An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought 9780226763033

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An Unnatural Attitude

New Material Histories of Music A series edited by James Q. Davies and Nicholas Mathew

al so Publ i sH e d i N t H e s eries Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music Holly Watkins

Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks David Yearsley

The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality Edited by Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin

Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770– 1839 Thomas Irvine

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891– 1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries Anna Maria Busse Berger

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An Unnatural Attitude ··· Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought

Benjamin Steege

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76298-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76303-3 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226763033.001.0001 This book has been supported by the General Fund of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Steege, Benjamin, author. Title: An unnatural attitude : phenomenology in Weimar musical thought /Benjamin Steege. Other titles: New material histories of music. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: New material histories of music | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020041057 | ISBN 9780226762982 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226763033 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology and music. | Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. | Philosophy, German—20th century. Classification: LCC ML3877.S74 2021 | DDC 780.943/09042—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041057 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Julian

Contents List of Examples

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Int rod u ct ion

Worldhood and World War 1 Max Scheler, “Genius of War” · 2 Musicology in the World · 6 From Psychology to Phenomenology · 12 Music in Phenomenological Study · 17 C h a pt e r 1

The Unnatural Attitude 27 The Acoustical Attitude and the Harmonic Attitude · 29 Beyond Psychologism · 45 “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?” · 51 C h a pt e r 2

Debussy, Outward and Open 67 An Outward Turn · 68 Dehumanization · 73 Being-There-With Music · 80 Letting Oneself Go · 90 Actuality · 95 C h a pt e r 3

Hearing-With 99 Ca se O n e

Aesthetic Hearing (Seventeenth-Century Suite)

Joining In · 102 Vocal Hearing and Instrumental Hearing · 105

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Ca se T wo

Participatory Hearing (Thirteenth-Century Motet) Factical Life · 115 Spacing · 123 The Limits of Community · 136 C h a pt e r 4

Techniques of Feeling 143 This Is Not a Test · 144 Techniques of Feeling · 149 A Call · 159 A ppendi x A Hans Mersmann, “On the Phenomenology of Music” (1925) · 163 A ppendi x B Helmuth Plessner, “Response” [to Mersmann] (1925) · 178 A ppendi x C Paul Bekker, “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?” (1925) · 182 A ppendi x D Herbert Eimert, “On the Phenomenology of Music” (1926) · 191 A ppendi x E Günther Stern-Anders, “On the Phenomenology of Listening (Elucidated through the Hearing of Impressionist Music)” (1927) · 198

Acknowledgments Notes

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Bibliography Index

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Examples

Musical examples are drawn either from the scores explicitly cited by the authors discussed, or from ones that would have been readily available to them. Example 1.1 Example 1.2 Example 1.3 Example Example Example Example Example Example Example Example

1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1

Example 3.2 Example 3.3 Example 3.4 Example 3.5 Example 3.6 Example 3.7 Example A.1 Example A.2 Example A.3

From Gustav Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart · 33 From Georg Capellen, Fortschrittliche Melodie- und Harmonielehre · 35 From Hans Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik” · 53 From Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik” · 53 From Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik” · 54 Claude Debussy, “Pour les sixtes,” mm. 1– 8 · 75 Frédéric Chopin, Nocturne, op. 27, no. 2, mm. 32– 37 · 76 Chopin, Nocturne, op. 27, no. 2, mm. 73– 77 · 76 Chopin, Etude, op. 25, no. 8, mm. 1– 4 · 78 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, act 3, mm. 90– 93 · 87 Johann Hermann Schein, Allemande no. 10, from Banchetto musicale · 106 Schein, Pavane no. 10, from Banchetto musicale · 107 Johann Rosenmüller, Studenten-Music, no. 50, “Paduan,” mm. 19– 28 · 112 Johann Jacob Froberger, Keyboard Suite no. 16 in G Major, “Gigue” · 113 Froberger, Keyboard Suite no. 16, “Sarabande” · 114 Anonymous, “O Maria, Virgo Davitica / O Maria, Maris Stella,” beginning · 125 Anonymous, “Riens ne puet / Riens ne puet,” beginning · 128 Duality of “motive” and “line,” according to Mersmann · 171 1. “Periodic succession”; 2. “Thematic development”; 3. “Theme and its functions” · 173 Graphic representations of four abstract formal types, according to Mersmann · 176

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[ Introduction ]

Worldhood and World War

1915, Göttingen, Dahlmannstrasse 7, outside the home of Edmund Husserl. His twenty-two-year-old student Helmuth Plessner— later a respected scholar in his own right— accompanies the philosopher home: “As we were going home from seminar together one time and reached his garden gate, his deep resentment erupted: ‘All this German Idealism has always made me want to puke. My whole life’— and here he drew up his thin walking stick with its silver crook and, leaning forward, braced it against the gate-post— ‘I have sought reality.’ In an unsurpassably graphic way, the walking stick portrayed the intentional act and the post its fulfillment.”1 Morning of June 16, 1919, Cologne, a small Jesuit chapel on Albertusstrasse. It is the wedding of the conductor Otto Klemperer to the soprano Johanna Geisler. Only a few close friends and family are present. The marriage is witnessed by the philosopher Max Scheler, whose popular lectures Klemperer has been attending at the University of Cologne, following a habit begun in 1916 when he had visited lectures by Husserl in Göttingen. (Scheler, like Klemperer a Catholic convert from a Jewish family, is at this time married to Märit Furtwängler, sister of another famous conductor.) Following the service, the Klemperers rush across downtown Cologne to Gürzenich Concert Hall, where Otto conducts a mass, his Missa sacra, which he has recently composed on retreat following conversion. Johanna is the soloist. The mass itself, despite being premiered on the Klemperers’ own wedding day, is dedicated to Scheler.2

This book is a historical essay on a style of musical thinking that coalesced in Germany in the wake of World War I. The style may be called, in short, “phenomenological.” Bracing a cane against a gate emblematizes its basic disposition: an inclination, orientation, or “intention” toward the world, a search for contact with phenomena, which in turn offer an affirming resistance or “fulfillment.” The walking-stick gesture was meant to have suggested that you are not going to find out very much about a gate-post by first constructing an elaborate theory about how your mind works, lavishing attention on the qualities, capacities, and faculties of your ego or self— the supposed vice of “German Idealism”— in order only afterward to piece together a coherent picture of everything else. You need instead to take up 1

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the proper stance or relation to things, and make that stance the theme of your work. What would it mean if, rather than supposing that your thinking, perceiving, imagining, and feeling all transpire simply within you, you instead take these acts to be excursive, running out toward the world?3 But this is getting ahead of ourselves. We should first consider the situation that gave this intellectual-historical moment its passionate impetus: the onset in Germany of a virtually uninterrupted experience of war, actual or imminent— a “perpetual interwar,” as one recent account has it— that characterized the entirety of the “short twentieth century,” though we are primarily concerned with just the earlier phases of that period.4 By way of introducing the main themes of our study, the following begins with an extended reading of an eccentrically, even irresponsibly, phenomenological text written in the “Spirit of 1914,” a text that by no means belongs to a philosophical canon yet remains instructive for the unexpected and remarkable way that it places the world-revealing potential of musical thought, briefly but crucially, at its center. From there, we will take a first pass at framing what phenomenology was held to offer in contrast to available alternatives, in order finally to arrive at a description of the aims and aspirations of the study as a whole.

Max Scheler , “Genius of War” Sometime in the first half of November 1914, the philosopher Max Scheler (1874– 1928) took up his pen in defense of the Central Powers. This would have been shortly after the Race to the Sea had ended in a draw at the Belgian coast and sucked nearly two million men into the monthlong First Battle of Ypres, known to Germans as the Kindermord bei Ypern, an early propaganda image of “child sacrifice” celebrating the semi-mythical belief that wave after wave of untrained student volunteers had advanced tragically into a headwind of British machine-gun fire, casualties mounting to well over 100,000 on their side alone. With its impassioned saber-rattling, Scheler’s book The Genius of War— nearly 450 pages written within a span of little over two weeks— was an incongruous sequel to his prior writing on love and sympathy.5 Yet it was widely read, cheerily reviewed, and outstanding among the considerable competition for its perceived deftness in articulating war aims.6 Encumbered neither by firsthand experience on the front (due to disqualifying astigmatism of the eye) nor by foresight toward the war’s imminent stagnation in trenches across Europe and the rapidly disintegrating Ottoman Empire, Scheler veered between the tendentious history and armchair anthropology characteristic of partisan scholars’ rationalization of the war on both sides. Precisely because of its lapses in re-

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flectiveness, however, his apologetics for military violence opens a unique window on the passions motivating an influential cadre of German academics, witnessed at a particularly unguarded moment. Like many, Scheler believed the fighting would compel a worldhistorical decision over not just the political and economic but also the spiritual future of the German lands.7 Where England and France stood for utilitarian capitalism, Central Europe was the natural home to a cultural superiority whose moment had yet to arrive but might soon be realized under the banner of a newly constituted “Europeanism,” in which AustroGerman influence would take precedence over the crass materialism and individualism of the West. The German spirit, Scheler proclaimed, was “anti-capitalist, heroic, anti-individualistic.”8 He reasoned that a separate peace with Russia (more than two years before its eventual withdrawal) would be not only militarily expedient but also morally neutral, because the essential fight was over the status of “Europe,” understood to extend from Great Britain down through the continental landmass to Greece, still claimed as the common origin of contemporary values. In a typical display of blindness to the farther-flung and longer-term colonialist conflicts that had prepared the stage for the present military actions, Scheler maintained that Africa and Asia, including the vast Russian and Ottoman Empires, were simply irrelevant to the essential struggle despite their present involvement in the fighting, because they played no part in that elemental anthropological unit promised by the idea of “the European.”9 In a word, they did not inhabit the same world. More than that, this throwaway phrase, we realize as the pages turn, precisely locates the unsettling question at the heart of Scheler’s outwardly bluff polemic: in the throes of what had already in 1914 been described as a Weltkrieg and as early as 1920 would be pessimistically called “The First World War,” what is a “World”?10 There is a vernacular whole-for-part synecdoche in which reference to “different worlds” casually marks a sense of difference among peoples from geographically distinct parts of the globe. But Scheler, thinking as a philosopher despite writing as a propagandist, was aiming at something more intensive, elaborating a construal of circumstances that would imply a further-reaching reinterpretation of the present. This was only natural since his argument that the war of 1914 was a campaign to define the character of European “worldhood” required substantiation of what could be meant by such a concept in the first place. As far as Scheler is concerned— and we may take him as an exceptionally explicit and extreme spokesman for a broader pattern of belief— the impulse to begin setting up some new, foundational category of worldhood can be seen to have arisen in response to a range of pressures particular to the historical moment of 1914.11 It

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would be an important, if unintended and often very indirect, consequence of the slowly unfolding response to these pressures that aesthetic and ethical theory would need to be revised accordingly. Scheler can be read here as needing to elaborate a notion of worldhood for two distinct, but interrelated, reasons: first, and most obviously, in order to make a particular point about the justification for the war, to specify the “world” that was coextensive with the central physical battleground, as defined by the Western and Eastern Fronts, and thus to give a strong profile to the stakes involved; and second, because he believed that the very recognition of the fact of “worldhood” itself was the basis of Central Europe’s claim to cultural superiority. Scheler’s ulterior argument, running in hidden parallel to the surface bluster of his main brief, was not simply in favor of a politically, militarily, and economically triumphant Germany and Austria-Hungary but, with far greater urgency, aimed at a transformation of what it meant to know Europe at all. To know the world as world would be to transcend the petty individualism of bourgeois, utilitarian capitalism. It was, for example, peculiarly English to construe political matters in terms of an atomized polity composed of distinct individuals who were constrained to pursue their private “interests,” in tension both with one another and also with artificial societal conventions. By contrast, the German alternative promised ways to realize more binding sources of human belonging. His war book concludes with a two-page “Table of the Categories of English Thinking,” which renders his perspective apt for quick assimilation in terms of fifty-odd paired contrasts between lesser, usurping values associated with the Western Allies, and higher values deemed essential to Europe’s future survival. The Allied nations were characterized by artificial “society” as opposed to the organic “community” that would have its chance to flourish under a German-led postwar European order— and similarly, crass “common interest” as opposed to “love,” formal “law” as opposed to substantive “morality,” noncommittally “putting oneself in another’s shoes” as opposed to genuine “sympathy,” and “mistrust of each with regard to everyone else, who keep each other mutually in check” as opposed to authentic “democracy.”12 (We can hardly escape the irony that wartime Germany was about as far from democracy as it would get until 1933, so the tabulation clearly must be read as aspirational rather than evaluative.) But the ultimate distinction that subsumes all the others is one between a supposedly Western European orientation toward mere empirical “surroundings” (Umwelt) and a recognition instead of a holistic “world” (Welt) in the large. From this intensive, fifty-fold mapping of dualities, polemically crude as it is, it becomes clear that worldhood is to be understood not just as a matter of an environment, but rather as a way of inhabiting or

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“living” it such that community, love, sympathy, and democracy stand the greatest chance of being actualized, and their antipodes seen in hindsight for what they are: empty formalisms that will always fail to inspire and cultivate our higher impulses. Scheler’s dismissal of the empirical immediacy of Umwelt in favor of the less readily tangible notion of Welt— a pivot from environment to worldhood— executes a crucial transition, a conceptual and attitudinal modulation that is central to the narrative of the present study. There is a germane contemporaneous term of philosophical art that comes close to naming the lesser end of the distinction. Just before the war began, Scheler’s older colleague Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938) started calling this sort of thing the “natural attitude” (die natürliche Einstellung).13 What is “natural” about it is both that it is naive— that into which one is “born” (nativus) without yet having become aware of any possibility of perspective, of the contingency of one’s presumptive disposition toward the world— and also, stunningly enough, that it is the attitude in which even the most modern “natural science” at the beginning of the twentieth century was being carried out. At any rate, Scheler was fairly certain that the naive naturalism that mistook Umwelt for Welt was just as inimical to his cause as were the troops digging in on the far side of no-man’s-land. If “world” did not demarcate a conventional boundary between divergent spheres of economic or geographical interest, it equally did not align with race-biological categories. Scheler, who had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish household but converted to Catholicism in 1899, considered Europe’s racial diversity one of its sources of strength: “a generatively coherent racial melange of Celts, Romans, Slavs, Germans and a disappearing Jewish-Semitic minority,” as he put it (though what looked like variegation to him up close will appear as shadings of white from a greater distance) (293)— the key point at any rate being that distinctions among ethnological groups could not be reduced to biological differences without seriously undermining the validity of the basic sense of human belonging. He dismissed the biological category of race itself as a symptom of precisely the misguided naturalistic thinking that had plagued Europe’s efforts to imagine itself for much of the nineteenth century. “World” was instead an ethical category that superseded the superficial attitudes characteristic of the antiquated study of physiognomy and comparative anatomy, hallmarks of race-thinking and of parochially natural-scientific efforts to define the “human.” “My answer to the question, what type of unity is that of ‘Europe’ or the ‘European’ I am discussing, is therefore this: the core of this unity is a particular mental structure (Geistesstruktur); for example, a particular form of ethos, a particular manner of viewing the world and of

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actively forming the world. Precisely this European spirit, which people always want to ‘derive,’ whether from race, climate, or milieu, is the underivable core within the concept of the European.”14 If this first approximation takes Geist— indistinguishably intellect and spirit— as its point of departure, it is clear that Scheler’s understanding of these terms was by no means restricted to a psychological conception of private mental habits, let alone to arid intellectualism. To the contrary, the Geistesstruktur that defined “the European” would be a matter not of simply contemplating the world from an Archimedean point above the fray, but of both viewing and “actively forming” the world. The terminology of worldhood implies a proximity to matters and indeed a distinctive form of participation in them, rather than a merely observational or reflective attitude (even if the very question of what “proximity” and “distance” might feel like in living practice would remain vexed within phenomenologizing literature). At any rate, the key point for the moment is simply that Scheler’s rejection of a naturalistic account of ethnological difference was tightly bound up with his rejection of the claims of the Western allies. To construe the war as one between divergent personal interests— that is, materialistically, individualistically, and hence psychologistically— would be to concede the struggle in advance on a different plane.

Musicology in the World In order to get a sense of the concrete parameters of worldhood from this perspective, we need to bring more specific sorts of phenomena into view. Scheler’s effort to demonstrate what constituted a world took the form of a catalogue of what later humanists would be more likely to call “cultural difference,” aiming to accumulate an overwhelming mass of anecdotal and professional ethnological information that would support a belief in the distinctiveness of Europe.15 Religious, moral, and aesthetic examples took precedent, and in this compendium of difference, music comes first. His source was the recently consolidated research field of so-called “comparative musicology,” whose center of gravity at this time was the work of a group of German psychologists based in Berlin, including that of Scheler’s own teacher, Carl Stumpf, as well as Stumpf ’s assistants Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Otto Abraham. By 1915, this collective body of work was several decades old, dating back to around 1885, the peak of the so-called “Scramble for Africa,” in which Germany acquired many of the colonial territories that enabled it to compete economically and politically with the other nation-states now at war.16 It is no coincidence that the style of knowledge Scheler came to co-opt at wartime was precisely coeval with

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certain conditions that had given rise to the political impasse he sought to analyze. For Scheler, comparative musicology had shown not simply that what counted as music varied from one milieu to another, differing in its instruments, its characteristic sonic attributes, and its social functions. Instead, beyond its trappings of positivist enumeration and taxonomization, the new discipline had brought to light the sheer variousness of modes of perception and ways of being in the world— in short, “differences in musical hearing between Europeans and non-Europeans . . . which until now had been considered hardly possible.”17 Somewhat predictably, the major feature that emerges as a salient point of comparison is the seeming anomaly of European harmonic thinking and perception, which now appeared less a natural phenomenon, and more a contingent product of its extended cultural historical moment. Central to Scheler’s representation of the state of musical knowledge in 1915 is an emergent sense of the peculiarity of the simultaneously perceptual and conceptual subordination of individual textural strands of pitch material to the phenomenal units of the “chord,” and to a tonal orientation within the “key.” Scheler held that non-Europeans, supposedly uncorrupted by centuries of the rationalizing processes that underlay contrapuntal and chordal modes of organizing musical tones, were in general endowed with a more refined sense of pitch discrimination and a sensitivity to potential distinctions of non-tempered tuning systems.18 In this spirit, Scheler echoes Stumpf marveling at the “wonderfully fine hearing” Siamese musicians must possess in order to operate with an equal division of the octave into seven pitches.19 Similarly, music observed in the Dutch colony in Java seemed not to be extensively organized around a consonance principle, and hence a principle of harmony, thereby pointing to a basic difference in the manner of engaging with acoustic materials. “What is so unfamiliar about this phenomenon is that these peoples only use one aspect of the principle of consonance— consonance being the most natural principle of all scale constructions— namely, the consonance of the octave as a whole, and none of the intervals within the octave space. A harmonic music cannot be reconciled with this principle of scale construction. This aspect of Siamese and Javanese hearing can hardly belong to the particularity of either their external sensory organs or their internal sensory center, yet it is nonetheless a fundamental variable, which brings about the absence of consciousness for consonance.”20 At first glance, this style of observation and judgment concerning music-theoretical detail appears to be, unproblematically, also that of the Berlin comparative musicologists. No new ground is broken at the level of what European scholars took to be the salient features of pitch organi-

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zation outside their own tradition. But Scheler goes notably further than his sources by then interpreting the question of what actually transpires at the site of “hearing” as a broader question about how to characterize the potential for engagement with the world in the large. A world, he affirms, shows up through a particular mode of engagement with sensory materials, and that mode of engagement constitutes a basic condition of the possibility of a particular “consciousness.” But, as we have just heard him say, this condition is neither merely physiological (having to do with “external sensory organs”), nor merely psychological (having to do with an “internal sensory center”). A conception of the disposition toward music simply in terms of psychological or physiological experiences would be a naturalistic one, which is to say one that takes for granted their presence as worldly sorts of thing without activating any further wonder or curiosity about just how they show up the way they do. The approach to these questions must have some other, essentially non-naturalistic grounding. Discovering how a world might be constituted, and perhaps even finding out in what ways worlds might differ, Scheler maintains, are not the kinds of goals that can be achieved by university research sciences, but would instead require an appeal to “those ultimate structures of world-viewing (Weltanschauen) and world-being (Weltsein), those modes of the organization and formation of sensible matter, of which some mode— no matter which one— necessarily belongs to the essence of world-reality (Weltwirklichkeit) itself.”21 Nor can the apprehension of “world-being” be taught as a matter of intellectual skill. It can only be cultivated through participation, “through unconscious, spiritual-bodily contagion, through thinking-together, living-together, expressing-together, doing-together in the first years of childhood right up to ‘maturity.’”22 Having suggested that manifest variations in the organization of musical sound might indicate variations in ways of “world-being,” Scheler then turns to painting and sculpture to develop the point more broadly, and in particular to refine the theoretical link between aesthetic activity and the encounter with worldhood. Retooling certain terms and ideas from the influential aesthetic theory of Alois Riegl (1858– 1905), he suggests that what the comparison of art from various historical and contemporary milieus demonstrates is more than just an array of incommensurable modes of representation, more than just a number of contrasting ways of showing how the same world is portrayed varyingly by different people. It reveals how, “even before the process of representation” begins, objects are “given to” culturally disparate artists in incommensurable ways, so that it becomes possible to speak of “a common European way of seeing,” whose referential objects are not those of other ways of seeing. It is not even correct to

