Creatures of the Air: Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath, 1817-1913 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226826134)

An account of nineteenth-century music in Atlantic worlds told through the history of the art's elemental medium, the air.

Often experienced as universal and incorporeal, music seems an innocent art form. The air, the very medium by which music constitutes itself, shares with music a claim to invisibility. In Creatures of the Air, J. Q. Davies interrogates these claims, tracing the history of music's elemental media system in nineteenth-century Atlantic worlds. He posits that air is a poetic domain, and music is an art of that domain.

From West Central African ngombi harps to the European J. S. Bach revival, music expressed elemental truths in the nineteenth century. Creatures of the Air tells these truths through stories about suffocation and breathing, architecture and environmental design, climate strife, and racial turmoil. Contributing to elemental media studies, the energy humanities, and colonial histories, Davies shows how music, no longer just an innocent luxury, is implicated in the struggle for control over air as a precious natural resource. What emerges is a complex political ecology of the global nineteenth century and beyond.

Author: J. Q. Davies
ISBN-10: 0226826139
ISBN-13: 9780226826134
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 08/11/2023
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.14w x 0.94d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2024