Across the Sublime Divide: Dryden and Handel

Back in 2006, I created a web page template for presenting short academic papers in an easy-to-read format. I took a paper that I had written about Handel's Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day and formatted it. It's been sitting on my website for a while, and to my surprise it's even been cited by a couple of scholars. Take a peek if it interests you, not just for its Introduction to Handel's work, but also for my web design. The idea was to have this as an empty template, and the user could paste in text from word and do just a minimum of formatting. The fonts will differ from user to user -- I call up my favorite fonts in descending order, and what you see depends on what you have, the lowest common denominator being the hated Times Roman.

The intro to the paper reads:

Handel’s 1739 musical setting of it, Ode for St. Cecilia’s
Day, signify the meeting of poetry and music in the realm of
the Sublime. Dryden’s poem takes music and its role in the
universe as its theme, and hence invites examination against
the eighteenth century’s radically evolving aesthetics of the
Sublime. Handel’s musical work, setting to music a text
about music itself, invites study to determine whether
musical practice in Handel’s time enacted the aesthetics of
contemporaneous poets and critics, insofar as they claimed to
understand the Beautiful and the Sublime in music.
This paper will attempt to illustrate the enormous gap
between the two arts by showing that eighteenth-century
British critical understanding of music was based on
abstract ideas largely unrelated to musical practice, an
understanding that failed to acknowledge music as an art
capable of sublime effect on its own. I will use Handel’s
work to demonstrate that composers achieve sublime
effects — with or without text — by employing harmonic,
dynamic and rhythmic techniques that constitute a kind of
rhetoric. This techne, closer to the Sublime of Longinus
than to that of Burke or Kant, allows music its
acknowledged power even when accompanied with lessthan-
inspired text. I will review some of the criticism
around Dryden’s poem that relates to its original 1687
musical setting, and then examine Handel’s work itself on a musicological basis.

View the Handel-Dryden Paper Here.