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suppose that a single world merely presents itself differently to artists of different milieus. Instead, the aesthetic production of different ethnological groups reveals their basis in fundamentally different worlds. Since the “value-ideals” (Wertideale) that orient distinct instances of artistic perception and of the “will to art” (Kunstwollen) vary from one milieu to another themselves, they already “gather together complexes of sensory material into idiosyncratic and fundamentally different units of form and value.”23 Neither Riegl nor Scheler provide an example of an artistic “value ideal” in the context of music, yet we can infer from the way Scheler handles comparative musicology that it might involve something along the lines of the functionalization of the spectrum of qualities that attach to simultaneous tones, which is a very generalized way of describing the various things European musicians seem to have done along their way toward working out whatever it is that we routinely and often unreflectively call “harmony.” I think Scheler’s view here is basically that this situation, which is in some sense a form of comportment within the grooves of available modes of sonic organization, has a kind of revelatory quality in the sense of disclosing to its practitioners (those “inside” this way of comporting oneself musically) something real and ultimate about the order of things, which is to say the “world.” Of greatest concern to Scheler, though, is that we cannot describe this as all just a matter of “perspective.” The notion of “worldview,” of distinct lines of access to “the” world, is too cautious and subjectivist for Scheler, who insists on a more radical prior distinction.24 And this is precisely what we must learn: that there is not merely a European “viewpoint” on the one real world— that is, a kind of subjective delimitation of the seeing of the “world” (in the received sense of the word)— but rather the inverse, a factually existing world of Europeans that stands nearer to the in-itself-ness of things than do other “worlds.” And we must learn that precisely that “one” world that has been alleged to be the objectively existing correlate of the ostensible European “viewpoint on the world,” is actually just an entirely subjective human matter of international and interracial convenience— but not the one true world of God, which we so long falsely took it for.25

This is tortuous passage indeed, yet it does point to an unambiguous upshot: there is no “‘one’ world.” If this seems to jar against the still robustly operative notion of a “one true world of God,” the crucial point is that there can be no discussion of an otherworldly world without first coming to terms with the nearer-to-hand reality of a this-worldly world. You can

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move toward the beyond not by despising and shunning the world as it presents itself to you, but only by loving it as God loves it, and loving it in the way that lets it show up as the world that it is.26 There can be no mistaking the way in which the very idea of belonging to a world shapes Scheler’s sense of what the war was about, where spiritual values were to be reasserted over the contingent factors of racial identification, international trade relations, and so forth. Where you identify your group belonging in terms of your apparent biological affinities or in terms of your perceived economic interests, then you are simply declaring your exclusion from any world at all, let alone the European world that is in a special sense the most “worldly” precisely for being most proximate to the godly. And yet, that latter belief in turn fed into a corollary sentiment, whose ambivalence is the ambivalence of colonial discourses generally: for Scheler, “the factually existing European world” is at once provincialized in that it is recognized as just one among many, whose grounding values cannot be extended beyond a local sphere of influence; and yet its centricity is maintained through the claim that the this-worldly world of the European does in fact stand closer to an other-worldly world, somewhat paradoxically by way of its bringing to greater clarity the inner-worldly “in-itselfness of things.” Did Scheler’s grand interpretation of worldhood accurately reflect the ethical agenda of the musicological knowledge he was appropriating? Did psychologists like Stumpf, Hornbostel, and Abraham in fact believe that comparative musicology yielded an image of such radical difference, of “worlds apart,” in terms comparable to Scheler’s polemically motivated statement? Explicit answers to this and related questions are not readily available in the early comparative musicological archive. An odd feature of the founding years of the discipline is that its methodological selfclarifications, despite their relative frequency, were often narrow, cautious, and less reflexive than one might retrospectively expect.27 Nonetheless, it seems more than a little unlikely that the psychologistic Berlin School would have gone along with Scheler’s reading of their work, a reading with something of the character of a “philosophy of exaggeration.”28 Scheler’s tendentious interpretation of fragments of psychological and ethnological study clearly points to something beyond what this knowledge was intended to disclose. How can you possibly, with a straight face, move from fussing over differences in tuning systems to fantasizing your proximity to God? So the reading is at best against the grain, at worst errant, but it is the way it misreads that makes it of interest here, getting to the heart of what “Psychology,” both as a formal field of research and as an informal way of

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understanding one’s position in the world, was seen to promise at that moment, and where it drew the boundaries of the knowable. The jointly authored 1911 statement “On the Significance of Ethnological Investigations for the Psychology and Aesthetics of Music,” by Stumpf and Hornbostel, affords an instructive point of comparison. The first half of the essay, written by Stumpf, initially confirms the idea that what was exciting about the new field of study was its revelation of the uniqueness of European music. In contributing to a new, energized field of ethnology, the comparative study of language and art should be given a central role, Stumpf writes, since “in both areas, ethnological observations teach us to view what we find among ourselves as only a special case among many possibilities, from which it gradually set itself apart.”29 The “special-case” view of European music, then, would at first blush appear to confirm Scheler’s belief in the incommensurability of worlds. Stumpf ’s contribution to the essay revolves around two brief case studies, both of which are meant to test how the study of non-European music informs our sense of the status of psychological knowledge. The first case is that of the equally divided octaves of certain Siamese and Javanese scales, duly referenced by Scheler. The specific news reported here is that, in contrast to the unequal scale steps of most European-derived scales, some non-European groups have determined a way to tune xylophone-type instruments such that adjacent tones are equidistant in respect of judged pitch intervals, and, crucially, that there is clear evidence that they have done this entirely based on the judgment of their ears, and not (as the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt had earlier supposed) by first fashioning the vibrating keys and plates proportionally by eye and touch, and only subsequently submitting them to aural judgment. This seems to suggest a certain autonomy of the auditory sense, and from Stumpf ’s perspective encourages the thought that what ethnology is increasingly doing is turning up questions, here about pitch discrimination, that can best or indeed only be answered by psychologists— ein Problem, das nur durch die Psychologie gelöst werden kann (110)— not by anthropologists, sociologists, or historians, and even less by musicologists left to their own culturally provincial devices. “Psychology” is defined and exemplified here by the ability and inclination to isolate the individual auditory sense as an autonomous field of research that can be approached as if one can extrapolate directly from its findings, preferably but not necessarily quantifiable ones, in order to say something about “perception” in the large, and hence “aesthetics” in the large, and hence “culture” in the large. In short, we have a case where a cross-cultural factoid is being strategically deployed in order to give a shot in the arm to a natural-scientific research

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agenda whose disciplinary prerogatives Stumpf was committed to embedding as firmly as possible in the institutional frameworks available to him.30 Stumpf ’s second case concerns a different kind of empirical curiosity, namely the circumstance that his Institute’s voluminous and everexpanding collection of recorded samples of musical utterances from around the globe appeared to have revealed a common tendency toward parallel perfect non-octave consonant intervals (fifths and fourths) among performances as various as that of a Wanyamwezi singing group in East Africa on the one hand, and that of a duo with transverse flute and plucked string instrument in Shanghai on the other. The unmistakable lesson in this second case is that there might in fact be sensory conditions that transcend radically disparate cultural environments to motivate similar aesthetic outcomes, give or take a few variables.31 This is patently just the opposite of what Scheler had read into comparative musicology, since it continues to prioritize the significance of psychophysical universals, without regard for an analysis of how one might dispose oneself toward these facts, or comport oneself within the cultural sphere marked out by them. In both cases— both where the guiding determinations of auditory sensation are being isolated and cut off from a surrounding musical environment, and also where cross-cultural aesthetic commonalities are being identified above and beyond proximate circumstances— the psychological approach of Berlin-style comparativism is decontextualizing and unworldly. Aspects of musical behavior that might otherwise be susceptible to a thorough ethnographic account, featuring a holistic image of action and orientation toward the surroundings and deeper cultural background of musical life— these aspects come to be reduced to discrete matters of mere sensory judgment and in that sense, in the hands of the comparativists themselves, undergo a sort of “unworlding” or Entweltlichung, to broach one of Scheler’s better-known interlocutors.32

From Psychology to Phenomenology I have begun with this strange passage in Scheler’s war book, at once misguided and yet symptomatic of its historical moment, because the way it reorients the object of psychology (which is a more charitable but also arguably more accurate way of saying it “misreads” that object) can be seen as a token of a much larger shift. To use the germane, if still awfully crude shorthand, we can say that this is a shift from a psychology to a phenomenology of music. In this limited and peculiar instance, that has meant shifting the mode of questioning away from the sheer fact of the sensory contents of music, toward the worldly background against which these facts

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show up. That this opening case in point folds such a reorientation into an ecstatic vision of violent renewal must give us pause and should motivate a watchful readerly stance toward this literature. Yet the fact remains that, as a historical movement, phenomenology was never tethered to any one political persuasion, attracting students left, right, and center, militaristic as well as pacifistic. By the mid-1920s, even Scheler had turned his 1915 posturing on its head, arguing instead not just for the plausibility but for the necessity of radical pacifism, while at the same time presciently characterizing peace talks such as the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921– 1922 as merely “another prelude to new wars.”33 Yet the key point is that it appears undeniable that the trauma of the war and the growing appeal of phenomenological ways of thinking were intimately related aspects of a single historical experience. To see this, we must take a step back to consider the situation of psychology at this turning point from a wider angle. It has often appeared that the previous century was the “century of psychology.”34 It began, after all, with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which furnished untold numbers of analysts (including, perhaps most importantly, lay analysts and self-analysts) with an irresistible language in which to couch the description of an earlier unacknowledged psychic life, to see it as an enigmatic landscape that could be more knowingly examined, if never fully charted.35 A few years earlier, the publication of Edward B. Titchener’s textbook An Outline of Psychology (1896), codifying the experimental approach he had established in his state-ofthe-art laboratory and lecture courses at Cornell University, had marked the definitive and permanent arrival of professional psychology within the American academy, rendering it a transatlantic enterprise as opposed to a Continental peculiarity.36 Meanwhile, William Stern’s coinage of “psychotechnics” in 1903 heralded the imminent explosion of instrumentalized applications of psychological knowledge in the form of IQ tests, career aptitude tests, and so forth, which would saturate the experience of cultural and economic life in industrialized regions within the immediate subsequent decades and up to the present.37 The instrumentalization of psychological knowledge, its ceaseless interweaving into the fabric of everyday experience and into the administration of that experience, was hardly a secret to anyone paying attention in the first half of the century.38 Typical was the assessment of Hendrik de Man— the Belgian socialist-turnedcollaborationist, briefly puppet prime minister under the Nazi occupation (as well as the father-figure uncle of Paul de Man)— who wrote in 1926, “If the twentieth century is to be the century of psychology as the nineteenth century was the century of natural science, this is not only because we have

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today more knowledge of psychology. It also means that we wish, above all, to have more psychological knowledge, while making a better use of the old knowledge, because our social experience leads us to attach more importance to psychological motives.”39 What has been less widely appreciated is the precise contemporaneity of Freud’s “dream-work” with another centennial publication pointing us toward a very different view of the history of psychological knowledge.40 The first volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900) rejected the notion, known as “psychologism,” that what we know about things could be grounded in what we know about the mind that thinks those things.41 In narrow terms— in the terms, that is, in which it was first presented— Husserl’s critique was a matter of pure logic. It merely sought to drive a wedge between logical truth and psychological truth. Against philosopherpsychologists like Theodor Lipps, it insisted that logic is neither a “physics of thinking” nor “identical with the natural laws of thinking itself,” but instead names the study of matters of validity irrespective of any specific instance of their being thought by some particular empirical individual.42 Least of all should we entertain the idea that observing mental processes from an empirical standpoint— that is, either through private introspection or through laboratory experiment— could reveal the basis for the study of logic. Read against the nineteenth-century theories Husserl specifically targeted (in addition to Lipps, this includes J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and many others), the critique has an immediately persuasive appeal, but might just as easily have been set aside as a local disciplinary concern with little bearing on life at large. Yet for a variety of reasons— cultural-historical reasons that have still not been thoroughly narrated or assessed— Husserl’s otherwise laser-like line of thought became linked with a far more general attitude of disdain toward the rising prominence of psychology within the university faculties.43 Husserl himself would come to couch his project in increasingly broader terms, as in an influential 1911 essay, where he observes that experimental psychology had gone from a niche venture within philosophy a few decades earlier, to aim now for hegemony in the human sciences as a whole. Having assumed for itself the mantle of “exact philosophy,” “the long-sought scientific psychology that has at last become a fact” was now being taken as the “scientific foundation” for traditional humanistic disciplines from logic to aesthetics to ethics: “they are in fact already on the way toward being transformed into experimental disciplines.”44 By contrast, the discourse of antipsychologism appeared to suggest new resources for describing experience by thematizing the priority of what was given to consciousness without experimental manipulation and without a self-observation cut off

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from the world. These resources were embraced by many young students and scholars as encouragement to turn outward toward that world, and in the ensuing intellectual-cultural movement, a new attitude known under the umbrella term “phenomenology” promised to make thought and the description of phenomena at once more certain and more worldly. That is to say, they would insist on the radicality of the apparently innocuous task of learning to make simple but true statements about the world, a world whose many ways of existing might indeed be doubted or theoretically suspended without thereby negating its reality. Writers and teachers in a phenomenological spirit emphasized the dignity of description itself as a worthy intellectual style, demoting the value of explanation and derivation— particularly naturalistic explanation and derivation— and generally shunning the influence of any sort of elaborate technical apparatus that might otherwise be taken for granted as enabling a privileged mode of access to things. Yet at the same time, despite occasional appeals to the notion of a “presuppositionless” philosophy, as well as to the primacy of everyday over contrived phenomena, phenomenological description was never a matter of simply celebrating “naive” perception. Married to an axiomatic skepticism about the rise of technoscience was an equally fervent distrust of the uncritical acceptance of perception and feeling taken to arise autonomously from within the interior of the private individual. In addition to Husserl’s watershed critique of psychologism at the dawn of the new century, it was Scheler who provided one of the most vivid examples of this reorientation in 1913, when he developed a lacerating critique of the widespread faith in theories of “projective empathy.” If I am only able to see the value of others by first inwardly recalling and representing my own experiences of things I believe others to be experiencing, and then projecting my own sentiments onto them, I am constrained to put myself perpetually in place of or indeed before everyone else, to live alone through my own prejudice, and to make myself unjustifiably the measure of all things. No reliable ethics could be built on such a premise, which merely reinforces (while at the same time depending upon) self-absorption and self-satisfaction. The novel alternative would be instead to realize the possibility of apprehending others as imbued with inherent value prior to any reference to my own personhood, to see each person as someone who exists in the world both before and alongside me.45 It is presumably this kind of ethical extension of what might otherwise have remained a parochial academic discourse that helps explain its broader appeal, particularly to the generation born around 1900. Martin Heidegger’s (1889– 1976) magnetic attraction as a teacher is of course legendary. But Scheler, now rarely cited beyond specialist scholarship, was

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at least equally celebrated prior to his death in 1928, an event that Heidegger interrupted one of his own lectures to announce, declaring him “the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and even in contemporary philosophy as such.”46 In the eyes of the prominent Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset (1883– 1955), a key witness whose aesthetics will occupy the better part of a chapter below, Scheler was “the first man of genius, the Adam of the new Paradise” (el primer hombre de genio, Adán del nuevo Paraíso).47 Even the more prosaic Husserl filled his lecture halls in the months following the return of troops from the front: young men who were looking for someone to show them how to see the world again as something solid, enduring, and shared, rather than illusory, fleeting, and contested.48 For Hannah Arendt (1906– 1975), who herself belonged to that student cohort and remains perhaps its most eloquent representative, this was a lost generation: “What is lost is not merely this weightless race of men but the world that was supposed to house them. . . . When they called themselves lost, they were looking upon the age and themselves with the eyes of the nineteenth century; they were denied . . . the quiet, pure unfolding of all their faculties— and they reacted with bitterness. They resented the fact that the world did not offer them shelter and the security to develop as individuals.”49 It is true that many commentators, including many of its early practitioners, would come to feel that the promise of security that phenomenology held out was false and even dangerous. According to Scheler’s assistant Günther Stern-Anders (1902–1992)— who was also William Stern’s son and Arendt’s first husband, and whose work we will be reading extensively— this philosophical tendency attracted “despairing youth” who were “seduced” by “guaranteed doctrines . . . such as Husserl’s phenomenology, in spite of its austerity.”50 And while Stern-Anders would eventually manage to accommodate his phenomenological training with an unorthodox Marxist theoretical orientation (comparable to his lifelong friend Herbert Marcuse, for example, or to Jean-Paul Sartre, on whom Stern-Anders exercised a crucial but underappreciated early influence), many others on the Left were unable to allay a deeply held distrust of phenomenology’s claims to non-dialectical knowledge of the world.51 For Max Horkheimer, writing in an unforgiving mood in 1936, this distrust unfolded into a hyperbole matching that of its target: “Scheler’s thinking belongs to the transition from the liberal to the totalitarian form of State.”52 Yet whatever the intensity of skepticism from various quarters both inside and outside the movement, phenomenology’s tremendous appeal in the years just following the war— and especially in the wake of the crisis in authority presented by the spectacular toppling of the centuries-old German monarchy during the November Revolution of 1918— lay to a great

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extent in the encouragement to take up a stance in the world, to decide how to dispose oneself toward one’s surroundings, and to see things for what they are without needing to consult a higher authority, without having to ask permission.53 The moment could be assessed as simultaneously one of the greatest disillusionment and the greatest possibility for renewal. From the vantage point of 1920, with considerably more sober vision than that of Scheler five years earlier, Husserl was clear that the passionate aim of the phenomenological program must be to address the deep spiritual wounds left by the war itself. Similar to Hendrik de Man’s observation of the amped-up operation of psychological manipulation and “influence” in modern life, but with a sharply contrasting evaluation of this historical development, Husserl was profoundly disturbed by the way nationalist sentiment and increasingly refined techniques of propaganda had been deployed to obscure the fact of common worldhood from inhabitants of the globe as a whole. As he wrote that year to a Canadian former student at Göttingen who had been interned from 1915 to 1918 (first in a campus prison in the lecture hall attic, subsequently at the Ruhleben internment camp outside Berlin): This war, the most universal and most profound Fall of Humanity in all known history, has shown up all accepted ideas in their powerlessness and inauthenticity. . . . Contemporary war, which has become the people’s war in the most literal and gruesome sense, has lost its ethical meaning. . . . The diabolical art of shaping the political sentiments of humanity, their political judgments, their choices of practical aims, an art extending around the entire globe, shows us for the first time what, under an alternative sign, could be ventured and practically striven for in terms of the everyday arts and crafts of influencing people, and in terms of a well-intentioned social-ethical literature— indeed, it shows us what must be striven for in service of an ethical-political renewal of humanity. What we truly, bitterly need is an art of the universal education of humanity, an art sustained by the highest, clearly secured ideals and taking the form of a powerful literary organization toward the enlightenment of humanity, educating from truthfulness into truthfulness.54

Music in Phenomenological Study Under the sign of this desire for renewal, it is hardly surprising that the subsequent decade would see a burst of musical writing by German critics, students, and philosophers trying to absorb the perspectives of phenomenology from Husserl’s, Scheler’s, and Heidegger’s teaching and writing. (The

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example of Otto Klemperer, whose own wedding festivities in 1919 incorporated an overt gesture of homage to an icon of phenomenological thinking, indicates the general state of things.) The present book seeks to reconstruct and understand this musical literature and its wider project in order to give an account of a distinctive family of theories of musical listening in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic and its legacy. Maintaining a focus on the German-language sources and milieus where this early movement was concentrated, this book evaluates an overlooked strain of speculative thought about music that sought alternatives to the ascendant influence of psychology and other forms of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics. For a variety of reasons, the historical fact and significance of this body of literature have gone largely unremarked in music scholarship since as long ago as 1945, though some reassessments have begun to surface.55 One reason among many for this comparative lack of attention is that the early literature of phenomenology often remained methodologically tortuous, abstract in self-presentation, and, despite the often-cited promise of “a return to the things themselves,” as per Husserl’s famous rallying cry, frustratingly unable to describe concisely and memorably what form an encounter with “things” might in fact assume. Immediately following this most-cited phrase, we are warned that “things are not without further ado things of nature,” and yet the vast project of uncovering these mysterious if ubiquitous “unnatural” things was always going to be a protracted and inglorious task for the dedicated few.56 By and large, this remained true as well for the various essays imaginatively sketching out an unrealized “phenomenology of music” that appeared in this era.57 “Phenomenology” was and remains a difficult term to define adequately for more than a single thinker’s work, a problem that dates back directly to Husserl’s 1900 watershed. For one thing, whatever his reception among early readers, including those featured in the following, Husserl’s own trajectory deviated almost immediately from what many had interpreted as a realist orientation in the first volume of Logical Investigations.58 His subsequent and better-known preoccupation with the analysis of consciousness— and the apparent turn to what was known in short as transcendental idealism— is notably distant from many of the lines of thought pursued by the thinkers discussed here.59 Complicating matters further, Husserl and his interlocutors often remained attached, even in the wake of the critique of psychologism, to the more modest agenda of “descriptive psychology”— or, even more confusingly, “phenomenological psychology”— as distinct from “explanatory” or “analytic psychology.”60 I am wagering for present purposes that not too much is lost in suppressing this distinction in favor of the loosely parallel one between simply “phe-

