ABSTRACT
In 1788 the erudite music historian and critic Johann Nikolaus Forkel published a summary of his ideas on music theory. The account of the nature and function of attention that arose in mid eighteenth-century Germany was crucially shaped by its responses, both positive and negative, to themes first set out by Descartes. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes had expressed dissatisfaction with traditional scholastic philosophy, and resolved to return to first principles before proceeding via a reliable method modelled on the deductive procedures of geometry. In both its irrationality and its drive to activity, the present mode of attention can be distinguished both from the listening attitude implicit in the aesthetics of early eighteenth-century Neoclassicism and from that of turn-of-the-century Romanticism. Conventional critical opinion of music's status as an art form, especially in the case of instrumental music, underwent a radical shift during the second half of the century, a process which has attracted much modern musicological interest.
