Abstract
The eager listener described above is none other than Immanuel Kant, affectionately chronicled by philosopher and theologian Ehregott Wasianski. This colorful description of Kant’s fascination with loud military music is suggestive on many levels. Most obviously, it tells us something of his listening habits, inviting us to smile at the great metaphysician’s somewhat unsophisticated musical taste. We could use Wasianski’s sketch to begin deconstructing Kant’s own musical upbringing and shed light on the infamously negative valuation of music in his third Critique. This passage, however, also encourages us to consider the surrounding context and examine what Wasianski implies about contemporary musical aesthetics. First, he distinguishes between an intellectual mode of listening-the kind that appreciates daring modulations and the nuances of Haydn’s compositional style-and a more immediate mode that takes pleasure in the sheer noise generated by military music. Second, Wasianski makes casual reference to a “bogenflugel;’ one with various stops. Given the variety of musical instruments invented during the eighteenth century, and the fact that so many of them are lost to us, we might ask exactly what he used to entertain Kant and von Hippel in 1795. Last, we can examine what it means for Wasianski simply to be able describe an instrument as imitating an orchestra, confident that his readership would know what he means.