Music and Sentimentalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Stephen Downes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032007427
• eBook ISBN: 9780429837401
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In a wide-ranging study of sentimentalism's significance for styles, practices and meanings of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of interpretations scrutinizes musical expressions of sympathetic responses to suffering and the longing to belong. The book challenges hierarchies of artistic value and the associated denigration of sentimental feeling in gendered discourses. Fresh insights are thereby developed into sentimentalism's place in musical constructions of emotion, taste, genre, gender, desire, and authenticity.

The contexts encompass diverse musical communities, performing spaces, and listening practices, including the nineteenth-century salon and concert hall, the cinema, the intimate stage persona of the singer-songwriter, and the homely ambiguities of 'easy' listening. Interdisciplinary insights inform discussions of musical form, affect, appropriation, nationalisms, psychologies, eco-sentimentalism, humanitarianism, consumerism, and subject positions, with a particular emphasis on masculine sentimentalities.

Music is drawn from violin repertory associated with Joseph Joachim, the piano music of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, sentimental waltzes from Schubert to Ravel, concert music by Bartók, Szymanowski and Górecki, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of The Remains of the Day, Antônio Carlos Jobim's bossa nova, and songs by Duke Ellington, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Barry Manilow and Jimmy Webb.

The book will attract readers interested in both the role of music in the history of emotion and the persistence and diversity of sentimental arts after their flowering in the eighteenth-century age of sensibility.

1Introduction

Getting sentimental

Feeling: a way forward

Let's get in the mood.

In a sentimental mood

I can see the stars come through my room

While your loving attitude

Is like a flame that lights the gloom.

On the wings of ev'ry kiss

Drifts a melody so strange and sweet;

In this sentimental bliss

You make my paradise complete.

How do these words by Irving Mills and Manny Kurtz combine with Duke Ellington's music (1935) to evoke a sense of the sentimental as proposed by the song's title? First, consider the lyric. The song's persona, the lyrical ‘I’, is alone, unable to sleep in their room. The sentimental mood, stirred by nocturnal loneliness and a longing for amorous connection, is one through which they move into a fantasy of blissful union with their absent lover. The lyric also identifies the mood with music itself, and a specific melodic type, one that is ‘strange and sweet’, heard in an imagined moment of ‘sentimental bliss’. This music, delightful in its sweetness but enigmatic in its peculiarity, wafts into the domestic confines of the singer's room from the vast world of a starry night. Space moves between the homely and the astral, suggesting tension between constriction and freedom and the dissonance between culture and nature. The ‘melody’ is associated with two manifestations of the amorous: an ‘attitude’ which travels like the light from stars through the darkness of night and a kiss which is in winged flight, airborne as a bird (or maybe a butterfly?). Both images emphasize the beauty of nature, a natural environment which in this moment is perfect, replete, and Utopian. But they also confirm distance and separation. This paradise of love is the desired construct of a lonely imagination.

In Ellington's setting (Example 1.1), the repeated – oo – vowel sounds (on ‘mood’, ‘room’, and ‘attit-ood’) are longingly prolonged, establishing that this mood is … oo … oh so lovely, and fixing the singer's mouth in the shape of osculatory promise on extended melodic notes. These vocal sounds are supported by a melody which is by turns pentatonic and diatonic but only once, and fleetingly, chromatic – the bluesy Ab on the second syllable of ‘loving’, the effect of which is suggestively erotic, the mood momentarily swinging into a smooch. Under sustained melodic notes, Ellington strings chains of chromatic chords in an example of what jazz players might call a minor line cliché. It's a technical feature found in several canonic sentimental songs (one might compare, for example, ‘My Funny Valentine’ [Richard Rodgers/Lorenz Hart, 1937], ‘Feelings’ [Morris Albert, 1970], or ‘What are You doing the Rest of Your Life?’ [Michel Legrand/Alan and Marilyn Bergman, 1969]). In Ellington's song, these chromatic lines turn from initial descents which, through ‘high art’ associations such as ‘Dido's Lament’, evoke elegiac melancholy, to ascending hope on ‘flame’ and ‘paradise’. The intimations of bliss, and later of things ‘divine’, emphatically characterize the dream as a redemptive moment, one of imagined reconnection (through the musical kiss) and of gloom and heavy-heartedness enlightened. Several aspects of the song's musical structure reinforce the feeling that the sentimental moment is inflected by a yearning for cathartic closure; the protracted withholding of the tonic F, so that much of the music is in D minor, the long-held appoggiatura G at the top of the initial vocal swoop, and the final resolution of the lamenting chromatic descent through an ascending progression.¹

Example 1.1‘In a Sentimental Mood’, music by Duke Ellington, words by Manny Kurtz and Irving Mills: opening.

