Affective Spaces, a Piece of Furniture and the Transformation of Bourgeois Culture in the 19th Century

What is it about?

This paper focuses on the piano and the affective-physical practice of piano playing in 19th-century Europe. The piano is an ‘affective artefact’ par excellence and thus a leading object for exploring the bourgeois history of emotion, the body, culture and religion in the 19th century. On the one hand, it is a profane product of mass industry; on the other hand, it is a thing that makes sensations and emotions resonate; and finally, it is an instrument that only achieves the desired effects through physical discipline on the part of both the performer and the listener. This artefact is formative for the inner life of the educated middle classes in both their living spaces and their experiential spaces of the soul. The piano, as a guiding fossil of Western modernity, not only raises the question of the distinction between art and religion, but also, and more fundamentally, that between the secular and the non-secular.

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