Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability

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instrumental music." "Critically assessing Edmund Burke, James Usher, E.T. A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Friedrich Holderlin, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche, this book re-presents the sublime as a feeling that defers resolution and hangs suspended between pain and pleasure. Musically Sublime rewrites the mathematical sublime as difference, while it redresses the dynamical sublime as trauma: unending, undetermined, unresolved." "Whereas most musicological studies in this area have focused on traces of the Kantian sublime in Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven, this book calls on the nineteenthcentury theorist Arthur Seidl to analyze the sublime of, rather than in, music. It does so by invoking Seidl's concept of formwidrigkeit ("form-contrariness") in juxtaposition with Romantic piano music, (post)modernist musical minimalisms, and Lyotard's postmodern sublime. It presents a sublime of matter; rather than form - performative rather than representational. In doing so, -- Cover Title Page Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations (in Order of Appearance) Introduction 1. Empty Signs and the Burkean Sublime 2. Sehnsucht, Music, and the Sublime 3. Ruins and (Un)forgetfulness: A Genealogy of the Musically Sublime 4. Sounds Like Now: Form-Contrariness, Romanticism, and the Postmodern Sublime 5. Anxiety: The Sublime as Trauma and Repetition Coda :The Sublime, Intermedially Speaking Notes Bibliography