Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism
Johann Gottfried Herder and Philip V. Bohlman
Abstract
Had Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) written a book on music, it would have been Song Loves the Masses. One of the great polymaths of modern intellectual history, Herder wrote influential contributions to philosophy, theology, anthropology, aesthetics, history—and music. His writings on musical subjects are among his most comprehensive, ranging from studies of music in the origins of human speech to the song practices underlying a universal humanity. Herder’s collections of these practices, to which he referred collectively as “folk songs” sounded world music in its complex diversity and pr ... More
Had Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) written a book on music, it would have been Song Loves the Masses. One of the great polymaths of modern intellectual history, Herder wrote influential contributions to philosophy, theology, anthropology, aesthetics, history—and music. His writings on musical subjects are among his most comprehensive, ranging from studies of music in the origins of human speech to the song practices underlying a universal humanity. Herder’s collections of these practices, to which he referred collectively as “folk songs” sounded world music in its complex diversity and provided the modern foundations for the fields of anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology. Many of the folk songs themselves entered the classical music of Europe, significantly transforming its aesthetics and history. The first-ever translations of Herder’s nine most sweeping works on music unfold across the chapters of this book. From the first attempts to forge theories of folk song and publish anthologies in the 1770s through the translations of the Spanish epic, El Cid, and the biblical Song of Songs to the aesthetics of transcendence that imbued his final essays, the chapters in Song Loves the Masses together transform our modern understanding of music and history.
Keywords:
Aesthetics,
Enlightenment,
Epic,
Ethnomusicology,
Folk song,
Nationalism,
Ontology of music,
Sacred song,
Universal history of humanity,
World music
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520234949 |
Published to California Scholarship Online: September 2017 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520234949.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Johann Gottfried Herder, author
University of Chicago
Philip V. Bohlman, author
University of Chicago
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