In 1786, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote that the imagination was ‘still the most unexplored and the most unexplorable of all the human powers of the soul.’ Nevertheless, the imagination received a great deal of attention in German philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology during Herder’s lifetime and well into the twentieth century. In this talk, I will show how emergent theories of imagination were taken up in specialist writings on music, focusing especially on one of the abilities attributed to the imagination: the power of synthesis, through which a whole might be related to its parts or the general to the particular. In the case of music, this meant that the imagination discerned unity from a manifold of sensory information: melodies, phrases, and entire compositions out of the temporal unfolding of sounding or written tones. We will see how writers ranging from Kant, to Hanslick, to Riemann, to Adorno (among others) explored the unexplorable and consider the implications that the imagining of music had on their aesthetic thought.
JANE HINES is a research fellow in music at Gonville & Caius College, where she works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cultural and intellectual history. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 2024 and also holds master’s degrees in music history and music theory from Bowling Green State University. In 2019 and 2020, Jane was a Fulbright doctoral award recipient at the University of Vienna. She has published on the music of Johannes Brahms and her 2022 translation of Friedrich Marpurg’s Treatise on Fugue recently received the Society for Music Theory’s Citation of Special Merit Award.
