The Sense of Tact: Hoffmann, Maelzel, and Mechanical Music
Anders Engberg‐Pedersen · The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory · 2018
This essay examines the notion of tact at the intersection of technology, music, and literature around 1800. Focusing on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann and Die Automate, it situates his texts in the longer history of musical automata in the eighteenth century and alongside the invention of the metronome by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel and Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in the early 19th century. This mechanization of music spurred debates about the problem of aesthetic order among composers and music critics, specifically about different conceptions of musical tact. Against this background the article reads Hoffmann’s texts as an attempt to articulate an inner sense of tact at once dependent on and irreducible to the mechanical musical instruments of his contemporaries.