The Work of Music

In The Work of Music, Celia Applegate examines the cultural history of Austro-German music through the lens of labor from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia to the Third Reich. She explores the working world of music and musicians, the various jobs they performed, the work music did in society, the observations and commentaries of contemporaries on the shape and function of musical life, and the work of organizing music making, both amateur and professional. At a time when ideas of absolute music and music-as-leisure were both on the rise, writing about music tended to obscure these practical matters. Here, Applegate reflects on how an intensely musical society organized and understood the ubiquitous activity that underpinned it.

Celia Applegate is William R. Kenan Jr. Chair of History and a professor of German studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat, The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme, and Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the “St. Matthew Passion” as well as a coeditor (with Pamela Potter) of Music and German National Identity.