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nomenology” and “psychology.” Heidegger, for one, took Husserl’s critique of psychologism to extend to psychology as a whole and to replace the latter with phenomenology, as he indicated at one point in a winter 1925– 1926 lecture course.61 This kind of ongoing negotiation and rivalry among various Isms and Ologies is one reason why my own account eschews any attempt to track a unified history of phenomenology in the large and instead follows the lead of the musical themes that present themselves more spontaneously than programmatically in the body of work I will be delineating. For clarity’s sake, though, we can at least say this much: “phenomenology” in this book will tend to refer to a project of adopting both a new attitude, disposition, or posture (Einstellung or Haltung) with regard to music, and also a new mode of description adequate to that new attitude. In particular, the “attitude” in question meant shifting orientation away from the kinds of empirical sense data that had been privileged in naturalistic research programs developed during the rise of experimental psychology from around 1860 onward. Further, it meant declining to see the interior dynamics of an individual’s musical experience as a final source of meaning or value. Instead, the goal became to establish a basis for understanding how music might either be part of a common world, or itself constitute a shared aesthetic world that possessed its own distinct contours and features and yet was in principle accessible and describable in communicable terms. This emphasis on the potential to form and sustain community, a general bias in favor of public over radically private experience and knowledge, and an either explicit or tacit commitment to the worldly qualities of music were all essential components of what I am characterizing as a new orientation arising in Weimar-era discussions. Our broadest concern is just what this goal of embracing an outward turn might have meant for musical thinking in a milieu where the cultural and intellectual impulses motivating it seem to have been felt especially keenly. Even setting aside the possible objection that the inherent interiority of musical experience radically resists any antipsychologistic treatment of it, a problem of professional inertia remained. From the standpoint of writing analytically or descriptively about music, it was always going to prove challenging to square the recent and ongoing work of influential, explicitly psychologistic music scholarship like that of the Berlin comparative musicologists, or certain proto-cognitivist music theories— let alone the broader legacy of belief, long ago expressed in Hegel’s view that music’s “proper element is the inner life as such”62— with the new demand to reject psychologism altogether and replace it with some new, as yet unarticulated mode of musical description. No interwar discourse of musical phenomenology was lastingly established that could be held to match, let alone supplant,

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the value of more traditional attitudes, whether analytical or aesthetic. This is not to say that there was no legacy for phenomenology in music scholarship, of course, only that the initial, Weimar-era reading of this body of thought does not seem to have taken deep root. When musical thinkers and doers as various as Pierre Schaeffer, Ernest Ansermet, or Yoko Ono initiated projects of music-phenomenological study or method in the 1960s, this would have had the feeling of beginning from scratch, not quite continuing a gesture already set in motion.63 Even a figure like Roman Ingarden, another musically inclined Husserl student who was “there” in the historical milieu I am highlighting, does not cite its literature.64 And the phenomenological moment in music scholarship that launched in the late 1970s (and I imagine continues to shape what North American academics today think of as music phenomenology) was even more disconnected from this first generation, which is hardly a critique of the later body of work, only an acknowledgment of a peculiar historical fact.65 Yet insisting too much on the apparent failure to lay enduring groundwork for a new discursive style in musical writing misses an opportunity to read this literature on its own terms. What the antipsychologistic moment in early phenomenology seemed poised to bring about was not merely a new way of approaching old problems— for example, the seductive challenge of describing musical experience in such a way as to reveal otherwise unattended nuance, and hence to enhance the perceived value of the musical “object” itself. Rather, the broader aim was effectively to rethink the conditions for that experience in the first place and to reimagine what the act of listening might be like at a basic level, prior to accounting for any particular instance of it. I mention this difficulty both as a speculative and partial explanation for why much of the intellectual-historical context for the following discussion might have fallen off the musicological map, and also in order to forestall possible misunderstanding about my agenda in revisiting and interpreting some of the aspirations characteristic of that context. The figures in this milieu staked at least four basic claims, each of which motivates a historical episode— more precisely, a chapter-length phenomenological etude— in this book. First, they argued that there must be something we engage when we listen that is not equivalent to its acoustical impression, a belief that immediately raises the question of how this “something” ought to be studied and described. Second, they argued that aesthetic experience was rightly grasped only when it was understood to constitute a common world, which must be accessed in an attitude of outward or open orientation. Third, they argued for the material significance of musical listening’s occurring together with others. Fourth, they argued

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that, insofar as listening entailed an act of feeling whose very act-like nature opened it up to historical variation, feeling itself may be experienced as constantly subject to revision, expansion, and refinement. These four claims, and the many questions they in turn provoked, arose within a highly charged intellectual-cultural atmosphere, where the character and purpose of humanities scholarship was contested at a fundamental level. If the relationship between human and natural sciences had generally been cast as a friendly rivalry in the nineteenth century, by 1920 the entrenched disjunction took on the feeling of a spiritual crisis for many teachers and students.66 This aspect of the storyline belongs to a relatively autonomous academic-institutional history— a sociology of philosophical knowledge, to borrow Martin Kusch’s phrase— in which phenomenology is readily grasped as the swift and stern reaction of a philosophy faculty wary of the spectacular rise of psychological research programs that had only recently established their conceptual and administrative independence from philosophy departments.67 Yet at the same time, phenomenology clearly must have been fueled by motives more affectively dispersed than can be interpreted just in terms of the intramural siege mentality of a humanities professoriate facing natural-scientific inroads on terrain long viewed as intrinsically humanist. It is a sometimes explicit, sometimes tacit premise throughout that the war and its aftermath radically exacerbated an already keen distrust toward any naturalistic approach to aesthetic and ethical problems. At any rate, the philosophers’ early principled epistemological uneasiness about the psychologistic theory of logic, when joined with a greatly dimmed view of recent technological progress in light of its role within disastrous geopolitical events, as well as the unprecedented instrumentalization of psychological knowledge within the structures of civil governance— all of this is self-evidently a potent brew. So, although the discourse we are reading here tends to find its point of departure within specifically aesthetic concerns, it also inevitably points outward toward broader ethical ones. This book can be described as intellectual history in the sense of leading along a path marked out by published and unpublished texts, many of which are relatively little known today (especially in English-language scholarship) and therefore require contextualization, commentary, interpretation, and critique in order to be evaluated. Yet the theoretical thinking occasioned by these texts would remain vacuous without an attempt to imagine and describe their implications for particular instances of musical experience. Each chapter therefore seeks to restore texture to what is often an abstract speculative discourse through suggestions for how one might imagine listening to some particular musical phenomenon or utter-

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ance. This resonates to some extent with the broader project of a history of listening, yet the aim here is not to reconstruct bygone hearings (a methodologically precarious endeavor in any case), nor even to identify the conditions for such hearings. Instead, the book aims— I emphasize once again, at the risk of redundancy— to participate in and carry on the work of imagining what musical hearing might be like in the first place, which I take to be the central, fantastical, and still elusive goal set by essentially all of the thinkers involved here. In other words, for reasons that are in fact centrally thematic to the present book project, I seek to honor the scene of speculative musical thinking as one of historically meaningful action, while also resisting the natural tendency of speculation to fall by the historiographical wayside under the pressure of other events. The participants in the larger conversation traced in this book occupied a variety of roles, including instructors of harmony, counterpoint, and eurhythmics, composers, critics and journalists, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists, and public intellectuals. They likewise achieved widely disparate degrees of public recognition. Some, such as Paul Bekker, Heinrich Besseler, and Herbert Eimert, were highly influential in shaping public discourse (Bekker’s popular works of music history and criticism), academic discourse (Besseler’s controversial and still-debated work on medieval and Renaissance music), or musical institutions (Eimert’s electronic music studio at West German Radio in Cologne). Others, such as Helmuth Plessner and Günther Stern-Anders, are largely unfamiliar within music studies, but have long been valued as major thinkers further afield, for example in philosophical anthropology. Still others, such as Arthur Wolfgang Cohn and Gustav Güldenstein, contributed substantively and insightfully to local interwar debates but are rarely read nowadays, if they are remembered at all.68 Yet my goal in assembling a narrative about their attempts to think through a common set of problems is not so much to restore prominence to the lesser known. The question of what still-perceptible “influence” this discourse may have had in the wider history of musical thought is specifically not of great interest to me. Or rather, the specific absence of filiation must be taken into account as itself constituting a striking historical fact. It is probably most fruitful to think of the material collected for this study from a loosely counterfactual historiographical perspective: what was the possible future for the intellectual project we are reconstructing here, granting as an at least plausible premise that it was not intrinsically destined to fizzle? The strands of thought, teaching, and action that fill the book are often incomplete or interrupted, and many of the figures and ideas in play fell out of the historical record by virtue of extrinsic events, above all the

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fact of real or internal exile due to politics or ethnicity. Many of the main players, indeed a numerical majority, were Jewish by birth, and hence did not enjoy anything like a continuous career trajectory from youth to old age. If you were not lucky enough either to have already established an unambiguous corpus of work and methodology that would constitute a road map for future readers, or to have a substantial community of willing ambassadors abroad who would translate your project into terms meaningful to a foreign audience, then as of 1933 your work might in many cases just as well not have been written in the first place (at least for the near term— texts have an odd durability, which to my mind makes a project like the present one not simply possible but well-nigh compulsory). Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, even a figure like Besseler, an outright Nazi who aligned with the regime both out of pragmatism and, I would insist, out of conviction, made only one last attempt to sustain the phenomenological orientation during his postwar career in the socialist German Democratic Republic, where such discourses were considered vestiges of bourgeois decadence. So, in short, it is both reasonable and valuable to consider “sideshadowed,” alternate scenarios in which this style of musical thought could in fact have taken deeper root.69 In that sense, much of the discussion below adds up to an extended attempt to “complete the thought,” to follow through on a gesture of thinking that had been set in motion but left elliptical by these young men, although it should also be acknowledged right away that it was always peculiar to the ethos of the phenomenological movement that its proper style was one of essentially incomplete, “infinite tasks,” to recall a formulation by one lucid latter-day commentator.70 In any case, our narrative tense is that of the past perfect: we are concerned here not merely with things that “were thought” and hence may still be thought in the manner of some ongoing but unperceived ideational continuity, but instead with things that “had been thought” yet were cut off and hence require a present effort of imagination to piece together and sketch what might have become of them. But there are also other moods of history-writing than a nagging worry about long-term impact, whether reconstructive or counterfactual. As Arendt— again, an invaluable witness to what at times seems a smotheringly homosocial interwar German academic scene— once suggested, a rather male anxiety about the influence one’s scholarly work might have on others may be best set aside in favor of the more affirmative goal of establishing shared understanding.71 The underlying motivation for writing this book is accordingly not to compensate for the failure of this largely forgotten body of work to radiate beyond the environment of its first enunciation, but instead to reach some understanding of a question that is both local to the pressures of that initial environment, and yet also general enough

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to attract us as an ongoing challenge. This general question— “What are we thinking about when we are thinking about music in non-naturalistic terms?”— arises here as a historically peculiar problem. Yet, despite the particular situation of its initial posing, it has not fully receded from our own contemporary experience and hence continues to interest us materially as scholars, thinkers, and musicians. Chapter one, “The Unnatural Attitude,” closely examines several focused attempts to outline what form a music theory without naturalism might take. It compares music-theoretical texts and pedagogies by authors who express a collective disappointment with the authority and achievements of psychoacoustics, including in particular the Basel-based Dalcroze instructor Gustav Güldenstein, as well as the critics and musicians Paul Bekker, Arthur Wolfgang Cohn, Herbert Eimert, and Hans Mersmann, and the philosopher Moritz Geiger. It assesses their approaches and seeks to describe the style of hearing they imagined, revisiting musical examples the authors held up as reference points. The chapter argues that these writers can be understood to be cultivating and prescribing a new “attitude” in which listeners are urged to learn how to orient themselves to musical sound beyond the acoustic and to attend to forms of tacit musical knowledge (non-acoustic “dissonance,” formal dynamics and melodic energy, and so forth) that may be broadly shared without being susceptible to narrow psychologization. An explicit reference point is the phenomenological turn away from what Husserl called the “natural attitude”— a turn that entailed suspending uncritical acceptance of the presence of things in the physical (including the psychophysical) world. If the quixotic and paradoxical character of this endeavor achieved mixed or equivocal results within the relatively parochial domain of its immediate application, its underlying thematization of the possibility of a reorientation of disposition lays the groundwork for more promising efforts. Chapter two, “Debussy, Outward and Open,” picks up the motif of the revision of attitude, but rather than focus on a bracketing of physical reality, it describes two attempts to reevaluate the relation between music and inner experience. When the philosopher and critic José Ortega y Gasset famously diagnosed the literature and music of the post– World War I generation as an art of “dehumanization,” he singled out Claude Debussy as a formative exemplar, arguing that new music in Debussy’s wake enjoined a fundamental reorientation from “inward” to “outward concentration” (concentración hacia afuera). Initially lesser known than Ortega, but equally caught up in the heyday of interwar phenomenology and its antipsychologistic spirit, the philosopher Stern-Anders likewise singled out Debussy

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as the exemplary music for a mode of attention that had been overlooked and misrecognized by traditional aesthetic and psychological discourse.72 In particular, Ortega’s idea of “outward concentration” merits comparison with Stern-Anders’s description of a disposition of “letting oneself go” (sich gehen lassen). These ideas are explored via the test case of one of Debussy’s 1915 piano etudes. Chapter three, “Hearing-With,” explores in depth one of the most notorious and ideologically charged theories of listening of its day: Heinrich Besseler’s call for a demotion of the concert scene in favor of community music-making, as expressed in a number of publications on contemporary and premodern musical practices. Besseler serves as a robust foil to Stern-Anders, with whom he shared an almost identical intellectual pedigree but came to starkly different aesthetic, ethical, and political conclusions. Where Stern-Anders pursued a reinterpretation of the meaning of the attentive act, Besseler simply attacked the disposition of concentrated attentive listening as a kind of vain illusion that would destroy the power of music to build and sustain community. The chapter works through a careful reading of Besseler’s watershed studies of the thirteenth-century motet and the seventeenth-century dance suite, in order to evaluate his working concept of “participatory hearing,” which has been underappreciated in Besseler reception yet also constitutes one of the most fascinating, if problematic, instances of an overtly anti-naturalistic description of listening from the period. Chapter four, “Techniques of Feeling,” follows the development of two figures already discussed, Eimert and Stern-Anders, into the postwar period. It shows how the effort to reimagine musical engagement as a matter of orientation toward worldly phenomena also applied to the category of “feeling,” interpreted as act-like and intentional, and hence susceptible to revision and refinement. Stern-Anders’s mid-1950s retooling of his own earlier music-philosophical suggestions in service of a pacifist, anti-nuclear politics is read here in conjunction with a 1962 tape work by Eimert, Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama, which was composed in direct response to a key text by Stern-Anders.73 The chapters are organized not so much chronologically as thematically, in a sequence meant to allow for a clear development of phenomenological topics. Zigzagging within the 1920s for the first three chapters, the book ultimately moves ahead through the 1930s and into the early Cold War in order to discern the retooling of interwar intellectual resources in later developments. But the discussion as a whole progresses from relatively local to relatively global concerns, or in other words from questions of tone perception and tonality (chapter one), through more general questions about

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modes of musical engagement (chapters two and three), to end with questions concerning the adequacy of musical experience in confronting historic moral and political crises that have loomed large especially from the mid-twentieth century onward (chapter four). Finally, the book includes five appendices, each of which presents an original translation of an essay on the phenomenology of music, all published in German music journals between 1925 and 1927. I selected these essays— by Mersmann, Plessner, Bekker, Eimert, and Stern-Anders— with the aim of conveying a sense of both the range of intellectual style and also the concentration of thinking within a short period of time. The texts represent an unusual intensity of music-theoretical position-taking, whose simultaneous coherence and diversity motivates their inclusion here. Apart from sporadic references, they appear to have remained widely unread, especially in English-language scholarship, and it is my hope that publishing them here will provide a valuable new perspective on the intellectual culture of the era as well as new insight into the history of phenomenology and the resources it has offered for musical thinking.

[ Ch a pter 1 ]

The Unnatural Attitude

September 9, 1920, Schneegruben (Śnieżne Kotły), a glacial cirque in the Giant Mountains, Silesia, German-Czechoslovakian (now Polish-Czech) border. Twenty-six-year-old Arthur Wolfgang Cohn, an experienced hiker familiar with the region, misjudges the scree after a heavy rain, loses his footing, and falls from a cliff, dying shortly after being hoisted back up by rope— this after having survived two years on the front from the outbreak of World War I until sustaining a major injury in July 1916. A week before his death, he had sent off corrected proofs for his forthcoming monograph, Can Money Be Abolished? (his second, following a 1917 book on The Musical Work from a Legal Standpoint), and was awaiting its publication along with several articles on both political economy and music aesthetics.1 Cohn’s abbreviated story raises the specter of an unrealized inquiry that is pure Weimar: what gives money, what gives music their value? 1934, Berlin, back room of a bar in Kreuzberg. The music scholar and radio broadcaster Hans Mersmann is playing one of his thousand-odd records for an informal group of students. Despite brief, early praise for the recent National Socialist “revolution,” he now finds himself peremptorily relieved of his official teaching positions and radio work, secretly meeting classes in an out-of-the-way hole in the wall. “Private office hours, luckily with a variety of themes (theory, composition, analysis, music history) and gifted students. . . . Formation of small groups in a spirit of intellectual resistance (through ten years of meeting weekly with a splinter group from the community college . . .). Phonograph record as indispensable intermediary.” A decade later, all one thousand of Mersmann’s records will be destroyed in wartime bombings, along with five thousand books and all of his scores and manuscripts— as well as his only son, killed on the Eastern Front.2

What would it mean to apprehend music without experiencing it acoustically? What would I be listening to if something other than a sonorous impression? A phantasm? A figment of the imagination? Or instead something truer than “mere” sound? Or should the contrast be cast rather in terms of proximity? Would these sounds, no longer attended to in a full resonant ongoingness, become farther away from me, or closer? And would this non-acoustic hearing become more, or instead less, ephemeral than sonic experience often seems? Might I hear something more enduring than 27

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acoustic resonance? Something that would be easier to communicate to others, more available for shared experience? Or would any response that admits the basic premise of such questions— that there can ever be a nonacoustic remainder in musical sound— amount to a vain delusion? This line of questioning emerges from writings by certain thinkers who were not only themselves beginners in philosophical thinking, but who were in fact still trying to decide just where they wanted to begin. The following discussion is concerned with a collection of articles, pamphlets, and books written in the 1920s, by an assortment of people born around 1900. In other words, this is a study of literature by and for a youth milieu, including students, young teachers, and early professional critics who were attempting to make the world their own in the wake of a disastrous war in which most of them had fought, and who can be observed taking up a stance against a way of thinking and talking about music that had come to seem to them a dead end. That way of thinking can be described in shorthand as a kind of naturalism. In some contexts, the term “naturalism” gives the impression of fairly cut-and-dried matters of epistemology, as when one believes that the best way to learn about mental life is by treating the mind in a manner similar to how one might treat a more classically natural thing like a storm cloud or a projectile mass. Here, where a naturalistic philosophy of mind is not centrally at issue, what is being characterized as “natural” or “naturalist” is instead an attitude, which is to say a certain way of disposing yourself toward things. As becomes explicit with its usage in classical ballet, figure painting, and sculpture, “attitude” describes the manner of occupying a place with one’s body, the way one disposes one’s torso and limbs in relation to one another and in relation to the surrounding space, such that some sense of gravity and of inclination in one direction or another is thematically present. The same goes for the relevant German equivalent Haltung, which appears in the phenomenological literature as a less formal near-synonym for Einstellung. In the present context, the kind of attitude in question is not bodily yet still reflects an intuition that, even without potential or actual corporeal movement, one nevertheless continuously engages thematic feelings of inclination in one direction or another, of taking an interest in some features and qualities of the world and not others.3 What makes an attitude “natural” or “naturalist,” then, would be simply the tendency to take up a relation to things as if their basic qualities had already been determined in advance. Yet the truth is that, in a certain sense, the term “natural attitude” is an oxymoron. The moment one recognizes one is disposed this way or that way, it ceases to be taken for granted, and hence ceases to be natural in the sense of being naive.4 Any gesture or

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stance of taking-things-to-be in such and such a way will have a certain epistemological character, but it is possible to consider an attitude as something that can be committal in terms of a general style of engagement without getting bogged down in pathos over ultimate premises. The manner in which “attitude” emerged as a thematic concern in these years was not entirely consistent, and certainly not philosophically rigorous in any classical sense. (And I would emphasize that what interests me is not specifically the varying degrees of ultimate validity or even elegance of these accounts, let alone their fidelity to their intellectual models, but the brute historical fact of their aspiration, which is compelling on its own terms.) The premise of the following chapter, as of the book as a whole, is that grasping the basic gesture of realizing an attitudinal modulation is crucial to understanding this historical moment. To reformulate, then, we are exploring the attitude of a particular community of musicians, who were loosely linked for a brief historical moment in wanting to practice what they took to be a distinctive and freshly articulated way of engaging with musical sound, one that declined to take as self-evident the way that sound may be encountered. We can describe the focus of the chapter more precisely in terms of a specific concern belonging to the family of rhetorical questions above: if I eliminate from my hearing everything that belongs to an acoustical apprehension of sound, what, if anything, remains? For if nothing remains, then one would have to conclude that the theoretical (or attitudinal) program at issue was itself a fantasy. It will be a guiding strategy here to assume as a matter of principle that something can be identified as a non-acoustical remainder in the style of hearing that these writers imagined.

