Secular Formations of Sacred Music: Schleiermacher, Romanticism, and Devotional Media in Germany

Authors

Desmond Sheehan, University of California - BerkeleyFollow

Abstract

Theologians and musicologists alike have often disregarded the material and technical facets of devotional scenes such as the one meticulously described in Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve Celebration: A Dialogue (1806). More recent musicologists have highlighted more concealed technologies that helped to facilitate Romantic aesthetic experiences – a form of methodological unmasking that at once denies and reclaims a Schillerian notion of disenchantment. This essay argues that both types of studies perpetuate secularization narratives that displace a Christian religiosity into public artforms and social practices in Romanticism, and secular modernity by extension. As a proposed alternative, a media history of sacred music can sidestep historical musicology’s deep-seated rhetoric of secularization and disenchantment by showing how certain expressions of religious aesthetics – specifically Schleiermacher’s, but more broadly, German Romanticism – are conditioned in part by the materials of a devotional practice, particularly Protestant domestic devotion. The transcendental aesthetics that have often linked Romantic music and religion, then, are not examples of discrete sacred/private and secular/public spheres traversing one another, but several religious practices reconstituted and merging through emergent media – the magazine and the keyboard reduction, but also the novella, Romantic criticism, and the north German salon. As an example of this new historiography, Schleiermacher’s Dialogue is reconsidered with an emphasis on its musical materials and devotional practices.

Author Biography

Desmond Sheehan received his Ph.D. in musicology from UC Berkeley in 2021. His publications can be found in The Beethoven Journal, Eighteenth-Century Music, The History of Humanities Journal, and the Oxford Handbooks series. Desmond is an independent scholar working on an academic monograph, entitled "The Invention of Sacred Music."

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Sheehan, Desmond (2024) "Secular Formations of Sacred Music: Schleiermacher, Romanticism, and Devotional Media in Germany," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 10: No. 1, Article 3.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1281