Abstract: This paper critiques the formation of Western classical concert ritual in early eighteenth-century Germany in relation to early capitalist practices of bodily enclosure and discipline.  Drawing on examples of concert series and ticketed musical performances in G. P. Telemann’s Frankfurt and Hamburg, it explores how these events were shaped by and helped consolidate the idea of the disciplined, contained body-as-machine that underpinned early capitalist attitudes to the body and its labour power. Simultaneously, however, those events were also crucial in delineating that sphere of the aesthetic which later came to be figured as a prime site for resisting the commercialisation of art and the self. I argue, therefore, that in these early stages of classical concert practice we can discern the roots of many of the tensions and contradictions that characterise the Western modern self. 

 

Bio: Bettina Varwig is Professor of Music History at the Faculty of Music and Fellow of Emmanuel College. She previously held posts at Magdalen College Oxford (2005-8) and King’s College London (2009-17). She is author of Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge, 2011) and Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (Chicago, 2023), and editor of Rethinking Bach (Oxford, 2021). Her work received the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association (2013), the William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society (2016) and the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society (2024). In 2025, she was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association. 

Bettina Varwig, Professor of Music History at the Faculty of Music and Fellow of Emmanuel College