The Acoustical Attitude and the Harmonic Attitude I want to begin with some music-theoretical work by an otherwise unremarkable figure whose name is barely recognized today, yet who exemplifies with unusual clarity both an unmistakable continuity with traditional music-theoretical modes of inquiry and also the phenomenological reorientation that had emerged in counterpoint against that tradition. Having studied with (and later having assisted) the great reformer of music education Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, as well as with Husserl, Gustav Güldenstein (1888– 1972) is a witness to two major sea changes in pedagogical and intellectual orientation of the early twentieth century. Pursuing a long and stable career as an instructor of harmony, improvisation, and eurhythmics at the Basel Conservatory from 1921 to 1953, he published a modest body of writings that revealed an impulse to generate systems of musical organi-

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zation by showing how to construct the idioms of tonality, how to define concepts such as interval, scale, and chord, how to modulate, and so forth. Yet these texts are ultimately less concerned with the long-standing desire of music theory to rationalize, derive, or otherwise “dignify” musical phenomena according to some ostensibly authoritative source of knowledge than they are with the rarer and more novel desire to imagine strategies for revising the disposition of anyone who sought to engage with music at whatever level of familiarity. The gesture of theoretical thinking in Güldenstein’s work has a programmatic kinetic quality that was meant to allow for its being carried out and continued by his students and readers, rather than simply reporting an end-state of knowledge. I am going to dwell for quite a while on Güldenstein’s work, both because it is particularly concrete in its embrace of phenomenological resources, and also because it is not possible to get a good sense of the attitudinal modulation without taking the time to reflect on just what is being asked. This initial phase of exposition, then, will allow that modulation to unfold at a more deliberate pace, setting up the more accelerated transitions later on. The most fully developed sense of Güldenstein’s program comes through in Theorie der Tonart (“Theory of Key”), published in 1928 but written piecemeal over nearly a decade.5 The book falls into two parts. The first was begun in 1920 and is an exposition of a particular manner of teaching the topic of tonality to music students. The second, written in 1925, throws his own perspectives into relief against what Güldenstein took to be the figures of authority in the field, critiquing the work of Moritz Hauptmann, Hermann von Helmholtz, Arthur von Oettingen, Hugo Riemann, Heinrich Schenker, Georg Capellen, and Arnold Schoenberg, among others.6 The book’s final chapter, “Akustik und Musik,” identifies the central distinction running through his theoretical work. It is not so much the mere fact of contrast that is of interest, as it is the problem of characterizing the relation between the terms, the pertinent question being what bearing acoustical knowledge has on musical knowledge. But here, again, the danger looms of slipping into a primarily theoretical or epistemological evaluation, since the prevailing momentum went in favor of thinking of one domain of knowledge as providing the foundation for another, a theoretical style in which, by generic convention, the activity of “derivation” looms large. Güldenstein’s response to the question initially takes on the appearance of a classic theoretical discussion of how to derive chords from circumstances taken to be prior to the chord itself. More interesting, however, is how this otherwise mundane discussion opens up onto a broader concern with just how one might in fact aurally engage with the phenomena at hand, or in other words how one might take up a particular attitude

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toward them. To some extent following Güldenstein’s lead, I will start with the mundane theoretical topic and then move outward to consider what I take to be the more interesting underlying concern. At first glance, the argument in “Akustik und Musik” would seem to veer away from the purpose of the book as a whole, which is to explore the characteristics of Tonart, or key. As Güldenstein notes, it makes little sense to imagine learning much about how the sense of tonality might emerge— which is to say, how a single tone or sonority may come to be perceived as having a quality of relative repose in relation to others within some complex of tones and sonorities— by thinking about the vibrational mechanics of sound-producing objects, or of the physiological mechanics of sound reception. “Key,” he writes, “is not a merely natural product, though it is based on a natural phenomenon.” Or, as he continues, “Once we see that key is a stylistic principle, then we must also see that the sonorities selected in a piece of tonal music cannot be assessed according to their acoustical quality but only according to their position in the system. The intellectual principle of motion is primary, the real sonority is secondary.”7 In other words, we can readily appreciate that there can be nothing in an acoustical signal which, as an acoustical signal, necessitates the perception of centering around any given sonority, since the quality of being a “center” is a function not of any isolated acoustical phenomenon but only of the way multiple phenomena are interpreted to be related to one another, and those relations can not themselves be said to be acoustical. However important, this insight is not in fact Güldenstein’s most trenchant intervention. Indeed, for a music theorist writing in the 1920s, rejecting an acoustical basis for tonality was, in itself, commonplace. Even the locus classicus of modern musical acoustics, Hermann von Helmholtz’s 1863 treatise, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, contrary to its own title (which has misled generations of readers), vigorously argued for careful and ongoing distinction between naturalistic and aesthetic approaches to sound. As Helmholtz (1821– 1894) was later at pains to point out, the “physiological” dimension of his research really applied only to the narrower question of the constitution and sensory quality of individual sonorities, not immediately to how one sonority might relate to another, which was not essentially a psychoacoustical question and in fact did not even fall squarely within the parameters of what the physicist himself considered “natural science.”8 The style of aesthetic judgment Helmholtz adopted toward music is summed up in his comment that “the mere proof that anything is natural does not suffice to justify it aesthetically,” duly cited by Güldenstein some sixty years later.9 For Helmholtz, writing in the middle of the previous century, the ultimate task of music

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theory was to bring to bear the full wealth of available knowledge of physical acoustics, human anatomy, as well as a broadly historical and cultural understanding of emergent patterns of musical organization, not in order to synthesize these into some high-level unified explanation, but far more urgently, if less explicitly, in order to determine and heighten one’s grasp of the limits of what each style of knowing could in fact claim or achieve, which in turn might allow for a richer cultivation of the research methods associated with each domain. In this regard, Helmholtz entered into a Kantian critical tradition in the basic sense of establishing boundaries of domains of inquiry, as well as searching after the conditions that make it possible to know or experience various types of thing.10 By asking about what might make the perception of key possible while seeking to keep competing attitudes toward musical sound at a distance from one another, Güldenstein was likewise extending that critical tradition. Yet rather than denying any motive for continuing to attend directly to the material implications of acoustical phenomena, he was compelled to begin his assessment of the relations between acoustics and music because of one specific lingering theoretical question that had been raised in more recent literature. In fact, it pertained to the problem in tonal theory of accounting for the qualities that would need to inhere in the referential sonority in order for music to convey a sense of tonal gravity in the first place. To the extent one assumed that the central sonority of tonal reference must normatively be perceived as consonant, undisturbed within itself, so as to provide a quality of repose in relation to other sonorities within the collection of sonorities in the key, one had to be sure that both of the two options for such a sonority— the major triad and the minor triad— could in fact be described as consonant without qualification. This would seem to have been a preliminary and hardly sophisticated theoretical matter. And yet, thinking through the question in the most basic terms made available by physical acoustics, it was not. If consonance was understood (following Helmholtz) as the quality a sonority comes to have in the absence of the acoustic “beating” sensation produced by interference between the constituent tones, including upper partial tones, that belong to that sonority, then the minor triad could in general not be described as having the same degree of consonance as the major triad. The simple fact that the interval above the tonic fundamental, the minor third itself, produced more acoustic beats than the major third meant that this quality was in effect definitive for minor. When Helmholtz pointed this out in 1863, he unleashed a decades-long storm of vituperative reaction from musicians who wanted to defend the honor of what they took to be the unjustly maligned minor triad, offering a range of solutions, which, however, them-

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Example 1.1. From Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart (1928), 186

selves often sought to appeal to the authority of acoustical observation.11 For Güldenstein, long-standing ambivalence over the role of acoustics in the theoretical assessment of the minor triad was a symptom of music theory’s confused state, and his attempt to address this seemingly mundane yet methodologically treacherous problem is ultimately what occasions his turn toward a new theoretical option. His immediate target is Georg Capellen (1869– 1934), a composer and theorist who over the course of several publications had been exploring the notion of what he called “Musical Acoustics,” by which he meant specifically a particular way of attending to tone phenomena that could be readily isolated and apprehended by lay observers experimenting domestically with musical instruments, especially the piano.12 In a 1908 treatise, Capellen took up the tradition of theorizing various derivations of the minor triad from the series of harmonic upper partial tones.13 To make a long story short, there is really no way to do this without assuming the generative presence of a fundamental tone that does not in fact belong to the three-pitch collection of the triad itself. In most versions of such a “derivation,” more than one fundamental is required. As Güldenstein notes, this line of reasoning is both musically and acoustically absurd.14 From Güldenstein’s perspective, though, more damning than the chord derivation itself is Capellen’s fixation on the acoustically dissonant qualities of the minor triad. Güldenstein observes that the quasi-metaphysical premise that there ought to be a dualistic contrast between major and minor triadic sonorities does not in fact square with a consistent application of an acoustical approach to the question, because one can arrange the constituent tones in a variety of ways to produce a corresponding variety of degrees of dissonance. As the chord identified in his 14a suggests (ex. 1.1), an A-minor triad voiced in close position in a low register on an equal-tempered piano, as A1– C2– E2, contains the chromatically adjacent overtones B3 (as the third harmonic partial tone of E2), C4 (as the fourth harmonic partial tone of C2), and C♯4 (as the fifth harmonic partial tone of A1), which quite perceptibly interfere with one another.15 Meanwhile, transposing the triad

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up an octave or two, as in 14b and 14c, seems to mitigate the dissonance for reasons Güldenstein does not spell out, but which presumably include the fact that the partials here would fall in higher registers in which their semitone relations produce less noticeable beats. (In general, lower frequencies produce more obvious beats.) In 14d, by contrast, Güldenstein perceives that the combination tone F2 resulting from the simultaneity of A4 and C5 (but mistakenly notated in his figure as F4) now appears in a receptive range of the audible spectrum and hence creates a notable dissonance against the triad’s E5. In 14e, the fifth harmonic partial of A3 is C♯6, which is directly dissonant against the closely spaced upper pitches of this voicing. Finally, in 14f, he demonstrates that there is in fact an idiosyncratic but nonetheless conceivable way one might voice the minor triad to mitigate its dissonance: namely by doubling the third (here as C4 and C5), whose combined harmonic spectra ought in principle to overpower the otherwise dissonant C♯6 overtone. However we might view Güldenstein’s qualitative assessments of these voicings— and I do not believe there is good reason to doubt that he did in fact perceive the sonic features he identifies as he worked through the examples at the piano himself— it is not difficult to see that they discredit the notion of an uncomplicated relation between the identity of a triad as a set of musically equivalent revoicings and the presumption of an essential acoustical quality for all members of that set. And his demonstration could of course be pursued to a further logical conclusion, which is that it is almost equally easy to find voicings of the major triad that produce these sorts of dissonance.16 Yet the tenor and upshot of his discussion are odd. We can readily accept that the working acoustical notions of consonance and dissonance operating in Helmholtz’s and Capellen’s harmonic theories are inconclusive in providing a basis for understanding their significance within the idioms of musical composition from at least the seventeenth century to the time of Güldenstein’s writing. But he has expended much effort in showing us either what he does not want us to hear in the minor triad, or what he thinks we do not hear in any case, without also showing us what he thinks we should hear (or do hear— there is some problematic slippage here). So the question lingers: if these seemingly marginal yet nonetheless empirically accessible phenomena either are, or ought to be, ignored, what remains? The question can be better understood in connection with an example containing more idiomatic richness than an isolated triad. Consider, for instance, how Güldenstein responds to another related suggestion regarding the minor triad in Capellen’s discussion. Here, the latter muses on the possibility that different theoretical derivations of the minor triad become

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Example 1.2. From Capellen, Fortschrittliche Melodie- und Harmonielehre (1908), 60

salient at different historical moments, such that its acoustical features may in fact change from one era to another. Of several possible such derivations, Capellen highlights two: a double-root construction in which A and C jointly serve as the sources of the minor sonority, by virtue partly of their harmonic spectra sharing the tones C, E, and G; and a single-root construction in which A is indeed the sole root, while the C a minor third above it is conceived simply as a kind of distortion of the “naturally” occurring C♯. Both of these two ways of imagining a genetic background for the minor triad presuppose some degree of dissonance: in one case G against A, in the other case C against C♯. But for Capellen, the difference between the two also has historical implications. We must assume that since Bach, an about-face in the conception of the cadential minor triad has occurred. Even in an authentic cadence . . . the minor sonority will no longer be heard as an averted (altered) major sonority and hence as dissonant, but rather as a double sonority of the type A– C– E(– G) and hence as consonant. By virtue of the unconscious elevation of C to a co-fundamental, a counterweight to the predominance of the root A is achieved, so that the physically present beating of the thirds (C against C♯) can be psychologically ignored. The true effect of the authentic minor cadence, crudely represented, is today as shown in Fig. 75 [in ex. 1.2]; but before Bach’s time, it was as shown in Fig. 76.17

In other words, at some point after the early eighteenth century, the minor triad had undergone a re-evaluation involving an underlying interpretation of the chord’s genetic background. This is a rather fanciful turn of historical and theoretical thinking, but there is a certain logic behind it: it was for a time conventional to alter the quality of the final triad in minor-mode pieces to major (the so-called Picardy third), and there may be some historical support for the notion that the minor triad had gradually come to be accepted in a casual hermeneutic sense as a self-sufficient entity rather than as a corruption of the major (though Capellen effectively undermines this line of thought by insisting almost everywhere else on the primary nat-

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uralness of the major). Furthermore, there is a charitable way to read such musings: namely in the spirit of music theory as bricolage, as itself a kind of aesthetic practice that blurs into the more familiar behaviors of “actual” musical production. Capellen is sitting at his keyboard imagining and in fact composing musical objects for us to hear in order to draw out latent qualities in the triadic material that may or may not be there “originally,” but that can be activated in such a way as to render his just-so story about a sea change in the status of the minor triad almost plausible. Güldenstein, however, is not so tolerant. Attending to the sorts of buzzings, beatings, and whirrings that surround any collection of fundamental tones like a halo or a shadow is, he writes, a matter of adopting an “acoustical attitude” (akustische Einstellung). But this is not in fact the attitude we normally or properly adopt when we hear music. It is not that the G Capellen posits in the “modern” hearing of the A-minor cadential triad (in his fig. 75) is somehow not there at all. “But far from actively incorporating this tone into our apprehension, on the contrary we take pains consciously or unconsciously to ignore it (überhören). Similarly, we take pains to ignore the major third [as the fifth harmonic partial] of the root, which may sound along with it.”18 “Ignoring” is an imprecise translation for überhören, which suggests something more like “listening past” or “beyond,” and yet again, we are in the position of needing to ask just what we would then be aiming toward, if indeed the idea of a refocalization of aural experience is what Güldenstein has in mind. In a discussion of the minor mode elsewhere in the text, he seems to provide the beginning of an alternative to the “acoustical attitude,” albeit one that does not initially seem to promise much in the way of theoretical progress. It is simply “harmonic hearing”: “nothing other than a manner of hearing, which relates upper voices to a bass. And this manner of hearing, which one may call harmonic hearing, is most intimately related with the conditions that must be given in consciousness such that key can be constituted at all. Hence it is understandable that within the key, this hearing is the prevailing one.”19 Any mention of “conditions that must be given in consciousness” raises an enormous red flag. An account of such conditions would greatly exceed the usual demands of the textual genre we are considering. And the flag must stay up, because Güldenstein had no intention of specifying just what these conditions might be. In fact, already in the book’s introduction, this had been ruled out: “A treatment of the question of how a consciousness must be formed such that key may be constituted in it, would result in a work of its own (which must be written sooner or later): phenomenology of musical hearing. Here, the conditions within which the experience of

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‘key’ may appear are tacitly assumed.”20 For a treatise on the theory of key and tonal hearing, this would seem a potentially discrediting caveat. There are further ironies here. In a striking gesture, Güldenstein dedicated the book (“in grateful veneration”) to none other than Husserl, with whom he had studied for three semesters at Freiburg between 1920 and 1922, while he himself was already commuting to Basel to teach harmony, counterpoint, eurhythmics, and improvisation.21 These men could not have known each other well. Attendance of Husserl’s lectures surged into the hundreds in the immediate postwar years as students returned from the front, and the brief exchange of letters between them on the occasion of Güldenstein’s book publication, a copy of which he sent to Husserl, is friendly but impersonal. Not surprisingly, Husserl is flattered and returns the compliment with an expression of admiration for the “enlightening clarity and refinement” of the book’s investigations, as well as for the “true phenomenological spirit” in which they are carried out. “I have the impression,” Husserl ventures, “that this theory will win you many friends. May great and fine new insights continue to be granted you on the great field of research that now lies open to you. I will take pleasure in all your further progress.”22 The irony in this case might seem cruel in that Güldenstein’s book does not in fact appear to have found much readership at all and has been rarely cited. As discussed in the introduction, for all the many later twentieth-century essays in the phenomenology of music, the firstgeneration work of figures like Güldenstein appears barely to have left an individual mark beyond the short-lived moment of the Weimar Republic. And as for its “true phenomenological spirit,” we have already seen that Güldenstein himself only just begins to stake out the space in which a fulldress phenomenology of musical hearing would be pursued, while remaining safely on the near side of the line. Yet the actual historical situation only has the melancholy look of failure from the standpoint of an intellectual history fixated on the life of printed texts. Güldenstein was before anything else a teacher, and it would only be fair to try imagining how his project might have unfolded in the context of the world of the classroom or studio.23 When he distinguishes between an “acoustical attitude” and a “harmonic” one, he is in effect attempting to retool certain conceptual strategies from Husserl’s phenomenology in the formation of an active pedagogy.24 We can really only assess his project by seeing the pedagogical texts as in fact sketching out the possibility of really performed mental and perceptual acts. Here, then, is an occasion where it matters for us to be able to ask, quite concretely, what exactly is entailed in thinking about an attitude or disposition. The notion of the “natural at-

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titude” was the repeated point of departure for Husserl’s own expositions, including most familiarly in the first book of Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology (1913). Husserl thought this term was a good description of the disposition we assume on an everyday basis as we inhabit and move around in the world and imagine it, both past and present, surrounding us in an ongoing and essentially familiar way. The idea was meant to capture the confident, though tacit, assumption one generally makes that there is in fact a world outside the mind, that in its basic constitution it will persist more or less as it now appears, and that it exists in such a way as to be knowable in scientific terms. This latter feature is then connected with the slightly counterintuitive notion that where the historically peculiar collection of practices and beliefs falling under the heading of “natural sciences” has misled us is in uncritically absolutizing what appears in the world (including the world of psychic life) without asking appropriate questions as to the relation between consciousness and its objects.25 It may appear difficult to imagine how the highly orchestrated methods of natural science, even just limited to the particular sphere of acoustics research since, say, Helmholtz, might fit within the same “attitude” Husserl would impute to someone strolling along the sidewalk casually taking in the sights. Yet the point is that this refusal to distinguish between some special domain of scientific research and the naive way we take the surrounding world for granted has the advantage of underscoring how naturalistic aesthetics have not been overly fussy, but indeed overly casual, in their observations of the phenomena. If there is any passage in the Theorie der Tonart that would have appealed to Husserl for its “phenomenological spirit,” it is the extended description that appears right at the book’s opening, where Güldenstein seems to coach the student in a possible mode of attending to some individual tone, sustained and perhaps replayed on its own without other musical elements: Let us take the following example: the isolated tone is G and would be produced as a deep tone on a piano or on a cello. After some immersion in the sonority, the tone series G– G– D– G– B– D– F– G(– A) would then be clearly heard. This tone series is actually nothing other than the unfolded form of the tone, and [even] a tone that cannot be unfolded bears the tone series of its unfolded form at least latent within itself. These energies resting within the tone give it a character, which (anticipating ourselves) we can call its dominant character. We find this latent energy even in a merely imagined tone phenomenon, insofar as it is actually imagined in isolation, such that we can say: The tone isolated from any context (absolute = isolated) has dominant function as a “function

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in itself.” But a dominant is a tone that strives for its tonic. So we recognize that the isolated tone immediately strives after a connection. This striving of a tone for the fulfillment of its function in itself we call musical gravitation.26

Right away, one wonders how to square what seems an unapologetically acoustical description of the single tone with Güldenstein’s adamant denials of the significance of acoustical facts as a ground for musical perception. On just the previous page, he had warned that “acoustics can prove nothing and deny nothing for music,” yet it would seem that he begins his pedagogy in a naturalistic style familiar from harmony treatises dating back to at least the eighteenth century, and that he wants us to hear that the dominant seventh chord, whose internal collection of intervals— major third, perfect fifth, and minor seventh above its root— happens to coincide closely with the lowest seven partials of the harmonic series, is in fact a natural phenomenon. Is this not a blatant case of the “acoustical attitude,” and worse, one that takes the fact of a particular kind of acoustic resonance as a genetic source for musical organization? Not if the phenomenon is rightly interpreted and taken in the proper relation to one’s own disposition, thinks Güldenstein. The piano or cello tone is not meant to be imagined prior to some already familiar intuitive understanding of the way tonality appears to us. Rather, the “world” of tonality, including the very sense of the tendency or pull of the dominant seventh chord, is present to us already before we begin the pedagogy. The theory to be developed here has no ambition to explain or derive, only to bring out certain potentialities latent in the material. “One must see clearly here: the dominant seventh chord and the major triad are not justified as musical phenomena by the overtones, but rather the other way around: the overtones interest us, because they play an important role in musically significant phenomena.”27 This is a clever inversion of conventional priorities. We are asked to attend first to matters of “musical significance,” only secondarily to the possible convergence of musical facts with acoustical facts, and we must indefinitely suspend judgment as to the interpretation of that convergence, which in any case is often fleeting or fluctuating. At moments, tonal musical idioms may appear to bear a likeness to features of acoustical phenomena, at other moments diverge. More to the point, the apparent coincidence of harmonic partial tones with triadic forms and dominant seventh chords may be accidental, or indeed, it may yet point to a more deterministic relationship within the frame of reference of some other mode of inquiry— one whose goal is the explanation of aesthetic preferences on the basis of natural facts— but Güldenstein dismisses this eventuality as a

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matter of “metaphysics.” Whatever the case may be, in 1928, no other musical thinker had put the matter in quite these terms. According to the approach being advocated here, it is not precisely a matter of a radical mutual irrelevance of naturalistic facts and cultural forms, but rather that the natural phenomena of acoustic resonance are themselves imbued with significance by virtue of their uncanny semblance of musicality. “Musical forms” may guide us toward “acoustical forms,” to use his terms (53), without thereby either linking themselves as effect and cause, or suggesting some path of derivation from one to the other. In short, Güldenstein’s theoretical project was to ask after a new point of departure. With minimal exaggeration, we can say that throughout the entire historical tradition of writing “music theory” (though especially, and to put it in more modest terms, since the early eighteenth century), the music-theoretical text had more often than not been burdened by a sense of obligation to begin with matters of fact that stood before and even beyond the “matter” that it understood as proper to it. One began, and under tacit pressure of generic convention had no choice but to begin, with string lengths, with numerology, with vibrational frequencies, with overtones, undertones, combination tones (difference tones, summation tones), with degrees of dyadic fusion— none of which was in fact understood to be itself “music” yet, but somehow imposed itself as a duty to be discharged before getting on to the real business of instruction and description. The hat trick had always been to start by dwelling for a moment among these bordering concerns, about which one was able to believe we already know something (since in some sense they are not really our concern, but have already been covered by others, whose business it properly is to know them), and then to leap, as if from standing, into the main concern, music, about which we are meant to believe we as yet know nothing, since the knowledge could only have come along with us from that other, initial position. The leap left one off-balance. It was always bound to entail a non sequitur, or, as Husserl (after Aristotle) put it, a metabasis eis allo genos— an unjustified transition into another category or species of being.28 Yet to assert that only “I,” uniquely and without precedent, am now disposed so as to be capable of beginning to teach music with music, instead of with some abutting field of things to know about, is bound to sound just as brazen as, in retrospect, did all those various conceptual leaps. The charm of the exercise (or thought experiment) with the sustained low G on a cello or piano is that it softens this audacity by dispersing the responsibility for “knowing” anything at all about music among the population of students and readers. It says that the act of hearing music entails a distinctive disposition, a “harmonic attitude,” in which we are each already prepared to

