Enlightenment Orpheus
The Power of Music in Other Worlds
Vanessa Agnew
Reviews and Awards
Winner of the American Musicological Society's Lewis Lockwood Award
Winner of the Kenshur Book Prize for 2008, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University
"With rare geographic breadth and deft archival digging, Agnew teaches her readers to hear Enlightenment debates anew. By recovering the connections between world travelers' reports and European musical theory, she provides an ingeniously realized model for thinking about the global shaping of modern European culture."--Harry Liebersohn, Professor of History, University of Illinois, and author of The Travelers' World
"Enlightenment Orpheus investigates the extraordinarily complex and convoluted relationship that Western societies have maintained towards music from Plato and his forebears onwards. What Agnew has accomplished, simply stated, is considerable. Agnew deftly outlines the politics of travel, the politics of music, and the discursive conjunctions both share in common."--Richard Leppert, Samuel Russell Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of Minnesota
"A fascinating journey into Enlightenment thought...Agnew's book not only makes an innovative contribution to research on alterity, the Enlightenment, and the cultural history of music, it also can be profitably read by a non-specialist audience with an interest in music."--H-Net
"Necessary reading for scholars of eighteenth-century music. Agnew's study does more than chart a new history of the music aesthetics and cultural ideals that preceded the apotheosis of Germanic music...She gives a strikingly original account that emphasizes the transnational and ven imperial matrix of this rise and, by implication, that of the period's most cherished ideals of music, which represents a high achievement indeed." --Eighteenth-Century Music
"A very significant and original contribution to 18th-century cultural history, as notable for its scholarship as for its theoretical acuity and critical insight. Like the waiata admired by Burney and Forster, this book induces both melancholy--for harmonies invoked and dissipated--and admiration."--Journal of Pacific History
"A marvelous book...We can be thankful that we have as nimble a travel guide as Agnew." --American Historical Review