Explores the uncalculated and incalculable elements in historical re-enactment - unexpected emotions, unplanned developments - and locates them in countries where settlers were trying to establish national identities derived from metropolitan cultures inevitably affected by the land itself and the people who had been there before them.

The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Agnew persuasively connects the English traveler and music scholar Charles Burney with the ancient...