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relate even an isolated tone to other tones. The apparent acoustical fact that most single instrumental and vocal tones are internally differentiated and perhaps even quasi-chordal ceases to be “merely” acoustical the moment it forms an occasion for motivating a particular kind of succession of one tone to another. For Güldenstein, it is the essence of musical tone that it can never exist in isolation but in order to be “musical” must form connections with other tones. This circumstance does not admit of explanation, merely of observation on the basis of what we have each ourselves come to experience, know, and feel when we are doing anything musical. If one did in fact imagine some genuinely isolated tone, then one would not be imagining a musical tone at all, but an acoustical tone, a fact without any musical significance on its own terms. Elsewhere, Güldenstein calls this the “static attitude” (statische Einstellung): “In this attitude, which approximates an acoustic-psychological attitude, sounds arrange themselves according to their affinity and fusion.”29 “Affinity” here, following classic work by Helmholtz, means the way tones are held to be related on the basis of shared overtones; it is a matter of physiological acoustics, the raw sensation of stimuli transmitted via neurological pathways. “Fusion,” by contrast, following Carl Stumpf ’s attempt to supersede Helmholtz’s physiologism, means the subjective judgment individuals form about the degree to which they perceive two tones to sound as if a single gestalt; it is a matter of “tone psychology.” But as long as, in the contrasting musical or “dynamic attitude” (dynamische Einstellung), one imagines some tone as musical— that is, as having a range of potential relations with other tones, which is what we normally do when we comport ourselves with attention to musical activities— the acoustical fact of its bearing within it such and such an array of harmonic upper partial tones would not simply cease to obtain any relevance; rather, it would affirm, amplify, or echo what we already know insofar as we already know how tonal music goes, initially fully independent of any immediate input from acoustic phenomena. It would “interest us,” as Güldenstein phrases it, for the way it helps us hear how the tone calls out for continuation toward (by default) the tone a fifth below it, a motion so fundamental to two centuries of tonal music theory that the two concepts— tonality and the descending fifth— had become almost unthinkable without one another. This at any rate is the upshot of Güldenstein’s phenomenology, insofar as it centers on a rather subtle characterization of the relationship between acoustics and music. The further details of his theoretical description are intriguing and suggestive, if not as unmistakably germane to our overarching theme of this wider effort to construct an anti-naturalistic music theory and pedagogy. The claim that a given tone comes to func-

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tion on its own terms as a virtual “dominant” is certainly idiosyncratic and breaks from every analogous precedent I am aware of, which tend to take an initial tonal phenomenon explicitly or implicitly as bearing an element of repose and hence “tonic” function.30 This claim has as a necessary chain of corollary implications the ideas (1) that musical tone is inherently relational (is specifically imbued with “gravitation,” as Güldenstein puts it), (2) that fifth relations are primary, (3) that a potential for infinite movement through the circle of perfect fifths is already latent within any individual tone (a potential that Güldenstein characterizes as suggesting an “infinite world”), and (4) that these relations must therefore be circumscribed by the various constructions that we call “scales” (which, especially in the case of the diatonic scale, realize the “finite world” that may also be thought to reside within the tone, once adequately reinterpreted within the relevant constraints).31 The adjacent questions that, from the perspective of a professional music theorist, might seem begged here— “What is a scale?,” “Where do scales come from?,” and so forth— are not exhaustively explored: “it would lead too far astray to carry out a phenomenological analysis of ‘scale’ here, and indeed it would scarcely be possible, insofar as it would need to be preceded by other analyses to which it could refer back.”32 But the underlying attitude continues to thematize the primary significance of familiarity, of already knowing how music goes, so as to arrive at a germane delimitation of the phenomenon. A scale is a registral ordering of pitches such that its consecutive intervals are either merely regular (as in a chromatic or whole-tone scale) or consistently stepwise (as in a diatonic scale). And how, in turn, do we recognize a “step”? Simply because we already know how it feels to move around within the musical space established by tonality itself, and hence we can tell the difference between the non-stepwise interval F-to-A♭ (in the context of, say, F minor) and the stepwise F-to-G♯ (in the context of A minor), intervals that in twelve-tone equal temperament are acoustically identical but musically unrelated (194– 95). This is not to say that consciousness of “tonality” is somehow given to us from birth, only that once it’s there, it’s there, and there is no need to look elsewhere to be able to speak to its presence. If this all remains a bit underwhelming as an interpretive strategy— how satisfying can a theory of tonality be without the slightest attempt to rationalize the arrangement of its basic elements?— it is worth emphasizing one last time that the intervention does not lie in a gesture of providing a surer footing or justification for musical phenomena, but instead in the gesture of asserting the priority of a musical consciousness that no longer need be “derived” in order to be taken as capable of imbuing musical experience with a coherent significance. What would remain is just the question of how tonality would

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show itself to consciousness, including not just its organizing principles but the peculiar array of objects, relationships, and characteristic gestures it comprises. The idea, however inchoate, that “musical experience” should now assume a kind of logical priority— or, at the very least, that theorists should no longer concern themselves unduly with some domain of thought itself imagined to be logically prior to “musical experience”— signals a critical turn. And it is at this point that Güldenstein looks directly to Husserl, quoting in full what is perhaps the most famous line from the first book of the latter’s 1913 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology: “Judging rationally or in a scholarly way about matters, however, means orienting oneself to the things themselves (sich nach den Sachen selbst richten), or, more precisely, it means returning from talk and opinions to the things themselves, questioning them as they are themselves given, and setting aside all prejudices alien to them.”33 In the quotation’s original context, Husserl had been seeking to differentiate his position from a naive empiricism, or what he calls “empiricistic naturalism.” If the goal of phenomenology is simply to get back to “things,” then it might at first appear that it shares the same basic goal as empiricism. Empiricisms had always been motivated by the desire to keep one’s eye on the ball, to use the pragmatic cliché. No more metaphysics, no more free-floating theories, facts rather than factoids. If we were to try to bridge the gap between Husserl and Güldenstein here, we might suppose that, for this kind of naturalism, the acoustical fact of tone, with all its overtones, combination tones, and beats, would constitute the immediate experience that only subsequently translates to what Husserl calls “mediated knowledge,” perhaps some sonority with a harmonic identity and potential meaning.34 But this two-step process from immediate experience to mediate cognition, we are now urged to see, is unnecessary and even misleading, because there is a different way in which the “things” or Sachen of tonal musical experience present themselves to us, other than as acoustical things. Getting “back to things,” from this point of view, would not mean leaving the familiarity of tonal musical activity behind, but precisely restoring it to view, taking it as something concrete in itself— not the matter that we know “too well” and must leave behind in order to come to understand it from outside, but the matter that we do not yet know well enough, in spite of ourselves. Husserl’s appeal in addressing this at once simple and difficult question of how things show up to us seems to have stemmed from his twin emphases both on the belief that the things, matters, or Sachen, of interest “give themselves”— are selbstgegeben— as well as on his observation that the way this “self-giving” occurs had never been properly appreciated by the var-

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ious forms of empiricism, idealism, and psychologism that competed for priority in earlier philosophical discourse. When Husserl, in the Ideas of 1913, introduced the particular kind of thing that interested him most— the “essence,” the object of so-called “eidetic seeing”— he described it as “an object of a new kind” (ein neuartiger Gegenstand), thus enacting a peculiar characteristic of phenomenology: it both tends to assure us of the essential familiarity of things and also makes such a big deal about their familiarity that they become unfamiliar, new sorts of objects.35 This apparent contradiction, the discovery of the “already there” as if for the first time and hence not “already” anything, runs throughout Güldenstein’s pedagogy as well. The problem lies in plain view especially in his deployment of Dalcroze eurhythmics. Dalcroze method, of which he was an early practitioner, first-generation disciple, and instructor, is a style of teaching in which students match body movements, of their own or of a teacher’s devising, with musical gestures on smaller and larger scales. Often the idea is to improvise movements to a passage of music in order to focus one’s attention on the dynamic fluctuation of specific qualities in the music. The question as to whether these movements import into musical experience something that is not “essential” to the music would seem to be begged immediately. On the one hand, Dalcroze method seems to mesh well with phenomenology in that it seeks to avoid the reification of musical perception that may occur when sounds are simply categorized according to concepts learned from books, and instead encourages attentiveness to immediate sensibility about how one feels music to go, since one has to be thinking on one’s feet in “expressing” the music at the moment that it happens. On the other hand, in committing oneself to some particular music-to-gesture relationship, how is one to know that the match is the “correct” one, without first having some pre-existing sense of what music is supposed to be like? (Here it is unresolved, here it comes to a rest, here things veer away from the center toward something new, and so on.) Furthermore, beginning students invariably must already have learned something about appropriate music-movement pairings by watching an instructor or other students. Güldenstein’s response to these objections is that, while it does seem intuitive, and pedagogically important, to be able to insist that some movements and bodily rhythms are indeed more “natural” than others— “any exercise is ‘wrong’ that goes against the nature of movement, and such exercises are to be excluded”— the ultimate aim of eurhythmics must not be understood to lie simply in getting the music or the movement right. Instead, the aim is to help people feel more at home with music, and to give them a sense of confidence in their musical engagement that is often

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blocked in the preoccupying and physically distracting process of learning an instrument. In a common closing exercise, which Güldenstein adopted from Dalcroze’s practice, students at the end of class were invited to move freely around the classroom in response to some improvised piano music, and here, “what counts is not whether a student’s movement is correct, nor that their attainment in dance is art; what counts above all is that they have gained the courage to express themselves at all.”36 In its original conception, phenomenology was not therapy.37 But, while not quite as directly as eurhythmics, it did give people a new sense of just what they, as persons, were capable of doing.

Beyond Psychologism If, as I have already suggested, Güldenstein’s distinction between “harmonic” and “acoustical” attitudes or Einstellungen— later recast as “dynamic” and “static”— is in keeping with a slightly older spirit of skepticism toward the naturalization of musical sound, this should not be interpreted as an indication of an overriding continuity of his theoretical program with its precursors. Rather, despite some overlap in methodological commitments, the 1928 text points toward a distinctive and novel way of approaching its material. In the most succinct terms, beyond the more obvious disengagement from acoustics, what we can observe at work in Güldenstein’s effort to envision a quasi-Husserlian phenomenology of tonality is the demotion of psychologistic music theory— or, in other words, a pivot away from a value hierarchy for which mental processes seen as essentially internal to listening subjects are uppermost, toward one for which this interiority remains secondary, though, once again, just what precedes it will continue to resist explicit specification. At the level of textual style, this shift involves a modulation in what might at first be considered merely a matter of rhetoric or tone. Güldenstein often approvingly cites Hugo Riemann (1849– 1919), the music scholar whose decades-long career at the University of Leipzig could plausibly be claimed to have made possible the twentieth-century idea of “music theory” as an area of professional specialization that would stand on its own, if only by virtue of a vigilant attention to its borders and affiliations with cognate and abutting fields. Yet there is only a superficial sense in which the younger theorist can be read as continuing to inhabit Riemann’s basic disposition toward musical sound. In his “Handbook on Acoustics” (first published in 1891, with several subsequent editions), Riemann reveals an ironic underlying disdain for the very topic of his own handbook to the extent that he characterizes acoustical phenomena themselves as so much

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Erdenschmutz, or “earthly filth.” It is in fact one of the most “comforting facts of musical aesthetics” that we, again, “listen beyond” (überhören) these details in order instead to apprehend the higher content that lies behind it.38 This higher content is a matter of the formal logic of musical relations that can be imagined mentally as “tone representations” (Tonvorstellungen) corresponding to, but abstracted from, the physical signal, a baldly antiacoustical notion whose elaboration occupies the latter third of Riemann’s handbook. And this trenchant instance of the anti-acoustical attitude was hardly incidental to Riemann’s overall outlook but was in fact its theoretical lynchpin. As he put it in his culminating statement of aesthetic ideology, “the Alpha and Omega of musical artistry is not found at all in the actually sounding music, but rather exists in the mental representation of tone relationships.”39 As throughout his career, the trajectory of musical knowledge, developing from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century, is cast as a tripartite ascent from physics to physiology to psychology— or, more particularly in the handbook, from “mathematical-physical” to “physicalphysiological” to “psychological”— where the third and final term, presented as the ultimate telos of understanding, is primarily occupied with the mind’s formal parsing of acoustical signals, the lowly Erdenschmutz, in terms of a reduced number of relatively simple harmonic interpretations. If “filth” is not tendentious enough, another theorist went Riemann one better. For Ernst Kurth (1886– 1946), whose career at the University of Bern picked up at more or less the same moment that Riemann’s was ending at Leipzig, it was axiomatic that acoustical “sonority is dead; what lives in it is the will to sonority.” Here, by contrast with the Riemannian understanding, the action of musical listening is not so much a transduction of sonic sensation into formalistic mental image as it is an empathetic immersion in the flow of a subcutaneous stream of energy, which is at once galvanic and noumenal: it animates the cadaverous acoustical surface of the music from within and makes it appear as if alive. But more than this, the very notion that “music” itself is to be sought or found in the world is a dangerous illusion. In fact, it can be located nowhere else but within a listener. “Music is a natural force in us, a dynamic of excitations of the will.” In a striking escalation of Riemann’s own formulation, Kurth insists not merely that the craft of musical organization is a matter of the intellectual manipulation of abstract relationships, but that music as a whole can only be grasped from a psychologistic standpoint. Sound is not just a distorted afterimage of true music, or an inconvenient but necessary conduit for pure thought from one mind to another, but is itself an outright impediment to what music really is: “The view into music is veiled by sonority. Yet theory has lost its ear for the unhearable, and thereby for the apprehension

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of its fundamental processes, which merely radiate through tones and sonorities.”40 In order to restore the truth of music to human knowledge, the music theorist— the student and the teacher— must henceforth renounce music as heard and turn their theoretical ears to the unheard, the inwardly imagined or felt. For thinkers such as these— the two most influential German music theorists of their era, with combined bibliographies spanning the half century from roughly 1880 to 1930 and hence marking out a historical period that could be described as the extended apogee of musical psychologism— sound as an acoustical signal is dirty at best and, at worst, dead, decaying, and rotten. It was only by virtue of its redemption within the human spirit that receives it that it could come to have any value at all. But this orientation— the denigration of the flesh of sound, the stern flagellation of acoustic materiality— is not Güldenstein’s, and it is certainly not phenomenological. Riemann and Kurth represent a mode of description of musical sound which, perhaps understandably, has sometimes been confused with the one I have begun to trace out in the foregoing discussion, but which ultimately must be seen to insist on fundamentally different values.41 Scholarship on Riemann and Kurth has always acknowledged their anti-acoustics. One could hardly do otherwise, since it is essential to their programs, a point of departure for their respective psychological explorations, proto-cognitivist in the one case, energeticist or quasi-vitalist in the other. But we miss something basic if we do not also take note of the implications of the animus toward sonority expressed in these theories. Even today, the retreat inward that is motivated here by a loathing of physically sounding phenomena may enjoy an intuitive recognition and may even smack of something laudable. Though it would be unusual nowadays to encounter a denunciation of acoustic sonority in such keen terms, I suspect that a deeply ingrained ideological commitment to the image of music’s psychologistic quintessence has nonetheless contributed to a contemporary cultural environment in which people are prepared to feel that music is meaningful above all not because of its actual situation in the world at large, but precisely because it affords opportunities for cultivating a private and inward self that is taken to be the most recognizable hallmark of one’s own value.42 By contrast, phenomenology, from its founding texts around 1900 onward— and ranging across the considerable diversity in methodology and intellectual style of its various practitioners in epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics— was predicated on the effort to show that one need not, and should not, retreat inward in order to achieve a vantage point on truth protected from the squalor and decay of the world, as if within the purity of

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the soul. Instead, the original image of phenomenological action was one of necessarily disposing oneself toward things— inclining, orienting, directing (richten)— even if these “things” were often held up for the imagination rather than standing in a physically obvious way “out there.” The way this antipsychologistic reorientation is characterized varies from one phenomenological text to another, and very often the emphasis falls on a suspicion of interiority for its supposed unreliability, self-absorption, and relativism. This negative characterization of interior experience shows up in Güldenstein, who extends Riemann’s tripartite division of musical knowledge by appending to the physics-physiology-psychology series the fourth term, phenomenology, which implicitly supersedes the others. Musical sound is accessible at various “levels,” which is to say in various of its aspects, none of which, crucially, can be reduced to or derived from any other one. One can approach musically pertinent questions along distinctly different pathways by asking about, first, “vibrating matter,” accessible from a physical perspective; second, “the mechanism of hearing,” accessible from a physiological perspective; third, “individual musical consciousness,” accessible from a psychological perspective; and now, finally, what he elects to call the “musical idea,” accessible from a phenomenological perspective.43 Yet it is the relation between the latter two levels, the psychological and the phenomenological, that is most difficult to pin down, and here Güldenstein is effectively at the end of his conceptual resources. In one example, which initially has no bearing on his main topic of tonality, he begins to dabble in preliminary questions of the ontology of the musical work (a staple of later philosophy of music, though with proximate origins in work by yet another Husserl student, Roman Ingarden [1893– 1970], who began to write on the topic at precisely the same time as Güldenstein but did not find a wider audience for his musical thought until the 1960s).44 As a thought experiment in helping us pass from psychology to phenomenology, he asks us to imagine a performance of a Mozart piano sonata, and to consider the charmless fact that what the music actually “is” can be grasped neither in terms of acoustics (because the constituent frequencies making up each performance could never be identical from one to the next), nor in terms of psychophysiology (because it would then need to be rooted in the observation of its discrete empirical effects on innumerable individual human bodies, and again not any single unity), nor in terms of psychology (because the experience of the performer and each person who hears it can easily be imagined to be accompanied by disparate mental impressions and thought processes). But surely there must be some one thing that is consistently referred to by all of these various features in each of the sonata’s performances:

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Thus in the end there is nothing left but to recognize that this one immutable thing is the idea of the sonata in question. It is the ideal object, which is intended (gemeint) with all real performances. On this ideal level alone, which is a matter neither of psychological nor acoustical process, are located the musical phenomena with which anyone will have to concern themselves if they want to make claims about musical relations. We should like to call this the phenomenological level.45

In contrast to the rather elegant, appealing, and pedagogically deft analysis Güldenstein had given to the non-acoustical engagement with musical tone, here we are confronted with a flat-footed and uncommunicative appeal to the aspect of Husserl’s teaching that is perhaps most likely to turn off otherwise lively and receptive minds. The thought that something like a Mozart piano sonata could be boiled down to a single, unchanging idea or essence that alone would authorize any worldly manifestation of it is hardly a strike against authoritarianism. On the contrary, it would seem to oblige us to pay homage at each moment to a God-like image, or anti-image, that cannot exist in the world except through distortion. Were that the case, it would be impossible to tell how Güldenstein’s phenomenological music theory differs from Riemann’s and Kurth’s psychological ones. Once again, I think a clue to solving this difficulty lies initially in matters of rhetoric or tone. Unlike his predecessors, Güldenstein never actually denigrates the acoustical or the physiological (or, now, the psychological) “levels” of access to music, even if it is clear that the latest, most recently disclosed modality of engagement is in fact understood to offer a wider view of things. The claim is not that one level precedes or lies behind another. The claim is instead that we need to differentiate among various modalities in order to become more conscientious about just what it is that we are talking about— this is, as he says, a matter of Aussagen, statements, claims, discourse. Nowhere in Güldenstein’s method are we told we must find the fixed point amid the flux and then cling to it with all our might. We are told instead that we must take an interest in the various ways that something ideal in turn enables subsequent experiences. As Dan Zahavi puts it (among others who have sought to put to rest a stubborn misconception about Husserlian phenomenology), “The reality of the object should not be sought behind its appearances, as if the latter were somehow hiding it; rather, it reveals itself in the optimal appearance.”46 Or, in Judith Butler’s formulation, “phenomenology seeks to tease the possible from the actual object, to display its ideality, not as an invisible perfection that lurks behind the phenomenal object, but precisely as the irreality of its givenness, the strangeness of quiddity, that it is rather than not.”47

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Similarly, in the Ideas of 1913, Husserl himself had sketched a specifically musical illustration of these points, where he is attempting to clarify how the perception of a thing may incrementally present itself through a series of varied profiles, none of which is in itself the thing. [A] violin’s sound is given, with its objective identity, through profiles [of resonance]; it has its changing manners of appearance. They are different, depending upon whether I come closer to the violin or move away from it, depending upon whether I am in the concert hall myself or hear it through closed doors, and so forth. No manner of appearance has claim to being valid as the way it is given absolutely, although a certain manner of appearance enjoys a certain prerogative as normal within the framework of my practical interests. For example, in the concert hall, in the “right” place, I hear the sound “itself,” how it “actually” sounds. . . . But that points merely to a kind of secondary objectification within the framework of the entire objectification of the thing, as one can easily recognize. It is, indeed, clear that if we cling exclusively to the “normal” manner of appearance, and if we delete the remaining manifolds of appearance and the essential connection to them, then nothing would remain of the sense of the thing’s givenness.48

The point here is that, on the one hand, there is no single location in the concert hall at which the “ideal” violin tone can be heard, since any individual instance of it is only a partial presentation of something far more differentiated. Yet, on the other hand, the individual appearances are not “lesser” versions of something absolute that we, in our worldly weakness, simply fail to grasp. Rather, it is in fact the essence of the thing that it shows itself through the iterative and infinite process of our coming to know one more facet of it after another. And while there may well be facets that reveal more at once than others, they nonetheless remain facets, never the thing, once and for all, since an absolute and unified way of presenting itself is only possible for particular sorts of givenness (like that of a feeling, Husserl supposes, though even here one might quibble). In this sense, things in their essence are excessive, not reductive, though the unfortunate terminology of “reduction” tends to discourage us from recognizing this. Güldenstein’s reading of Husserl, however, does not explicitly pursue things to such finer degrees. For him, in any case, it would appear that questions of the identity of the “musical work” are not in fact especially urgent. At almost precisely the moment that it would become reasonable and expected to define the quiddity of musical phenomena more fully and clearly in either their non-acoustic or non-psychological character, Güldenstein’s

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text peters out, leaving the task for some future point— or, more charitably and in truth more realistically, for some actual pedagogical practice: a live rather than a bookish phenomenology. Güldenstein survived the 1930s and 1940s just barely out of harm’s way as a Jew in Basel, continuing to teach without publishing. His posthumous Intervallenlehre maintains only a few of the theoretically rich lines of thinking from the work of his early adulthood, namely the distinction between “dynamic” and “static” hearing, albeit stripped of any reference to phenomenology per se.49 Yet whatever the gaps in his project, it is worth conceding the real difficulty of this task of description. The deep conviction that musical qualities might be characterized in other than acoustical terms, as well as in other than psychological terms— in short, that it manifested a way of being all its own that lay in plain view without having been articulated as such— fell far short of actually prompting any broadly shared method for making what had come to seem self-evident to the young theorists communicable in agreed-upon terms. As we turn now to several other representative phenomenologically inclined music theorists of the 1920s, we cannot help but be struck by how little consensus there was about just what should be taken as the privileged object or terrain for the new orientation. Having begun with a publication that appeared only near the end of the initial musical reception of phenomenology (though written earlier), we now step back several years toward the beginning of that period to survey several efforts, which, despite the partiality of their results, most clearly project the energetic optimism surrounding the adopted agenda.

