The Berlin Montagsklub was a gathering of mid-eighteenth-century intellectuals from the arts and sciences, including philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer, poet Karl Wilhelm Ramler, and composer Johann Joachim Quantz. Its likely guests also featured philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and composer Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. One of the group’s principal aims was to strengthen the friendly ties among the its members and to soften the boundaries of a classed society and its social structures (Allihn 1998). Even though extant records of the Montagsklub meetings are lacking, based on the members’ writings, it is possible to approach topics likely discussed in this “asylum of all sciences and arts that, according to the true theory of the beautiful, preferred multiplicity over sad monotony” (Friedrich Gedike in Allihn 1990).
Rebecca Cypess (2018) has drawn attention to the philosophical concept of unity in multiplicity, which can be read as an analogy of social and political ideals of the Enlightenment and further applied to Berlin duet repertoire. In Mendelssohn’s writings, it mirrored the capacity of different religious groups to coexist within Prussian society. Multiplicity also featured as a key component in both aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime, and references to the concept appeared in various instrumental treatises. Multiplicity’s musical manifestations were related to counterpoint, instrumentation, ornamentation, dynamics, and ultimately, affect expression.
In a case study with violinist Laura Hárs, I approached Berlin galant duets through historical writings of Montagsklub authors and discovered new performative aspects of the pieces. As analytic tools, we utilised collective autoethnography to document the implementation of eighteenth-century aesthetic ideals onto our playing, as well as the theory of experimental systems (de Assis 2018) to tackle the questions related to our positionality within the field of historically-informed performance.
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 55(2), 239-266
Vera Plosila 