Towards autonomy : imitation and expression at the turn of the nineteenth century -- E.T.A. Hoffmann's aesthetics of music and musical machines in "The Automata," "The Sandman" and music reviews -- Schopenhauer and Hanslick : toward a definition of instrumental music as an autonomous art -- Virtuosity and the experience of listening in Heinrich Heine's music criticism and "Florentine nights" -- Rilke's phonograph : the "talking machine" and imagined sound
Summary
WhenMachines Play Chopin brings together music aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Philosophers defined music as a direct expression of human emotion while soloists competed with one another to display machine-like technical perfection at their instruments. WhenMachines Play Chopin looks at this paradox between thinking about and practicing music to show what three literary works say about automation and the sublime in art