“What Is the Phenomenology of Music?” For most phenomenologically inclined music theorists in the 1920s, the urgent object of critique was not simply psychoacoustics, a subfield of psychology oriented around the physics of sound, but rather “Psychology” writ large, which was taken to be a form of study that granted privileged attention to the private inner world of individuals. Yet this antipathy toward psychology as a whole ran the risk of a critical misfire, where the original phenomenological distinction from naturalism got blurred under the pressure of an affiliated but ultimately rather different project of antisubjectivism. The following stage of discussion will begin with an example of one such redirection of phenomenology (Hans Mersmann), then pass through a few attempts at course correction (Moritz Geiger, Paul Bekker, Herbert Eimert), and finally conclude with the briefest sketch of what might have been a more coherent vision of a music-phenomenological research plan had its author (Arthur Wolfgang Cohn) not died at a young age.

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Hans Mersmann An especially keen, even Puritanical belief in the importance of bracketing individual experience is evident in the work of Hans Mersmann (1891– 1971), a folk song specialist, early radio broadcaster, and editor of the influential modernist music journal Melos from 1924 to 1934.50 By his reckoning, psychologistic musical thought enfolded a wide range of aesthetic discourse, including hermeneutics, Riemann’s own anti-acoustical theory of tone representations, and recent theories of Einfühlung or “projective empathy”— comparative neologisms in both German and English naming the act of projecting one’s own inward states onto exterior aesthetic events.51 In each case, it seemed, the value and meaning of aesthetic experience was taken to be dependent on what Mersmann called “ego relations,” or Ichbeziehungen. Taking them one by one: first, the aesthetics of empathy threatened to invite an improper psychological identification of an observer with an artwork; second, the project of hermeneutics seemed to have been hijacked by an arbitrariness of linguistic utterance whereby poetic description threatened to overtake and subsume the artwork; and third, even so ostensibly formalist a thinker as Riemann had come to insist on locating the value of musical hearing in the internal representational faculties of individual listeners. What was now needed, Mersmann declared, was an attitude of standing back and clearing a space in which a substrate of basic musical forces might be seen unobscured by interpretive or cognitive-representational self-assertions. The new attitude or standpoint, he asserted in a 1924 conference paper, “regards the artwork as a phenomenon (Erscheinung), which I will translate more freely and fundamentally: as an organism. It attempts to detach this observation from all relations to the observer, as far as this is possible. With this detachment from all ‘egorelations,’ associative factors of observation fall away, and its subjective, secondary aspects— that is, its tendencies toward paraphrase as opposed to designation— become delimited, while striving for the greatest possible objectivity and relative bindingness of results.”52 Where Güldenstein’s method worked by coaxing students into deceptively simple forms of phenomenological exercise, Mersmann proceeded instead by pronouncement and overt analytical demonstration, which would stand or fall on the ability of a reader to actualize the descriptive propositions in the act of listening. His first and most extensive attempt to envision the prospects of a phenomenological music aesthetics appeared in a 1923 journal article, whose featured test case is an analysis of a complete composition, rendered both in verbal description and also in the graphic

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Example 1.3. From Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik” (1923), 261

Example 1.4. From Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” 256

representation shown in example 1.3.53 Here, the first movement of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Sonata in E♭ Major, Hoboken XVI:49, is presented as a fluctuation of “tension” and “relaxation,” with the curvilinear trajectory tending up at moments of asserted tension and down at moments of asserted relaxation. Mersmann maps the tension-relaxation spectrum onto neither register (as one might assume) nor harmonic function nor even some symbolic harmonic space, but instead onto certain features of formal design that he hears in terms of an underlying polarity of “forces.” His model asserts a basic distinction between “motive” and “line”— or, to be precise, “motivic forces” (motivische Kräfte, as identified on the upper half of the figure) and “linear counterforces” (lineare Gegenkräfte below the horizontal axis). “Motive” is understood here to be any brief musical figure that is open-ended and forward-tending and therefore characterized by tension, while “line” is closed and balanced, tending toward relaxation. “Line is being, state, present; motive is becoming, will, future. Line is essentially passive, resting or decaying force, complete at each moment of its being; motive is essentially active, penetrating force, incomplete in its appearance yet of the strongest driving force. Motive is seed; line is blossom.”54 In the Haydn sonata example, the two wiggly sixteenth-note groups that open the movement exemplify “motive” (ex. 1.4), while the smoother, predominantly stepwise eighth-note continuation in mm. 3– 4 exemplifies “line.”55 On the full-movement linear graph, this four-measure passage corresponds to the segment labeled “1,” represented as two successive billowings up above example 1.3’s central axis (“A”), followed by a single dip below (“B”). While contour in this particular case happens to correlate

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Example 1.5. From Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” 242

roughly with the tension graph, what fundamentally motivates the representational choices are the asserted formal qualities of the component gestures, regardless of registral orientation. Mersmann runs some distance with this central polarity, further associating the driven motive with the formal unit he calls “theme” on the one hand, while associating the stabilized line with the “period” on the other (ex. 1.5). For what should be obvious reasons, however, a neat dualism cannot be maintained, and the categories, heuristic at best, cross-pollinate one another (as indicated by the crossing lines at the top of ex. 1.5): the basic unit of the motive must be allowed to appear within the larger construction of the period, though its open-ended, future-oriented quality will be contained and stabilized.

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Proceeding hierarchically down from the theme-period pair, he moves to a broader contrast between developmental (or motive- driven) and successive (or line-driven) forms, at the diagram’s bottom even mapping the opposition onto a background polarity between content (again, motivedriven) and form itself, which as an overarching characterization of the quality of musical closure would be associated with the stabilizing character of line. From either a phenomenological or a traditional music-theoretical perspective, there is much to wonder about regarding this kind of effort at abstract, total systematization. For one thing, it is uncertain how someone so opposed to poetic description, and indeed to any reliance on representation, could fail to see how a graphic interpretation, such as his Haydn analysis, might be viewed as pointing away from the ostensibly immediate phenomena of music to which he sought to return. Paul Bekker (1882– 1937), whose own phenomenology we will visit shortly, was quick to point out in response to Mersmann’s methods how even those who deny hermeneutics “become hermeneuts themselves the moment they begin to talk seriously about music,” a group he took to include not only Mersmann, but also Heinrich Schenker, August Halm, and Hans Pfitzner, among others.56 Furthermore, the essentially poetic metaphor of “force” at the center of Mersmann’s descriptive vocabulary draws him into Kurth’s orbit, an awkward mésalliance given Kurth’s deployment of the jargon of “energy” as an explicitly psychic event.57 Though Mersmann acknowledges the affiliation, his wager that the idea of Kraft could be imputed directly to musical events with no mediating element of language or psychological self-reflection would remain unargued and undefended. Despite the anxious rhetoric that accumulates around his desire to rid musical discourse of “ego-relations,” the curious fact remains that Mersmann did not quite promise anything like a rigorously objective standpoint purified of all psychologism or hermeneutics. Rather, he eventually admits that even the suspect hermeneutics of nineteenth-century criticism itself is not necessarily to be avoided altogether, just made subsequent to the study of qualities (“forces”) whose characterization he takes to be less susceptible to individual variation. Furthermore— and more interesting, since it places Mersmann roughly in line with the cultural aspirations we saw at work in Güldenstein’s pedagogy— it emerges that Mersmann’s ulterior, if less overt, aim was to construct a descriptive language that could bypass the representational forms of traditional music theory and enable laypeople to begin the work of observing musical phenomena on their own. He recounts delivering a lecture displaying his Haydn analysis to a consortium of musically untrained students at the Volkshochschule Groß-Berlin (an adult community

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college of Greater Berlin), where participants “originated predominantly from petit bourgeois circumstances,” as he puts it. The graphic representation enabled “two thirds” of the students to follow the musical trajectory closely, as evidenced in the outcome that “a keen deepening of the artistic impression was noticeable in all of them, which . . . found expression in discussion that never went completely off track.”58 Moritz Geiger And then again, however, whatever the projected social aspirations of this style of “applied phenomenology,” there is little support for the notion that phenomenological aesthetics as a whole was undertaken in order to realize democratizing impulses. This was brought home at one of the pivotal moments in German aesthetic discourse in this period, the Second Conference for Aesthetics held in Berlin in October 1924, where Mersmann presented a condensed account of his phenomenology and, more prominently, where Moritz Geiger (1880– 1937), an established philosopher who had belonged to Husserl’s early inner circle, presented a general outline for the project he called simply “Phenomenological Aesthetics.” In a keynote paper of that title, Geiger remarked that phenomenology would displace the less discriminating forms of knowledge associated with “empiricistic naturalism,” as Husserl had called it. The oft-reiterated rhetorical gesture of moving from “brute facts” to “essences” might have made this point more subtly on its own, but Geiger made it overt. “We have been spoiled by what we may call the democratic character of natural science. We believe it must be accessible to anyone who simply brings along a tough enough backside and possesses that logical aptitude which is presupposed at least in principle to be common property.” By contrast, “the disciplines which rely on phenomenological method are aristocratic in nature,” because phenomenology is not something one learns simply by reading, watching a physics demonstration, “listening to lectures on aesthetics or psychology, or by appropriating the opinions of others or historical information, but only by one’s own endeavors (Selbsttätigkeit), by self-reliant analyses.”59 As our discussion of Güldenstein’s pedagogy above has already suggested, Geiger’s characterization of phenomenological aesthetics as a matter of “self-reliant” action, driven by an ethos of impersonalism and unaided by popularizing shortcuts, was not sui generis. In a similar sentiment expressed in his magnum opus on “Applied Musical Aesthetics,” Angewandte Musikästhetik (1926), Mersmann claimed that the new aesthetics was no longer really “theory” at all but rather a Wegbereitung, a “path- clearing” or “preparation,” seeking to open a point of access to musical phenomena.

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Phenomenology, he wrote, is the “final segment of a development” that could be seen “in the renunciation of Romanticism and psychology and the orientation toward the artwork itself.”60 Whatever his divergence from a classical phenomenological teaching or “school,” then, we may observe at the very least that in casting his style of thinking as a matter of a thematic “orientation” (Hinwendung), turning-toward or turning-outward, Mersmann was practicing what we have seen to be a hallmark of the phenomenological attitude: the thematization of one’s disposition or stance toward the world, as opposed to a naturalistic account, after the fact, of what the world does to us without our intentional engagement, which is what they accused psychologistic aesthetics of attempting. What kind of object did Geiger, a professional philosopher in contrast to the dilettante Mersmann, think a phenomenologist should take up? In his most public formulation on the occasion of the 1924 conference, the phenomenological object at first seems to be defined negatively: that is, as what is not “real” in the naturalistic sense of, say, the sensations that make up some particular aesthetic experience. Aesthetic value or lack of value of any kind, however, does not belong to objects as real objects, but only in so far as they are given as phenomena. It pertains to the sensuous sounds of a symphony— the sounds as phenomena, not the sounds considered as made up of vibrations of air. A statue is not aesthetically significant as a real block of stone, but as what is given to the beholder, as the representation of a living being. And it is of no consequence aesthetically whether the singer portraying Gretchen is old and ugly and owes the appearance of youthful freshness only to effects of costume, make-up, and footlights. What matters is the appearance, not the reality.61

In fact, there are two noteworthy styles of characterization overlapping in this statement. The first amounts to know-it-when-I-see-it-ism: the musical phenomenon is nothing more than what the word implies, what “appears,” what “shows up” to me, and I should not need to waste time trying to say more about the conditions of this appearance because it is, after all, literally self-evident. This is of course not a satisfactory approach, making the second style of characterization all the more welcome: here, things are clarified by way of an analogy with one particular art form, the theater. “Gretchen” refers of course to the character in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s great drama, Faust, part one (1808), and hence retains a theatrical function, even if Geiger’s image of a singing persona suggests that he had more immediately in mind Franz Schubert’s famous setting of one of her

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characteristic passages as the lied “Gretchen am Spinnrade. Aus Goethes Faust” (1814). The value of this line of thought for phenomenological analysis does not seem ever to have been fully cashed out, yet it captures the sensibility Geiger had in mind quite well. In contrast to what Riemann and Kurth (and perhaps even Mersmann, in spite of his efforts) might have us assume, when you attend to a vocal persona, it would be absurd to think that the fleshly aspect of its mode of production is somehow an outright obstacle to engaging the persona itself. Setting aside Geiger’s example of one woman standing in for another— the “wrong” one for the “right” one, a misogynist crack that only distracts from an otherwise theoretically defensible point— we do not take pains to ignore, suppress, or listen “beyond” the physical presence of the singer herself, since the singer must obviously remain the locus of that persona. Nor is there some magic involved whereby the singer transforms herself into someone she is not. No mystification is required to give an account of the phenomenon of hearing someone sing a role, and this is emphatically not a case of illusion, as if the real were to be negated and replaced by something whose positing is at bottom false. Geiger claims instead that it is possible for a particular presence, one that is borne by but not identical with the physical body, to be produced within the situation of dramatic song. The adopted persona and the singer-actor herself are each equally as much in the here and now as the other, and our attention may (or even must) follow each at the same time, or at least flicker back and forth between the two in an otherwise unnoticed, oscillating equilibrium. Paul Bekker Geiger’s 1924 statement only hinted at a greater subtlety and specificity than it was in fact able to articulate, and perhaps partly as a result, the published conversation around music phenomenology in the immediate wake of the Berlin conference had the feeling of whiplash that came with residual disagreement on the question of what its object should be. One visible outlier here was the critic Paul Bekker, who contributed two texts to the discussion within a few months: first, an engaging if idiosyncratic short treatise, On the Natural Domains of Sonority: Outline of a Phenomenology of Music (1925), which was almost completely uninformed by the classical texts of practitioners of phenomenology itself even though it displayed all the musical erudition for which Bekker has been rightly admired; and second, an essay in a prominent music journal, in which he asked directly, “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?” and then proceeded to answer

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the question by flying in the face of professional philosophical consensus and asserting that such a mode of study could have no other object than “sonority” (Klang) itself, and even more specifically sonority as a “natural” phenomenon.62 Not entirely without reason, his rationale for this position is that to the extent that phenomenology declares itself concerned with discovering the “essence” of something as complex and varied as music, it must have to find a basic enough common denominator to encompass everything that might fall under such a broad heading. From this perspective, the notion suggested by Geiger wherein sounding tone is not itself the phenomenon but only the bearer of a phenomenon, in the manner of an actor bearing a persona with which she is not identical— this notion is too historically particular to account for everything that might count as “music” in 1925. Bekker makes an equally cogent point against Mersmann’s denigration of hermeneutics by noting that the sheer variety of possible ways of being musical must include a kind of music that is “hermeneutically conceived” (his emphasis), which is to say created on the tacit understanding that it would be heard as constituted by layers of meaning that may be more or less evident or accessible to later listeners but in any case all but call out for discursive recognition. Bekker’s riposte is that even a “hermeneutically conceived” music is a cultural form that still rests upon an underlying substrate of natural phenomena, and while the cultural forms may vary, the substrate remains unchanged. Herbert Eimert Bekker’s essay, prompted by the 1924 conference, in turn prompted a rejoinder by the musician and scholar Herbert Eimert (1897– 1972), who had been studying with Scheler, among others, and was widely enough read to see that Bekker’s attempt to revert to a naturalistic grounding would never be able to answer the demands phenomenology was placing on musical discourse.63 Unlike Mersmann and Bekker, Eimert grasped that a true phenomenology of musical listening would have to develop a more sophisticated analysis of the act-like character of listening itself. It could not peremptorily posit, as Mersmann did, a force phenomenally inherent in the movement of tonal figures, toward which one might imagine oneself to be orienting oneself without implicating one’s own perceptual activity. Nor could it simply imagine, as Bekker did, that there is something out there in the “natural” world that one might perceive to be the inert material upon which “cultural” attitudes were secondarily overlaid after the fact. Eimert maintained that the objectivistic fixation on the idea of a detached phenomenon, whether Kraft or Klang, was no less a dead end than the anti-

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pode it opposed, namely the subjectivistic idea of an empathetic listening that fixated on what a listener projects onto musical sound from within the privacy of their own psyche. A phenomenological understanding of music would instead have to acknowledge the way in which musical sounds form a kind of condition for a mode of hearing that reaches out toward them and, in an action of “intending,” activates a network of meaning that, while not inherent in sounding relations, is nonetheless constituted through the act of engaging them. Phenomenology takes this act of perception not as an imparting of meaning fulfilled by the subject, or as an additive connection, as “association,” but as an object-conditioned act-network of “ideation,” of “ideational intending” (Husserl). Sonority is thus given as acoustical matter and is simultaneously comprehended as meaningful “idea”— that is, it is meaningful in itself. It has, like every object, “sensory” and “nonsensory” qualities. Now a one-dimensional, idealistic standpoint would claim that the non-sensory qualities of the sound constitute its actual, deeper meaning, just as a sensualist perspective would say the same of the sensory qualities. Yet phenomenology considers both properties immediately. It intuitively knows of the unity of form and content and thus sees sound as a totality free of mediation, as “intuitive plenitude.”64

In this passage, whose conceptual specificity is indicated above all by the charged notion of “ideational intending” (ideierendes Meinen), Eimert comes closer to deploying the terminology of intentionality than the other theorists we have encountered so far in this chapter. Although intentionality is widely held to be central to the program of phenomenological research from its inception in 1900, the concept played very little or no role in the writings of Güldenstein, Mersmann, Bekker, and even Geiger.65 To understand the act of musical listening as an intentional act, for Eimert, is to understand that it always consists in the reference to a meaning, which accounts for his wording in terms of Meinen as opposed to Intention, both of which are commonly rendered as “intention” in English translations of phenomenological literature.66 “Meaning” in this context seems not to be taken as something particular or determinate, let alone hermeneutically ornate, but simply as the fulfillment of the general possibility for “feeling.” The intentional reference to meaning, in other words, just is the act of feeling. Feeling refers not simply to a passive response, not to an event that transpires inwardly, merely “within” the person, but instead refers to potentialities that musical events themselves bear and that may be activated at the moment of listening. For Eimert, this understanding helps

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account for how one may simultaneously feel an inward (“subjective”) cheerfulness, while at the same time intentionally referring to the (“objective”) mood of mourning evoked by a funeral march.67 Eimert’s phenomenology essay was published more in a promissory spirit than as a statement of fully formed method, and it contains neither extended musical examples nor well-developed concepts. It should be fairly plain that there was much in his contribution that would have required further working out, only some of which was in evidence elsewhere in the contemporary discourse. Nor did his subsequent work— including the many musical writings from the better-known phase of his career after World War II that was capped by the co-founding and directorship of the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio— pick up the key concept of intentionality that he broached in 1926, though he did season a 1932 dissertation on form in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music with Heidegger citations.68 But these thematics did not go completely unrealized either, and I will suggest in chapter four that it is in the context of one of his own electronic compositions from three decades later that we may best begin to appreciate a complex analysis of feeling-oriented intentionality stemming from the wider intellectual inheritance he shared. Moreover, Eimert’s pivot away from a vision of phenomenology that focused on recharacterizing the qualities of the musical “object,” toward one that better reflected the tendencies of academic phenomenology by focusing at least as much on the character of perceptual acts, was far from an isolated move in the interwar environment. Although many of even the most interested music scholars missed the opportunity to incorporate a thoroughgoing and enriching account of intentionality into musical discourse, it is at any rate this latter focus more broadly on the act-character of hearing that motivates all of the remaining chapters of this book. Arthur Wolfgang Cohn Before turning away from this chapter’s initial overview of the reception of phenomenological ideas within music discourse, however, one figure in particular deserves comment since he had in fact begun to adapt the thematic of intentionality to musical discourse in an original way that has remained almost completely unnoticed.69 Arthur Wolfgang Cohn (1894– 1920), whose lifework was cut short in a hiking accident when he was twenty-six, had already demonstrated considerable expertise in two otherwise mutually unrelated areas, music aesthetics and political economy. The disparity between these research emphases put him in a unique position to bring certain questions into a distinctive focus. At the same time, the