The combination of Mills and Kurtz's lyric and the Duke's music gives a deliciously evocative example of key aspects of the sentimental: a melancholy mood of desired, imagined, but, in reality, denied connection; the loneliness of the long-distance lover; the dissonance between the restrictions of domestic space and an idealized communion in nature; the combination of lament with imagined pleasure; suffering and the hope of comfort, even rapture, couched in religious metaphors.

The song's subject is isolated. But they are far from a singular case. Zoom out from the close focus on this lonely but imaginatively musical persona and a vast community and long history of similarly sentimental subjects comes into view. These sentimentalists have not always aroused compassion and understanding, but they are stubborn in their prominence and unmissable in their multitude. Artists have created a myriad of such figures through portraits, novels, dramas, movies, poems, and all forms and styles of music. Some of these artworks aim for simple and immediate sympathies, while others offer the prospect of more reflective responses; some are cuttingly or playfully ironic, while others are damningly pejorative. Some works express many of these attitudes in ambivalent combinations.

The sentimental has proved resilient, adaptable, and divisive. In various guises, sentimental moods and topics inform art in all media, across all invented hierarchies of genre, taste, gender, race and class, and indeed across much of the world. Sentimental feeling has persisted at all levels of artistic achievement, from the sophisticated to the banal, and in manifold styles, forms, and cultural contexts. Artists engage with the sentimental to promote, revalue, indulge, and enjoy, but also to interrogate, critique, debunk, and provoke. The sentimental has stuck around despite being under attack since its ‘high art’ inception and critical heyday in the eighteenth-century age of sensibility. In spite of critical neglect or disdain, it has always remained an influential presence in forms of expression across all constructed levels of artistic value. This resilience has meant that far from dwindling over time, the attacks on the sentimental have often gained strength. Romantics were characteristically ambivalent, by turns developing, diverging, or distancing themselves from the sentimental legacy. Modernists typically had deep-seated problems with the concept. James Chandler, in his influential ‘archaeological’ study, noted the ‘almost pathological fear of sentimentality’ exhibited by early twentieth–century literary critics such as I. A. Richards. More recently, with the benefit of hindsight, critics have recognized that there are, as Chandler says, ‘things about modernism that are not visible clearly without a proper appreciation of the sentimental’, that though much art and criticism of Romanticism and Modernism can be characterized as anti-sentimental it is work which ‘bears more of the markings of the sentimental mode than we usually recognize, and that their complex negotiations of the sentimental legacy are central to some of their signature achievements’ (Chandler 2013, p. 264). French sociologist Luc Boltanski is particularly bullish: ‘at every stage’, he claims, ‘sentimentalism survives by winning out over criticism’ (Boltanski 1999, p. 97).

Chandler's work is prominent within a recent burgeoning of scholarship on sentimentalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. Experts in the literary, visual, and cinematic arts have, particularly since the 1990s, generated a substantial and rich critical literature on the sentimental as a theme, mode, and critical term (whether rebarbative, magnanimous, or celebratory in intent) in diverse repertories of high, middle, and lowbrow reputation from across the two centuries. Within this body of work, music occasionally makes a guest appearance, but though there have been some important contributions (which will be discussed in due course), the musicological scrutiny of the sentimental beyond examples from the eighteenth century is notably limited by comparison. This book seeks to address some of the lacunae. The chapters which follow do not present a history of music and the sentimental across two centuries, even though the selected repertory broadly moves chronologically from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. There are important historical studies of emotion in which the sentimental is prominent, for example, of the idea in eighteenth-century France (Reddy 2001) and in a history of emotion in Western music (Spitzer 2020a) but a history of sentimental music remains to be written. The aim here is to refine and broaden our understanding of the characters, forms, functions, and values of the sentimental in music during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the application of an array of critical and analytical strategies.

