Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List

Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until January 19, 2026

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

“Ces Magnifiques Instruments”: Sound, Power, and Romantic Orchestral Technologies, 1789–1869

Nemeth, Samuel Tyler
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1702054783019245

Abstract Details

2024, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Musicology.
The soundscapes of late-eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth-century France were acutely informed by years of political, social, and imperial upheaval and violence. In the decades following the Revolution of 1789, musical instruments sonified political instability and the goals of military conquest. In France, the lines between concert hall, festival ground, and battlefield blurred as a process of organological expansion and ensemble integration began. The nineteenth-century Romantic orchestra which emerged by 1830 was not merely a continuation of eighteenth-century orchestrational practice, but a distinctly French creation that reflected a turbulent, increasingly-militarized national landscape. This dissertation seeks to understand what such an ensemble, and its several component instrumental groups, meant and could do. Musicologists have recently turned to examining the meaning behind instrumental ensembles of this period, paying particular attention to issues of instrumentation, affect, and timbre. My interest in the history and politics of organology and timbre is similarly granular: I suggest that individual instruments carry distinct historical, cultural, and political associations, and that we can begin to understand the social, political, and military history of France between 1789 and 1869 by examining the instruments that animated the nation’s major musical genres. I am especially interested in the orchestra’s power as a national political collective, its function as a type of sonic weaponry, and its carrying of the sonic markers of empire. By examining the intersections between sound, power, politics, orchestration, warfare, and trauma, my project takes us back in time to the moment when composers such as Hector Berlioz and his contemporaries first deployed sound as a weapon, ushering in cultures of auditory violence that resonated through the following centuries. As I will show, nineteenth-century instruments could be deployed as weapons, just as weapons could function as sonic instruments. The two categories became inextricable in the age of Berlioz, intertwined in an audible musico-military feedback loop with long-lasting consequences not just in France but across the West.
Francesca Brittan (Committee Chair)
Peter Shulman (Committee Member)
Susan McClary (Committee Member)
Daniel Goldmark (Committee Member)
335 p.
European History; History; Military History; Music; Performing Arts; Technology
Instrumentation; Orchestration; Timbre; Nineteenth-Century France; Hector Berlioz; Orchestra; Sonic Weaponry; Acoustic Weaponry; Sound; Power; Politics; Warfare; Trauma; French Military; Concert Hall; Adolphe Sax; Jean-Georges Kastner; French Revolution; Gothic

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Nemeth, S. T. (2024). “Ces Magnifiques Instruments”: Sound, Power, and Romantic Orchestral Technologies, 1789–1869 [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1702054783019245

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Nemeth, Samuel. “Ces Magnifiques Instruments”: Sound, Power, and Romantic Orchestral Technologies, 1789–1869. 2024. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1702054783019245.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Nemeth, Samuel. "“Ces Magnifiques Instruments”: Sound, Power, and Romantic Orchestral Technologies, 1789–1869." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2024. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1702054783019245

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1702054783019245
© 2023, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.