The academic year has flown by like a magnificent vulture, and I can’t believe it’s time to invite you all to the final workshop of the year. Abigail Fine, music historian extraordinaire, will be presenting work from her dissertation proposal, tentatively titled, “The Saintly Composer and Material Presence in Late Nineteenth-Century Popular Reception.”

The discussion will commence this coming Wednesday, June 5 from 4:30-6pm in our open-air paradise (Logan Center 801). An abstract follows below, and the full paper is available here–email Marcy or Dan for the password.

Andrew Cashner will serve as respondent.

Scholarly and popular writings about famous composers and musicians often betray a quality of reverence and devotion by those who admire and study their lives and works. This devotion emerges from these composers’ status as almost superhuman individuals who create timeless, divinely inspired artworks. While figures such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles are memorialized through cultish practices such as pilgrimage, display of relics, and reverent devotees, similar practices surrounding composers from the Western classical tradition are also alive and well today, with thousands of visitors to museums, global centennial or bicentennial celebrations, and an aura of awe and veneration in program notes, documentaries, and biographies. My dissertation investigates the nature of this veneration, its historical origins, and ways in which the spiritual and material dimensions of composer worship participated in the formation of the Western canon. Specifically, I will trace cult-like practices of worship to their origins in the nineteenth century. I argue that composers were not simply “deified” in an abstract sense, but that their veneration was grounded in specific traditional practices of saint veneration, which sought to forge a spiritual connection with the material, corporeal presence of the composer. I wish to investigate how such worship was interwoven with nineteenth-century popular religiosity and the confluence of art and divinity. I am also interested in the growing consumerism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ways in which ideals of spiritual transcendence that stem from early Romanticism are repurposed in a bourgeois consumer culture that markets nostalgia and veneration.