Rethinking Sensibility

Musicologists have increasingly questioned the categorization of sensibility or Empfindsamkeit as a topic, emphasizing sensibility’s nature being, according to eighteenth- century understanding, a personal character that shaped moral values, individual consciousness, musical imagination, and social connections. As Matthew Head puts it in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (2014), “sensibility… was not a musical topic, a style, or a period but the capacity to experience sensations and feelings and thus a foundational concern of art.” Given sensibility was a broad phenomenon with localized manifestations, particularly in France, England, and Germany and thus cannot be reduced to the notion of Empfindsamkeit, recent research has also proposed treating sensibility as a quality that could be signified by different signifiers and topics. The idea of sensibility’s relationship to Romanticism being only evident in literary culture remains challenged, and Enlightenment studies have further reframed the eighteenth century as not just the age of reason but also one of sensibility, even in scientific discourses. In light of the idea that sensibility was a force underpinning the Enlightenment, this paper delves into the culture of sensibility as one characterized by the cultivation of human receptivity, examining how sensibility, a frequently ruminated and debated subject, was understood by poets, novelists, philosophers, politicians, physicians, religious thinkers, and of course, artists. Instead of proposing to expand the topical universe of sensibility or limit the exploration of sensibility by clinging to the idea of a “sensibility” topic with rigid boundaries, it invites listeners to explore how topic theory and various musical topics—both existing ones and ones that have yet to be identified and formulated—may help us understand eighteenth-century sensibility and its impact better.