The idea of the sentimental has, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it, had a ‘strange career’. Its prospects have not always looked promising, as it has variously and repeatedly been discredited or devalued as ‘insincere’, ‘manipulative’, ‘vicarious’, ‘morbid’, ‘knowing’, ‘kitschy’, ‘arch’ (Sedgwick 2008, p. 150). Sentimentalists have been routinely castigated because their artistic taste is deemed imbalanced, tipped towards the maudlin through neglect or rejection of rational control. In influential circles, the sentimental became widely tainted. It was a major casualty in the rise of ‘snobbery’ in the formation and buttressing of the status and value of a ‘highbrow’ taste which rose above the morass of mediocrity created by the ‘culture industry’ (see Peterson 1997).² This is a familiar story, one often told with striking metaphorical flourishes. As part of an ‘anxiety of contamination’, to use Andreas Huyssen's potent psychological-cum-medical phrase, those able to wield dominating cultural power erected an aesthetic barrier to separate (and protect) ‘art’ from the trivial, the banal, the tawdry, and the commonplace. Huyssen describes how this is exemplified by the characterization of Gustav Flaubert's Emma Bovary (1856), as a ‘sentimental’ reader of trashy romances, a fictional figure who stands for ‘woman’ as lover of inferior literature, confirming her place with mass culture on the low side of the ‘great divide’, a division excluding women and their sentimentality from high art (Huyssen 1986, pp. 44–7). Huyssen's aim is to historicize how works and characters deemed sentimental were placed in a kind of quarantine through a discourse of exclusion driven by artistic and critical strategies of hifalutin self-preservation. It was a cultural programme sustained by the assumption that sentimentalism easily descends into cultural and political complicity and by the construction and exploitation of hierarchies to keep women in their place, reassert the power of patriarchal hegemony, and maintain the rule of an authoritarian regime.

The perceived or ascribed femininity of the sentimental was a key driver in the denudation or denial of its artistic value. This gendered coding meant that the sentimental man was frequently posed as a problematic character. In response, a particular focus of this book lies on masculine examples of musical sentimentalism. This emphasis will not be to the exclusion of feminine figurations but is a strategy designed to facilitate a sustained rethinking of the conventional and still predominant attachment of sentimentalism to forms of feeling identified with women, which all too often was simply a way of reinforcing the denial of cultural significance and sustaining the gendered power relations of dominant discourse. As Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler identify in the North American context, for too long there was a critical aversion to imagine or scrutinize the ‘man of sentiment, as if this subject position is too paradoxical, too unstable, too threatening to discuss’. After the example of Chapman and Hendler's work in literature, this musicological study will explore how masculinity and sentimentality can be ‘mutually constitutive discursive formations’ in the creation, performance, and reception of music (Chapman and Hendler 1999, pp. 3–9). The story is well told by Chapman and Hendler of how the eighteenth-century ‘man of feeling’ was relegated through identification with devalued notions of the feminine and eased out of the masculine public realm and into controlled domestic spaces in which sentimentalists can be confined. Especially influential (and controversial) in the late twentieth century was Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture, in which the sentimental was consigned to ‘mass culture’ and criticized as debased and dishonest, nostalgic, and conformist (Douglas 1977). Feminist critics countered by revealing the radical political and artistic potential of the sentimental, particularly as it pertained to (de)constructions of spatial binaries (public/private) and the embracing of marginalized subjects, audiences, or communities and maligned forms of emotional expression. Much of the very best of this critical work has taken examples from American literature by women as its texts.³ By contrast, work on tracing the significance and legacy of the man of feeling, as artist and as subject within sentimental music from the early-nineteenth century to the present, remains only very partially addressed.

Musical repertory has been selected not only to put male figures and their feelings in prominent place, but also to reveal how sentimental themes either resist or reinscribe the recalcitrant ascriptions of high and low artistic value, how they both operate within and subvert canon formation, and how they inhabit and inflect the hierarchies and functions of public and private performing spaces. In reaction to Douglas's argument that sentimental arts lie outside the canon (made of male mastery) feminist critical responses in the late-twentieth century scrutinized how the patriarchal powers confirmed and preserved the canon in part by denying sentimentalism a place within that canon. As some of these old canons are being denuded of their monolithic cultural authority (a process taking some time), new canons are formed which are no longer seen as a subservient ‘other’ to a master(ful) canon, whether, for example, of classical (late eighteenth– and nineteenth-century) music of the concert hall, or of a master(ful) body of supposedly ‘authentic’ rock. But much post-eighteenth-century sentimental music has suffered cruelly at the hand of these disciplinary divisions and gendered hierarchies of value, truthfulness, and place. A recognition and understanding of the persistence, transformation, and significance of sentimentalism across different political, social, and cultural contexts also requires the rejection of an essentialized view. June Howard urges a dismantling of the simplistic identification of sentimentality with ‘nineteenth century domestic ideology’ and its legacy (which in music would equate to feminized spaces such as the salon, drawing room, and parlour, to feelings of softer, tender emotions, and to genres of small and undemanding form) in order to interrogate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of music examples
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Getting sentimental
• Part I Spaces
• Part II Genres
• Part III Psychologies
• Part IV Appropriations
• Part V Sympathies
• Coda Compassion, mediation, and the consumer
• Index