ABSTRACT
Il faut mediterraniser la musique signals the opportunity, little grasped yet in musical studies to comprehend the circum-Mediterranean world as a unit distinguished from others by certain longterm trends. In its injunction to Mediterraneanize a cultural product such as music across the longue duree, Nietzsche's phrase diverts Braudelian history from its characteristic concerns. The geographic region between the northern realm of shamanism and the southern areas of possession is the Mediterranean basin. Two moments in the long history occurred across the eighteenth century; both were ambivalent in the face of music. First, the emergence of a modern aesthetic led to an emphasis of older, mimetic understandings of artistic expression, then to a dissatisfaction with them and the broaching of other, less tractable explanatory categories, especially a sublime reconceived in regard to its ancient, Longinian underpinnings. Second, by the end of the eighteenth century a novel conception of the human subject was taking hold in Europe, one most analyzed by Kant.
