Media Aesthetics: Pergolesi's Stabat mater and its Circulation in the Long Eighteenth Century

This dissertation takes as its starting point Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s recent contention that the Enlightenment is best understood as "an event in the history of mediation," specifically the “proliferation” of "new and newly important" media that "establish the conditions for the possibility of Enlightenment." Media for the circulation of music likewise proliferated during this period, resulting in the unprecedented mobility and iterability of musical works. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat mater, as one of the most celebrated and copiously mediated works of the eighteenth century, offers a unique entry point into this changing mediascape and the effects of media proliferation on music discourse. By following Pergolesi's Stabat on its global peregrinations, this dissertation surveys society's evolving relationship with new musical media, how these media became naturalized in different places, how different media interfaced with each other and how media proliferation reshaped generations of listeners’ musical experiences./nThe first three chapters serve as archaeologies of three media particularly enmeshed in the reception of Pergolesi’s Stabat. Chapter 1 focuses on the Neapolitan conservatory system, the medium through which the musical style that characterizes the Stabat was distilled and transmitted to Pergolesi along with his fellow students. Not only did the conservatory system serve as a medium for the transmission of Neapolitan style, but it was also crucial in fostering a musical diaspora that enabled Neapolitan music to traverse the Alps and spread across Europe. The second chapter examines Lenten public concerts and the new concert societies that reorganized local and supralocal sociabilities around musical performance. Originating in a symbiotic relationship with the opera season, these concerts became a new media format in their own right. By the end of the century, most cities in Europe had experimented with some form of “spiritual concert” and many concert organizations had also experimented with at least semi-annual performances of Pergolesi’s Stabat. (A short intermezzo between this and the next chapter looks at the influence of Pergolesi’s example on other Stabat settings, exploring how composers managed Pergolesi’s legacy through reference and allusion). The third chapter follows a parallel media development to that of the second chapter: the emergence of the new genre of composer biography. The popularity of Pergolesi’s music and the misfortune of his early death drove interest in his life. Biography offered writers and readers an opportunity to use the character of Pergolesi to (re)imagine musical communication, musical labor and musical history in ways that addressed music’s increasing mobility and iterability./nIn the process of excavating these media forms, a reoccurring theme is the material underpinning of the Stabat’s exceptional and novel fame. Contemporary writers heaped praise on the expressivity of the Stabat. Rather than demonstrating the origin of this unparalleled expressivity in the music itself, the reception of the Stabat strongly indicates that its vaunted ability to depict and illicit feeling was nothing less than the sum of the sentimental valences that accrued around the work in the process of its constant mediation. The mediacy of the work, stemming from the peculiarities of Neapolitan style, allowed it to accumulate sentimental meaning, while allowing it to factor conspicuously in aesthetic debates concerning music’s new mobility and iterability. Its early entrance into cosmopolitan circulation, though, ensured an ambiguous position in discourses surrounding notions of progress, emergent nationalism, ideas of canon formation as well as concerns over sacred music’s religious propriety and music’s gradual commercialization. The final chapter investigates the aesthetics of media saturation, just as the first three explore those of media proliferation. With the naturalization of once new media, the currency of the Stabat’s mediacy became devalued, initiating a decline in prestige. But even as the Stabat’s European reputation waned, media proliferation into Europe’s colonies brought the Stabat into contact with non-European music, prompting a clash between competing aesthetic values.

Advisor: Mathew, Nicholas