‘Musical under the touch of the Universe’: Aesthetic Liberalism, Music, and Vernon Lee’s Essayistic Art of Resonance

Abstract

Vernon Lee’s essayistic writings on music are underpinned by an ethical commitment to modes of relationality that sustain a vibrant connection between self and world. For Lee, certain styles of Western art music – most notably eighteenth-century Italian opera – facilitate through their formal and affective affordances experiences of spiritual and moral healthiness: a heightened awareness of one’s personal agency and autonomy; an affirmed sense of stable, integrated selfhood; and a sympathetic openness to the claims of the other. Attending to the relational dynamics of Lee’s essays allows us to register more fully the range of affective modes her works inhabit, and to think more carefully about the relationship between her ethical commitments and her distinctive treatment of the essay form. It also enables a more careful consideration of the place of Lee’s writings on music within broader cultures of liberalism in the late-nineteenth century, one that manifests itself not only in the social and political claims made for music in her writing but also within the stylistic affordances of her experiments with essayistic writing.