'God's alphabet' : le transcendantalisme musical de John Sullivan Dwight

"This article explores the roots of the American art music tradition in the aesthetics of John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893), the most influential writer on music in 19th century America. As a Brook Farmer and a former Unitarian minister, Dwight articulated a conception of music simultaneously endowed with deep spiritual content and social import. Steeped in the literary and musical traditions of German Romanticism, especially the works of Schiller and Beethoven, Dwight's musical Transcendentalism echoed many of Emerson's themes and contributed to fashioning the key notions that nurtured the aesthetic tradition in which Charles Ives was raised. His utopian musical anthropology turned music into a form of spiritual experience reorienting our relation to the world and thus foreshadowing the refounding of society."