that Herder is not explicitly acknowledged in these debates. In terms reminiscent of Foucault, Stollberg mobilizes but also problematizes the ‘history of ideas’ paradigm, constructing an archaeology based on traces of Herder's ideas discernible in later discourse—in this case the early Romantic aesthetics of music and subsequently in Wagner's writings, above all in the essay Beethoven (1870). That there is no evidence (besides his ownership of some Herder volumes) of Wagner's awareness of Herder's work is not the point here. Stollberg's goal is to show that the traditional antecedents cited for Wagner's theories—Schopenhauer, E. T. A Hoffmann, Novalis, etc.—take their bearings from the ‘surface of the discourse’ and risk overlooking broader ‘affinities’ in favour of ‘borrowings that have actually been made explicit’ (p. 115).

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