In much contemporary work on timbre, attention to timbre is implicitly or explicitly framed as a disciplinary virtue. By this I mean that grappling with timbre is understood both to be a corrective to scholarship that has woefully ignored timbre and that attention to timbre is understood to bring us, as listeners and scholars, closer to some sort of sonic reality. The burgeoning subfield of timbre studies has been slow to reach chamber music, and especially the Enlightenment-era string quartet. This lacuna is revealing: it gestures to the ways in which the string quartet has pointedly bypassed questions of timbre. The quartet has been held up as one of the paragons of “pure music” while scholars and critics have stressed questions of the genre’s “internal logic” and the interrelatedness of its musical elements (Bent 1994). For many, the quartet is cerebral, absolute, and belongs to the “non-material world of the mind” (Dahlhaus 1991). This is not simply the product of later nineteenth-century formalist thought but has a longer history that is bound up with early writing on the quartet as a genre. Petiscus, writing on the quartet in 1810, declared that “the essential beauty of music lies not in [the] mere physical power of tone” (Petiscus 1810). Though this discourse does not necessarily name timbre, the quartet has long been defined against music’s more material existence: it has been a space of “timbrelessness.” One inviting musicological move here would be to unmask all of this as ineluctably timbral. One could argue that timbre was ultimately vital to the instrumental blend of the quartet and that the “timbrelessness” of the quartet is intimately tied to ideas of timbral superiority and perfection associated with string instruments in the early nineteenth century. Tracing the quirky reception of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat major, Op. 74, this essay considers how this particular quartet reveals the implicit timbral constraints that governed the behavior of string instruments in the genre of the string quartet, inviting us to consider how listening past timbre has its own valuable history and learned audile techniques.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

EMILY I. DOLAN is Department Chair and Professor of Music at Brown University, where she has taught since 2019; previously she held positions at UPenn and Harvard. Dolan works on the music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on issues of orchestration, timbre, aesthetics, and instrumentality. She is the author of The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and has published articles and essays in Current Musicology, Eighteenth-Century Music, Studia Musicologica, Keyboard Perspectives, Representations, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and 19th-Century Music. In 2018, she guest edited a double issue of Opera Quarterly entitled “Vocal Organologies and Philologies.” With Alexander Rehding, Dolan co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Timbre (2021), which won the 2022 Ruth A. Solie Prize from the American Musicological Society. With Arman Schwartz and Emily MacGregor, she co-edited Sonic Circulations: Music, Modernism, and the Politics of Knowledge, which was recently published by University of Pennsylvania Press. Currently she is completing her second monograph, Instruments and Order, from which her talk is drawn.