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link between Cohn’s two themes is a common concern that could not help but preoccupy anyone living through the first years of the Weimar Republic, which was born in the midst of a period of destabilizing inflation that actually began with financing the war itself (even if it is best known for the spectacular hyperinflation that came only after Cohn’s death): namely, the question of value. How is it that things in the world come to have, and to lose, value in the first place? In a line of inquiry that was never followed up in the terms Cohn had begun to lay out in the last two years of his life, the approach to this question for musical contexts seems to have been guided by a complex triangulation among issues of fluctuating legal theory surrounding music copyright, issues of monetary theory stemming from uncertainty following Germany’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1914, and issues of phenomenological theory.70 Thus, when Cohn asks in 1919, “What is money? What does it signify? What sense does it have?,” and then suggests in 1920 that the most urgent task for music aesthetics is to establish what he calls a “science of value,” or Wertwissenschaft, it should not come as a complete surprise if the terms in which he couches the theory of value are largely the same for both contexts.71 For both, the framing conceptual gesture is avowedly phenomenological. In the money book, the inquiry into the “essence of money” is characterized outright as a matter of “eidetic reduction,” which Husserl had glossed as the method “that leads . . . from the factual (‘empirical’) universality to the universality of an ‘essence.’”72 Neither of the long-standing older alternatives against which “reduction” was being proposed— on the one hand, “induction” (empirical inquiry into how money has in fact been deployed in historical practice), on the other hand, “deduction” (movement from a definition of monetary value in terms of abstract first principles down to local instances)— had been able to provide workable methods that could answer pressing contemporary policy questions. Reduction promised to supersede its rival methods as theorists became desperate to break the methodological stalemate “between factual experience and pure speculation, between individual happenstance and empty formalism, between historical-statistical induction and hypothetical deduction.”73 The term “eidetic reduction” in particular means thematization of the structure of the act of consciousness whereby value is not merely derived (deductively) or observed (inductively), but given, such that Cohn can now say that we can only specify the meaning of money “if we go back to the meaning-bestowing consciousness, the ‘originarily presentive act’ (Husserl), in which we behold money in its peculiarity.”74 Cohn takes the phrase “originarily presentive act” (originär gebender Akt) from a key early passage in the 1913 Ideas, the same in fact that calls for the “return to things them-

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selves” along with the crucial caveat that not all “things” are “things of nature.”75 In the case of money, what could ever be the “natural” basis of value? Not any equivalent mass in gold, certainly, and all the more obviously in the absence of the gold standard after 1914; and not exchange for some other object, particularly in light of the failure of attempts to set up an ersatz wartime barter economy, referred to by German economists as Naturalwirtschaft (“natural economy”) or Naturaltausch (“natural exchange”). Instead, Cohn argued, the analysis of value would have to proceed from an analysis of intentional consciousness, from the intentional act in which value is given in the act of seeing, where “given” does not mean either that an evaluative intuition itself imposes value from the standpoint of the subject, or that value is inherent in the object, but rather that a worldly potential for value precedes the beholder yet is brought into actuality, is fulfilled, only through being engaged intentionally— in short, in being intended. Cohn’s simultaneous preoccupation with the question of aesthetic value brings this theoretical orientation to bear mutatis mutandis on music.76 In fact, for him, what the basic project of aesthetics is can be characterized simply as the cautious, iterative, and in principle infinite process of the intentional fulfillment of what is musically given. It is, he writes, the “judgmental formulation of what is evidentially given in the sphere of musical cognition.”77 Yet this is a recontextualized paraphrase of a sentence written by Scheler not in the context of aesthetics but of ethics, in his epochal critique of Kantian “ethical formalism”: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1913). What Scheler actually wrote was that “ethics is only the judgmental formulation of what is given in the sphere of moral cognition. And it is philosophical ethics if it restricts itself to the a priori content of the evidentially given of moral cognition.”78 In a nutshell, Scheler’s position is that the world is not even just a world of things at all, but also a world of values, which, however, are never absolute or emptily formal but are, once again, “given” on the occasion of personal acts of feeling— preferring, loving, hating, and so forth— acts in which the value aspects of the world suddenly “come forth” (sich erschließen).79 Scheler’s phenomenological value ethics is far too extensive and ramified to explore in any detail here, yet we might at least note that his analysis of the worldly manifestation of value, despite its lesser emphasis on the jargon of intentionality, has a broad structural similarity to the way the theme is treated in Husserl’s Ideas (with which it shared a cover, as both first appeared in the inaugural 1913 volume of the Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung). Valuing or evaluating is in fact one of the basic categories of intentionality for Husserl. Cohn duly cites him observing that the characteristic phenomenological gesture of turning-

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toward (Hinwendung) may be discerned not only in contexts of perception but also in the less readily psychologizable scene of ethical evaluation. “In the act of evaluating,” Husserl affirms in a key passage quoted by Cohn, “we are turned toward the value. . . . The intentional object, the value as such . . . is only made into an apprehended object in a unique ‘objectifying’ turn. We are turned to some subject matter in the course of valuing something that coentails, to be sure, the apprehension of it. Yet not the mere subject matter, but instead the valued subject matter or the value . . . is the full intentional correlate of the act of valuing.”80 Here, then, is the basis for Cohn’s own distinctive answer to the question as to what we are hearing when we are not hearing (just) acoustically: in Husserl’s more precise terms, we may be turned at once toward “the mere matter” (die bloße Sache) and also toward “the valued matter” (die werte Sache), which is to say more simply its value. In another instance of phenomenology’s seeming to create the very things that it claims it is bringing us “back” to, the two— the matter and its value— are not identical, and the specification of value now becomes a project for some future, still unrealized, music theory. The abstraction calls out for exemplification, which Cohn serves up in the form of a generous literature review of scholars (August Halm, Alfred Heuß, Ernst Kurth, Hans Pfitzner, Hugo Riemann, Arnold Schering) whom he takes to have pursued the task of “valuing” in a phenomenological mode. Yet this survey is certainly too generous. The conceptual specificity he displays in his reading of Husserl and Scheler simply cannot survive the translation to such a wide range of writers. Instead of imagining that a thematic intentionality or some other trace of the phenomenological was widely manifest throughout musical discourse already as of 1920, we can only wish that Cohn had been able to instantiate his method himself.81 Moreover, Cohn’s aprioristic insistence on the “evidential givenness” of value projects a vividness and animation pointing in two different stylistic directions, which together might be described either as complementary or as mutually canceling, depending on one’s sensibilities: on the one hand, a zealous commitment to the importance of scholarly activity as a privileged site for the intentional fulfillment of aesthetic value; and on the other hand, a note of obligation toward the musical object that threatens to tilt toward the authoritarian (Musikästhetik als Sollenswissenschaft, “Music Aesthetics as a Science of Ought,” as he puts it).82 The former tendency, in which musical knowledge undergoes a modulation away from speculation and toward an image of evaluative thought itself as a substantive practice, had already come into focus in a slightly earlier essay that features a striking characterological sketch of what Cohn thought the music-scholarly persona could aspire to become.

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Even the scholar, the theorist, is a person, is endowed not merely with understanding, but also with spiritedness and volition. Alongside their intelligence (insight), they possess fantasy (power of imagination) and energy (vigor). If they primarily view the environment factually, impersonally— and this one-sidedness is explained and determined by the incompleteness of everything real— they nevertheless “live” and “experience,” do not merely think, but also feel and act. And thus they proceed from knowing to acknowledging, from judging to adjudicating, from theorizing to the praxis of knowing. At this point, alongside its factual rightness, this praxis of knowing, like any praxis of human life, obtains a valuative validation. Impersonal knowing, which is bound to nature, becomes rededicated to culture, to truth as an idea of value. Knowledge as such is now no longer only fact and concept, but also . . . good and work, treasure and aim, standard and goal. Knowing is just as much the valuing and creation of value as it is research, wisdom, communication. Knowledge in this sense, as cultural realization of the idea of truth, is called science.83

The replacement of “mere thinking” by “feeling and acting” suggests shadings of Scheler’s phenomenological mood, as distinguished from Husserl’s. Among other things, this affective disposition enables Cohn’s sharper, and in a certain regard rather forward-looking, characterization of music studies as a cultural practice that trafficked in the actualization of value. Yet the privilege accorded to “givenness” also provides an opening for a profoundly conservative ethics, according to which a Cohn or a Scheler can slip smoothly from contemplating a tableau of judging what is given in knowledge to asserting that “if a value is self- given . . . then willing (or choosing in the sense of preferring) becomes necessary in its being, according to an essential lawfulness.”84 As with Güldenstein’s phenomenologizing Dalcroze practice, tensions remain between the unprejudiced observation of things as they are and the normalization of the status quo. Projecting a vision of aesthetics as action will not stop anyone from entertaining a vision of aesthetics as assent. Again, given the notorious difficulties involved in understanding Scheler’s value ethics, it is not possible to reckon the implications of Cohn’s sketch for a Musikästhetik als Sollenswissenschaft here.85 Still, I would at least suggest that, however distasteful the prospect of setting up a speculative discourse for the purposes of dictating aesthetic norms, it is not inherently malign to inquire into the quality of the feeling of compulsion some art seems to exert. A speculative theory of obligation toward aesthetic objects— in the sense of feeling compelled to attend to things, to clarify

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them, to care about them, to value them— could still be sympathetically interpreted as a worthwhile task, and perhaps particularly under the historical conditions of 1919. The unapologetically pro-modernist Bekker, who otherwise appears a bit out of step with our overall theme, was almost certainly correct to characterize the phenomenological turn that had come into full view by the mid-1920s as a moment of historical caesura, in which the structure of the personal relationship to musical objects fundamentally changed. For one thing, phenomenology seemed to Bekker to voice a kind of accusation against naive belief in any clever overcoming of the past. If the “mania for progress, the theory of development as an ascent,” or the “conception of history as a ‘becoming,’” had been “an exclusive property of the nineteenth century and was borne with it to the grave”— along with, we must infer, the sixteen million immediate victims of the war, as well as the further fifty million or more victims of the ensuing flu pandemic of 1918– 1920 that spread with massive wartime population displacement— then what was needed was an end to programs, dogma, and even workaday art criticism, in favor of “a passionate clarification of phenomena and their laws.” This was not a repudiation of change exactly, and indeed “change” would of necessity displace “progress” as the default mode of historical narrative. Yet it did entail “the knowledge that the dream of perpetual progress has been exhausted, that this path has been trodden to the end— an inner pause, then, and a moment of reflection and with that, the surfacing of the question, ‘What is that?’ But with this question, the turn to phenomenology is already completed.”86

[ Ch a pter 2 ]

Debussy, Outward and Open

Evening of March 8, 1921, Madrid, Calle Serrano near the Puerta de Alcalá. Eduardo Dato, the moderate prime minister of Spain, is being driven home from the Senate. Three Catalan anarchosyndicalists on motorcycles fire their revolvers twenty-seven times into his automobile. He is dead by the time the chauffeur reaches a hospital. Earlier that day, the center-left Madrid newspaper El Sol has published the first half of an essay by the critic and philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, praising the music of Claude Debussy for refusing to pander to a complacent bourgeoisie. The turbulent events delay publication of the essay’s second half by two weeks. When it finally appears, Ortega is attempting to describe a necessary change in “attitude,” taking up a posture of protective alertness: “Sometimes a spring of delightful memories opens in the depths of our inwardness. It then seems that we are closed to the outside world and, gathering ourselves up, we remain attentive to the intimate source, absorbedly savoring the shimmering fountain of fragrant reminiscences. This attitude is inward concentration.  If, suddenly, a few pistol shots resound in the street, we abandon the immersion in ourselves, emerge into the exterior world, and observing from the balcony, direct the five senses, all of our attention, toward the fact that is occurring in the street. This is outward concentration.”1 Debussy is like this too, which is why we must observe it aright: music that can only be heard as pointing us outward toward the world while keeping it at a safe distance, like gunfire in the street. Early spring 1924, Freiburg, university office of Edmund Husserl. His twentytwo-year-old student Günther Stern (later Günther Anders) sits across from him. Stern-Anders has just asked his advisor if doing philosophy might ever become less a matter of continuously repairing a damaged net and more a matter of dancing on the net. “First he stared at me aghast over the rims of his glasses. But then the full professor in him was awakened, his dignity offended. ‘Me, dance?’ he asked, as if that were the most immoral thing one could suggest of a well-positioned, tenured philosopher. In fact, he had summoned me, his doctoral student, to his office when a rumor ‘reached his ears that I had danced the whole night of Carnival in costume,’ in order to give me a bit of life advice: ‘A phenomenologist does not dance, least of all in costume!’ When I answered that I had neither danced as a phenomenologist nor dressed up as one, he shot back— and he meant it— ‘So what did you dress up as?’”2

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An Outward Turn A central but underdeveloped theme that emerged over the course of the previous chapter was the image of reorientation, an intentional Hinwendung or “turning toward” music, which is clearly premised on the notion of music subsisting essentially outside the person. By and large, I reported the fact of this formulation without extensive evaluation. Clearly, though, as Geiger had explicitly told the attendees of his 1924 conference address, there is not much one can do with such a notion without entering into some fairly intensive investigations of one’s own— without effectively taking up the demand for Selbsttätigkeit, in other words, and doing the phenomenology in one’s own manner. The present chapter means to take up this challenge, while at the same time introducing two new figures, here writing between 1920 and 1928 in the phenomenological style they saw modeled by Husserl, Scheler, Geiger, and Heidegger. The discussion is focused and motivated, moreover, by the striking circumstance that one particular repertory— the music of Claude Debussy (and really, to be sure, in only a few of its salient aspects)— was privileged within a pair of representative texts as a case in point for their broader arguments. The goal, however, is not so much to “apply” a theory in order to see what it might teach us about this music. Rather, what is intended here, as throughout the book, is the imaginative reconstruction of an attitude, mode of listening, or perceptual style, and the correlative attempt to augment a sketchy speculative-theoretical discourse with somewhat— though by no means exhaustively— more circumspect description of possible musical experience. In other words, rather than an essay on “Debussy reception” in interwar aesthetics, the following is instead a heuristic examination of two specific efforts to imagine the structure of listening, where “Debussy” (as a shorthand for a broad set of putative musical qualities, which we may or may not agree are accurately attributable to the composer’s repertory as a whole) is being strategically enlisted as an instructive case. Of particular interest is that we encounter not one, but two essentially contrasting strategies of positing musical “worldhood” here: first, a thematization of aesthetic distancing effects where the “worldly” character of music comes to the fore in its being grasped as essentially distinct from the self-feeling person; and second, a thematization of musical listening’s tendency to draw out the essential co-involvement of person and world. It is an odd paradox of the historical moment of Austro-German phenomenology in the 1920s that both of these otherwise sharply contrasting themes could play into the same broader critique of psychology. Yet such is indeed

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the case, and at any rate, the common factor was a post-Romantic, postExpressionist eagerness to do away with an overemphasis on inner experience. It is no secret that this sort of aesthetic-theoretical maneuvering would necessarily come with distinct cultural-political overtones. In a critical tendency ranging at least from Theodor W. Adorno to Richard Taruskin, the very idea of “antipsychology” in music has earned rebukes for its ostensible alliance with right-wing reaction.3 Indeed, the long-standing suspicion of a distasteful link between rightist politics and the rhetoric of “depersonalization” would surely have to be counted among the reasons for the general neglect of this aesthetic discourse. And to be sure, it is not difficult to see how this judgment might have been reached. One of the earliest theorists to adopt the spirit of descriptive phenomenology in Husserl’s wake was José Ortega y Gasset, who had studied philosophy in Germany in his twenties before taking up a career as a public intellectual and cultural critic in Madrid.4 It was in an antipsychologistic mood that Ortega repeatedly called for art that would return us to the world, away from the privacy of our inner selves and out into the street— not as part of the agitating masses, but rather as the alert citizens who would need to be more and more on guard against them. Taruskin, one of the few recent music scholars to have taken Ortega seriously, characterizes him as a figure of conservative reaction, whose overstated manner of expression “reflected the right-wing political attitudes of the 1920s, with their violent recoil against democratic politics.”5 Yet this turns out to be an easily disproven misrepresentation, confusing elitism with antiliberalism.6 Ortega’s major social-theoretical statement, The Revolt of the Masses, is an excoriation of mass culture as it had emerged in the insecure democracies of early twentieth-century Europe, yet its politics are not fundamentally antidemocratic.7 At issue is rather an attempt to diagnose the predicament in which the ideal-typical figure, “mass man,” finds itself, bereft of long-standing cultural and political certainties. Most germane to the present discussion is Ortega’s sense that the fitful transition to democracy had brought with it a dimmed historical consciousness, a style of living “from day to day” (al día), which meant forgetting how the conditions of the present moment had come to be in the first place, effaced by a naive belief that “a world so excellent, technically and socially . . . has been produced by nature,” and hence ultimately the acceptance and affirmation of “everything [the contemporary person] finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, taste.” Ortega’s critique of “mass” culture, written from a perspective of what might be called aristocratic democracy, was a call to resist the acceptance and naturalization of things as they are, a status quo that he took to be reinforced by the retreat inward and the in-

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sistence on grounding one’s values narrowly in what can be found “within,” and hence falling into ahistorical and unworldly forgetfulness. This politics translated readily into an aesthetics, as we have already seen in this chapter’s opening “scene.” It comes as no surprise that the second half of Ortega’s 1921 essay on music would touch on a connection between varying modes of aesthetic engagement and the need to confront violent instability in one’s surroundings, showing the dangers of “inward concentration” and its necessary supersession by “outward concentration.” If his sequence of images presents the move from inward to outward orientation as a possibility contained within a unitary narrative action, it soon emerges that Ortega saw the initial position of absorption in one’s own thought and feeling as ripe for historical obsolescence, so the pivot from one to the other is not just momentary, but is meant to represent a broader observed or posited change in “attitude”— actitud, which must be read as an otherwise untraceable mark of the German phenomenological fixation on Einstellung. The immediate though uncredited source of the terminology of concentración hacia afuera and concentración hacia adentro, rendering the German Innen- and Außenkonzentration, was undoubtedly the aesthetician Moritz Geiger, a member of Husserl’s early circle (whom we first encountered in chapter one and to whom we will return below).8 Further, though the distinction had been presented first at the level of perception, it quickly fans out into a moralized hierarchy. As far as Ortega was concerned, inwardness, intimidad— that safely guarded province that had been cultivated, laudably, in the course of the historical emergence of the modern private citizen over the previous century and a half or so— had now become a hallmark of mediocrity and of the failure to imagine a world of things that were not predisposed toward sustaining one’s ongoing comfort. Outlasting its original historical milieu, the musical legacy of the nineteenth century had deteriorated into little more than an occasion for selfsatisfaction. And what would be the music appropriate to “outward concentration,” to an attentiveness to the world beyond the limits of the private, inward self? Not, indeed, a music that resounded with gunshots in the street. Music in Debussy’s wake seemed to open up a possibility of bracketing out personal interest and observing the world for what it is, for engaging a kind of bare factuality. When we listen to Debussy, instead of attending to its sentimental echo within us, we direct the ear and our complete fixed attention to the sounds themselves, to the enchanting event that is really and truly there in the orchestra. We take up one sonority after another, savoring, appreciating its color— one might

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even say its form. This music is something external to us: it is a distant object, located completely outside our “I” or “ego” (nuestro yo), and in the face of which we feel ourselves pure beholders. We enjoy the new music in outward concentration. This is what interests us, not its resonance within us.9

A few years later, the terminology of “outward concentration” would be superseded by a punchier slogan: “dehumanization,” which stands as the provocative title of a 1925 essay on contemporary music and literature, “La deshumanización del arte,” Ortega’s best-known work of criticism.10 And indeed, although in 1921 he had credited “recent psychologists” with the terminology of “inward” and “outward concentration,” it emerges in “The Dehumanization of Art” that he is actually attempting to describe an attitude adequate to a poetics that seemed no longer to celebrate traditional “psychologizing” values of expressivity, interiority, or private affect. Music had to be relieved of private sentiments and purified in an exemplary objectification. This was the deed of Debussy. Owing to him, it has become possible to listen to music serenely, without swoons and tears. All the various developments in the art of music during these last decades move on the ground of the new ultraworldly world conquered by the genius of Debussy. So decisive is this conversion of the subjective attitude into the objective that any subsequent differentiations appear comparatively negligible. Debussy dehumanized music; that is why he marks a new era in the art of music.11

But what might it mean, in fact, to “dehumanize music”? To begin with, the crucial task established by such a slogan— namely, to cultivate a “serene” listening oriented around attention to the “ultraworldly world”— indicates that what is ultimately at issue is not style change or historical development in modes of representation but rather a transformation in the practice of perception itself. In other words, despite Debussy’s centrality to the critical project, there is a sense in which Ortega’s musical judgments, ungrounded in descriptive substance as they remain, occasion a further, broader argument on behalf of emergent possibilities for aesthetic engagement, possibilities that did not become fully evident until after Debussy’s death.12 It would be easy enough to object that Ortega’s breezy characterization of Debussy as entailing an “objective attitude” merely exemplifies the sort of bad art criticism that passes off arbitrary personal judgment for philosophical argument. We are offered no principle for determining which musics might enjoin which sort of “concentration.” Nor are we offered much

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insight into the question by Ortega’s source in Geiger. We can hardly avoid the irony that the latter had already waffled on precisely this question, having asserted in 1911 that “someone who wanted to apprehend Debussy’s tone successions in pure outward concentration would hardly take pleasure in them,” only to reverse himself by 1913, deciding that “keener analysis shows that even [Debussy’s works], like all artworks, are enjoyed in outward concentration, just in a different sort of outward concentration than would be, say, Bach fugues.”13 Yet these ambiguities in what Ortega conceived from the beginning as a sketchy, journalistic approach are at least partially amenable to descriptive-analytical redress, as the following discussion wagers. Moreover, Ortega’s deployment of Debussy in the service of a wider aesthetic-theoretical agenda was hardly anomalous for this period. More precisely, he was not alone in attempting to work out an antipsychologistic theory of aesthetic experience in which Debussy’s music was the exemplary phenomenon. So, while my initial aim is to come to some understanding of the manifesto for a “dehumanization” of music, Ortega will represent here just one of a pair of position-takings within a dispersed but coherent interwar aesthetic discourse flowing from the critique of psychologism. He makes a show of parting ways with what were perceived to be outdated “nineteenth-century” attitudes, all the while preserving certain key presuppositions from an older critical tradition. In this respect, he may be read as enabling a sort of conceptual pivot to a second, more radical phase of critical position-taking. The latter is represented by Günther Stern-Anders, a younger member of the circles around Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger. In the mid-1920s, Stern-Anders was sowing the seeds for a career as a philosopher of music, a career that would be cut short in part by extrinsic historical events, including of course the rise of National Socialism.14 His 1927 essay on Debussy, “On the Phenomenology of Listening (Elucidated through the Hearing of Impressionist Music),” written under the unmistakable influence of his teachers, is a suggestive document of the effort to imagine an aesthetics not predicated on values associated with psychologizing introspection.15 While Stern-Anders shares Ortega’s skepticism toward the value of a hermetic inward perception, he both softens the moralistic tenor and ultimately also suspends the very conceptual framework according to which “concentration” or “attention” must be understood to describe the attitude of a subject choosing at will between matters of the world and matters of the psyche. Yet whatever the contrasts, and while, as far as I know, neither philosopher-critic was directly aware of the other’s work in the 1920s, both Ortega and Stern-Anders approached the historical fact of Debussy’s oeuvre from a surprising and original perspective oriented to-

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ward what we might think of as an event in the history of perception. In other words, they were commonly though variously convinced that what “Debussy”— again, taken provisionally as the proper name for a set of musical features whose attribution to a specific oeuvre is open to question— had achieved was not simply to renovate musical language or to pose novel questions about aesthetic value or “representation,” “expression,” “formalism,” and the like. Rather, more ambitiously (and hence more vulnerably), both writers proposed that this music was important for somehow showing us how we might engage the world in a manner adequate to its present actuality. Despite having died in 1918, Debussy remained “contemporary” in 1921, in 1925, in 1927, and so on, since there was something about this music (or at least about certain musical utterances rightly or wrongly taken to exemplify the body of work as a whole) that might in principle throw into relief the limits and possibilities of aesthetic listening.

