Applied Aesthetics and the Musical Public on the Threshold of Romanticism

Abstract: The rise of a musical public in the early nineteenth century has been recognized as an important example of what Habermas identified as the emerging bourgeois public sphere. This article explores how patterns of musical consumption were shaped by the authority of music-critical journalism, especially given contemporary critiques about the aesthetic worth of instrumental music. To assert music’s aesthetic legitimacy, the leading music journal of the period developed a critical discourse, characterized by the use of an “applied aesthetics,” to guide public preferences governing music consumption and to explicate these choices within larger philosophical debates about music’s aesthetic value.