ABSTRACT
The threatening size of the sublime object permits its ambivalent manifestation as also the helper of the fairy tale: as the large ally that may compensate for the smallness of an onlooker diminished by a stripping away of all social supports. The Sublime displays a substratum of the uncanny when digitization renders it potentially subject to metamorphosis at any point, starting with any pixel. Sublimity's stretching of the frame seeks a place beyond the borders both of one's particular present and the mortal, material world in general. Universalization of the particular helps explain the role of sound, particularly of music, in expanding images into another sense, that of the Sublime. Music's abstraction, however, could so whittle away the world that some musicians came to hear purely orchestral music as needing correction by language in the "An die Freude" chorus of the former's Ninth Symphony or in the latter's Gesamtkunstwerk.
