Editor’s Note

This issue of 19th-Century Music features its first “Object Lesson.” It is not a new type of article, but new to the journal. Which “objects” and what “lessons”?Three years ago, I received a query from Francesca Brittan, one of the journal’s associate editors. Would I be interested in contributing an “Object Lesson” to the volume Berlioz and His World that she was putting together with Sarah Hibberd for the enduring Princeton University Press series? I was too busy to commit, but intrigued by what the book’s introduction would later describe as “punctuating” traditional “long-form” essays with “brief meditations on particularly resonant Berliozian images, artifacts, or moments.” While essays were “deep dives into Berliozian waters,” object lessons were “teasers, meant to raise questions, begin conversations, and offer starting points for theoretical and historical expansion.”The idea resonated and the term stuck. For almost three decades, I had taught proseminars on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century music, initially hewing to inherited syllabus design: repertory and research complemented with source readings. While selections of music and scholarship evolved more quickly, those readings attained a canonical status, not least because they had been deftly augmented with commentary in a few key volumes, notably those curated by Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler and by Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin.Over the years, the reliance on text-based sources felt increasingly incomplete. With a growing interest in other dimensions of musical production and practice, research projects began to cast their net wider: the technique of playing the Carnatic violin; the business of the music box; the sociability of the phonograph. Those objects do not obviate the significance of discourse about music. But they direct attention to other types of sources that invite consideration for the mundane and sublime realities of making and experiencing music: the velvety feel of an ivory-plated keyboard, the dense fog on an opera stage, the crumbled stage bill. Paleographers in our field have long been tracing the tangible boundaries between text and texture. As Samantha Kim Heinle shows in her Object Lesson about the use of Schubert’s song “Die Forelle” in a Samsung washer, contemporary economies of classical music are entwined with global economies of the senses.Anything that is part of the historical record can become an object of interest. Its lessons are not units of instruction with a specific learning outcome, but occasions for gaining new knowledge and understanding. As musicology has become more conscious of the monumentalizing forces of canon formation in music historiography, object lessons can offer a “punctuating” alternative.