Dehumanization The slogan of dehumanization was undoubtedly sensationalistic, but it was nonetheless earnest. Given its sinister ring, one wants to know right away what it did not mean for Ortega. It was not a call for mechanization. It did not mean removing human agency from the process of aesthetic production. Nor did it mean denying individual, subjective response to artworks. Nor, finally, did Ortega imagine dehumanization to be a matter of simply de-emphasizing the characteristic objects of a human lifeworld, or even traces of the human form itself. The slogan, in short, did not mean so much the elimination of the human as a historical being as it meant a shift of focus away from experience as habitually lived by that being and toward aspects of the world taken at a moment removed from the flux of everyday practice and feeling. (Though Ortega does not deploy the rhetoric of “estrangement” or “alienation” common in contemporaneous and later arttheoretical traditions, these critical strategies are clearly cousins within a larger family of ideas at play here.) For art to “dehumanize” meant primarily to make a new object of something that under normal circumstances would just be “lived.” In a “lived” experience of a thing, according to Ortega, I am attuned to it as it aligns with my everyday pace of motion and action, whether or not I am aware of that attunement. “Human” here describes a kind of frictionless perception that takes for granted its capacity for comprehending and responding to the world, without altering— or even wondering about— one’s sense of its basic constitution and character. Art, in this state of affairs, would likewise tend to affirm a sense of the world’s familiarity and everydayness, whether by “world” we understand

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the world at large, or a more specifically aesthetic art-world. Nineteenthcentury poetry, in Ortega’s tendentious judgment, had merely informed readers of the poet’s “private upper-middle-class emotions” (emociones privadas de buen burgués). In such cases, the poet’s “ambition was to enhance his daily existence. . . . All the poet wished was to be human.”16 And it is easy to see how this judgment might extend to “humanizing” music of the nineteenth century as well. Any music whose perceived aim or ostensible result was to recreate or prolong private affect would fall under this heading. Yet Ortega’s tone is ambivalent: at one moment sneering at the very suggestion that “private upper-middle-class emotions” were worthy of artistic representation at all, elsewhere insisting that it is not so much that he wants to save art from its abuse by a blinkered bourgeois artistic class, as that he wants to cultivate a respect for the integrity of life itself by insisting on the distinction between life and “mere” art. Art is envisioned here as regaining a salutary levity and self-ironizing distance from habitual reality, qualities associated with contemporaneous Neoclassicism in music.17 As a marker of this distance, contemporary aesthetic production for Ortega was neither simply mimetic of reality nor absorbed with ideal forms but rather concerned with the creation of real yet novel, “unheard of ” objects, whose independent existence would be explicitly thematized, occasioning a subtle change of occupation from trafficking in the manipulation of feeling per se to the production of “felt objects.”18 The attentional shift from “feeling” to “felt object” self-evidently correlates with the shift from inward to outward concentration. And here, again, making an object of something that would otherwise be merely “lived” is to dehumanize it. The new art “leaves us . . . surrounded by objects with which human dealings are inconceivable, and thus compels us to improvise other forms of intercourse completely distinct from our ordinary ways with things. We must invent unheard-of gestures to fit those singular figures.”19 At a century’s remove, imperative statements of this kind present an awkward challenge to the critical-historical imagination, above all with regard to the “improvisatory” act of perception by which “unheard-of ” forms of aesthetic “intercourse” might be “invented.” Whatever the gaps in Ortega’s critical style, the basic issue is fairly straightforward: we are asked whether there is in fact a kind of music that would encourage “outward” attentiveness, and so we want to find out what sorts of specific features might support this reorientation. Presumably something like what Ortega has in mind is at play in any musical context where the “usual” relation of empathetic identification is put into question.20 There are really two demands in place: first, that I put out of play the assumption of a natural fit or agreement between aesthetic materials and my way of apprehending them, the

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Example 2.1. Claude Debussy, “Pour les sixtes” (1915), mm. 1– 8

assumption that whatever I encounter is recapitulated unproblematically in its full integrity within me as if at home there; and second, with my belief in the basic familiarity of the (aesthetic) world thereby suspended, that I should be put in a position to wonder, not simply at the sheer occurrence of this experience, but instead at how— under what conditions— the world in which this experience occurs could be possible in the first place.21 It will be helpful to think about this in relation to some examples where the issues are in reasonably evident play. Though no single instance can unqualifiedly stand in for all of Debussy (nor even just for the later Debussy), a convenient example is a piece like the piano etude “Pour les sixtes” (1915), which maintains, and operates on, such a clear generic relationship to precedents in the Romantic tradition (ex. 2.1). In hewing to the elementary device of the parallel sixth with such fastidious consistency, beyond the requisite constraints of the etude genre itself, the piece both extends and transforms the decades-old convention of the pianistic imitation of bel canto song. From a naive point of view, it is a kind of duet, frequently thickened by a supplementary pair of voices in the otherwise accompanimental left hand. As the dedicatee of Debussy’s etude set as a whole, Chopin is of course the salient point of comparison here, as for instance in his D♭-major Nocturne, op. 27, no. 2 (1836), and especially internal passages like that shown in example 2.2, where the convergence on a duet in parallel sixths signals an affective heightening and a play of empathetic identification. The narrative logic of the nocturne relies on the suggestion of a lyrical protagonist being joined in imaginary song at formally marked moments— phrase beginnings, cadential approaches, and so on. It requires little reflection to intuit how comfortably this music seems to inhabit a first-person position, oscillating freely and suggestively between the singular “I” and the plural

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Example 2.2. Frédéric Chopin, Nocturne, op. 27, no. 2 (1836), mm. 32– 37

Example 2.3. Chopin, Nocturne, op. 27, no. 2, mm. 73– 77

“we.” Without investing too much in the slippery critical strategy of discerning the precise locus of a musical persona here, we can crudely suppose that any poetics that so forthrightly projects an image of sublimated singing must in some sense elicit a response of familiarity and potential identification: in short, that what “I” enjoy in this music is that it seems to do as “I” do.22 This poetics can hardly resist a final musical image of idealized togetherness in the guise of the ascending parallel sixths in the antepenultimate bar (ex. 2.3); the precise moment, however, at which the fragile illusion of the bel canto expressive world is deliberately, if delicately, broken as the piano writing drops any pretense of the vocal character of the parallel-sixth sonority, drifting up to the highest register of the instrument, where the mimetic conceit becomes attenuated beyond recognition— a kind of diminuendo of the vocal-mimetic register. Apprehending the conclusion of this piece, then, ought to have something like the character of an ungathering, a loosening of provisional melodic continuity, and a refocalization of attention on the fact of felt hammers on metal strings as opposed to sublimated voices. The point of contrast with Debussy’s etude, however, is not that the newer piece thematizes “sonority” in the manner of a quasi-immediate psychophysiological aesthetics (though, to be sure, there had been ample

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room for movement along this trajectory in some earlier French discourse surrounding debussysme).23 As already demonstrated at some length, the “worldly” moment of early musical phenomenology was emphatically not naturalistic, but instead hearkened to the traits of a specifically aesthetic, which is to say fictive, “world” in which certain possibilities are native: here, the otherwise highly peculiar circumstance that a percussion instrument like the piano might emulate the lyrical continuity of the singing voice. Where Chopin’s nocturne enacts rhetorical closure by vaporizing the illusion of the very lyrical duet it had occupied itself with conjuring into being (suggesting that pulling off this trick had itself constituted a background poetic rationale for the music in the first place), Ortega asks us to listen for the possibility that Debussy’s etude already assumes as its basic premise the condition of having suspended the lyrical persona, despite maintaining distinct poetic affiliations with the vestiges of such a presence. If the Chopin nocturne “humanizes” by sketching the expressive contours of a vocal agent— establishing a kind of empty symbolic space where we can imaginatively locate a nominal “subject”— Debussy by contrast takes up the inherited techniques of humanizing sketchwork and thematizes not so much the non-human, whatever that might be, but instead just those techniques of humanization themselves. One hears this perhaps most directly in the transformation of Chopin’s affectively charged but flexibly (that is, “expressively”) deployed sixth into Debussy’s exaggeratedly consistent treatment of the sixth as an element whose patent two-“voice”-edness now becomes rigidified beyond the point of simple identification as pseudo-vocalization. As has been noted, despite its slavish textural consistency, neither element of the sixth dyad in the 1915 etude maintains a “leading” role, and this absence of hierarchy contributes to a weakening of the expected dynamic, which is narrative as much as it is textural, in which an initial vocal persona attracts a subsequent joining-in in song, whether toward amplification or ironic counterpoise.24 Meanwhile, the total absence in the etude of any expressive embellishment or diminution, so characteristic of Chopin’s bel canto moods, establishes a flattening of affect, despite the ongoing dynamic fluctuations that remain in service of shaping phrase. So it is not that Debussy moves diametrically against “expression,” whatever that might entail, but rather that certain defamiliarizing peculiarities of his melodic treatment point subtly toward the artifice involved in the very exercise of composing this sort of texture. Ortega holds that dehumanization is never a matter of mere resistance to representation but of showing things in such a way that their representedness comes to the foreground.25 Similarly, as already mentioned, he never imagined merely attempting to remove the traces of human form

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Example 2.4. Chopin, Etude, op. 25, no. 8 (1837), mm. 1– 4

or origin from the artwork, but rather making a show of dehumanizing exactly what appears most human by removing it from its habitual context. A member of the new artistic generation would be more interested in the “human aspect which he destroys” than in “the startling fauna at which he arrives.” The goal became “to paint a man who resembles a man as little as possible.”26 In this spirit, what I mean to suggest is that Debussy pointedly maintains the conventional signs of human presence while letting the artfulness in the manner of staging that presence be shown. “Stylization” is a familiar word, roughly speaking, for the procedures just described, though it does not capture all the particularities. Of more specific interest is just what the explicit thematization of aesthetic artifice might mean for how one takes this all in. Short-circuiting the identitarian or empathetic impulse that seems to arise so naturally in relation to a lyrical idiom is an important part of the phenomenon, but beyond this there is the even more obvious (and yet strangely elusive) question of how the genre at hand, the etude itself, might bespeak an aesthetic distance that one could describe as entailing a “dehumanized” or outward attentiveness. To continue in our comparative vein, certainly the most familiar precedent for Debussy’s “Pour les sixtes” is Chopin’s own etude for sixths, op. 25, no. 8 (1837), which not coincidentally shares a D♭ key signature with the Debussy (ex. 2.4). Despite its patent elegance and lightness of harmonic constitution, Chopin’s etude has essentially none of the bel canto of his nocturne but instead participates directly in the post-classical tradition of the mechanical etude— what Leslie Blasius diagnoses as the constitutive negative

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“double” for the self-image of Romanticism’s paradigmatic expressive musical persona.27 Part of the uncanny effect of the otherwise innocuous “Pour les sixtes,” by comparison, must be the way in which it manages so clearly to activate the legacy of what Blasius calls the “mechanics of sensation” while also flirting openly with the poetic strategies that would support a humanizing illusion. In other words, Debussy brings the bel canto expressive convention into communion with the nearer-to-hand one of the mechanical etude, so that we end up with something like a hybrid between nocturne and etude: neither fully expressive nor fully mechanical, but wandering in between two generic possibilities.28 One of the ironies here is that what is “unheard-of ” about Debussy’s piano etude lies precisely in the piano’s acting more like a piano, being more like what it is supposed to be. But that way of being becomes audible to us only through the way in which it clings to an obsolete quality of being partially like something else: like a voice. Its pianism ironically shows itself all the more clearly by virtue of its vestigial vocal character. This subtle poetic situation, esoteric or even trivial as it may seem when described in relation to Debussy and Chopin, is nonetheless, for Ortega, of the essence for the new art. Further— and this is the point at which a question of the mode of attention begins to come more directly into focus— in Debussy’s etude, what is being drawn out into the open as a matter of “technique” is more than the classical procedure of the piecemeal construction of a manual-technical corpus, a virtuoso performing body for whom harmony and harmonic consecution appear a sort of lightly worn vestment, a travesty of “true” music, as we would have expected a century earlier. Rather, as elsewhere in the etude set, what is evidently to be “studied” here is the sixth not merely as an element of mechanical execution, but also as a sheer acoustical quality, as an isolated quasi-harmonic quality, and most especially as a unit of an incipient ars combinatoria in which sixths can be overlaid upon one another to produce a multiplicity of novel sonorous possibilities. When, for example, the left hand joins the right hand in restricting itself to the sixth in m. 7 (ex. 2.1), the resulting harmonies bear a stilted, almost contrived character. The left-hand line initially obeys a literalistic logic of more-orless diatonic inversion, and the resulting simultaneities ape functional significance in a way that sets “functionality” in play to its detriment: an initial tonic sonority, to be sure, but then an awkward and unbeautifully voiced succession of sixth pairs that wear their “dominant” character too casually to stick, followed by a slide further out of syntactical orientation, landing on the initially unassimilated augmented sonority on the second beat of m. 8. Prior to the arrival of the bass B♭ immediately thereafter, one might

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easily perceive this bar-and-a-half passage as involving a game-like preoccupation with the formal possibilities of the sixth, and a pointedly casual regard for unification within a tonal-syntactical utterance, though without, at the same time, a complete dissolution of the latter.29 What this description has been aiming at are some ways in which the etude points us toward a peculiar activity of “study,” above and beyond the usual expectations for the genre. Confronted with harmonically unidiomatic, mechanically disruptive, acoustically unassimilated compositional detail, one is subtly engaged in a modulation in the register of aesthetic engagement. To “study” in this sense must amount to something like what Ortega meant by “outward concentration,” if it is to be understood as an act that makes new objects out of otherwise unattended nuances of habitual experience. I have limited description to a single passage from a single work since any good-faith effort to do justice to a wider range of examples would either fail in its brevity or overwhelm the basic throughline of the essay, which is admittedly more intellectual-historical and aesthetictheoretical than analytical. Still, one rightly asks whether the etude is in fact representative of the composer’s output as a whole, let alone more generally of “new music” in Debussy’s wake, as Ortega actually claims. The breadth of that claim makes it at once far more difficult to defend and also less relevant to a style-analytical connoisseurship that would insist on pointing out exceptions and qualifications in the compositional poetics of various exemplars. But Ortega’s basic point, that Debussy plays a privileged role in a larger historic drift away from the psychologistic aesthetics of empathetic identification, is hardly controversial and belongs in one form or another to nearly all music historiography from the 1920s to the present. It is only a matter of asking, for the specific case, what precisely I am apprehending, and, especially, in what sort of attitude, such that this circumstance comes to the fore.

Being- There- With Music If the discussion fairly represents what Ortega means by dehumanization— crudely put, a conversion of the “human” (the “habitual,” the “lived”) into the aesthetically foreign, occasioning a conversion of perceptual orientation toward contemplative distance— then one might well respond by observing that, despite its rhetorical bombast and intended affiliation with the younger, post-Debussy generation and art of the 1920s, the underlying aesthetic attitude retained the formalist priorities of a critical tradition dating at least to Eduard Hanslick. It should come as no surprise to learn that Moritz Geiger (whom we first encountered in chapter one, as well as earlier

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in the present chapter as a likely source for some of Ortega’s key terms) in turn claims that familiar nineteenth-century champion of “absolute music” as a prototypical or anticipatory advocate of the new attitude, declaring outright that “Hanslick wants us to enjoy music in a state of outward concentration.”30 One way of assessing this situation is to observe how Ortega’s taking up a stance on the ground of the phenomenological critique of psychologism already destabilizes this stance and points beyond toward a distinctly more original possibility. That is, if Ortega were serious about an antipsychological aesthetics of music, he would have needed to give up certain presuppositions that he otherwise jealously preserves, chief among them the position of a strong and sharply individuated listening subject or autonomous psyche who would be able to exert unilateral control over its musical “forms” or “objects.” Here we begin to sense how Ortega might be read as executing a conceptual pivot to the second position I foreshadowed above. As the next stage of discussion will suggest, a more effective alternative to a psychologistic account of musical experience would have to involve not so much enforcing distance from the music as rather actually questioning that distance, interrogating its grounding and character— and this not in order to reinstate a simplistic identification with music, but in order to show how the understanding of “concentration” or attentiveness in the broad has been misled by traditional habits of thought and academic discourse. A complication already emerges from within the very notion of a “state of outward concentration” (Zustand der Außenkonzentration)— the state Geiger sympathetically observes Hanslick having demanded as an antidote to sentimental swooning. This deceptively commonsense phrase embarrasses the distinction it is meant to uphold, for surely, whether its ultimate causes are external or internal, “state” must refer at least partly to an interior condition. A stubborn insistence, then, on the possibility of music’s exteriority and distance from the listener would seem to ensnare us in selfdeceit. One response to this objection would be to point out that Geiger, in his search for an alternative to psychologism, firmly disavows any reliance on assumptions regarding “causal” psychology in the first place. Accordingly, the matter is at all times presented as one of phenomenological description rather than of psychological explanation. It ought to be possible for me to describe an impression as appearing for my experience to occur more “out there” than “in here,” without thereby committing myself to hard epistemological premises about what is “actually” happening in naturalistic terms. (This would go all the more for a thematically, emphatically aesthetic experience, though even the aesthetician Geiger did not always

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limit himself to dealing with the apprehension of products of artistic labor.) In the case of raw feeling, Geiger maintains, the experienced connection between [the feeling and the felt object] will be described in such a way that one says: the feeling seems to come from the object, to set out from it, to be stimulated by it. (Such a stimulation of feeling by the object here is an experienced relation and has naturally not the slightest to do with a psychophysical relation of causality between external object and feeling.)31

In good phenomenological style, having rejected a naturalistic explanatory mode, Geiger reverts to sustained analysis of the various locational qualities that feelings and felt objects may obtain in their copresence with the person— in other words, various orientations of attentiveness. It appears possible for me in one instance “to be there with the object (Gegenstand),” in another instance “to be there with the state (Zustand)” of feeling. Geiger comes to understand attention as a matter of moving among such locations of experienced “withness,” and the initial distinction between Außenkonzentration and Innenkonzentration is recast in a parallel distinction between what we might render as “objectival” (gegenständlich) and “stateful” (zuständlich) attitudes.32 Yet, even with a naturalistic psychologism set safely aside, the evident catch remains that these dispositions are imaginable only as involving transformations of inner states. It is only ever possible to ask whether I am “there with” the object or “there with” my feeling in terms of a fundamental interiority, which we had been led to believe was the locale or venue of phenomenological description we were meant to be getting away from in the first place. Geiger may well write on one occasion, every bit as moralistically as Ortega, that “the aesthetic task of the era is once again to overcome that dilettantism of inward concentration, which . . . has poisoned our artistic experience.”33 And yet he has no option other than to describe even outward concentration as a matter of an inward disposition: “The inner ‘being-there-with’ (Dabeisein) is an essential feature of attention. I ‘am’ inwardly always ‘with’ whatever it is that I direct my attention to, and I am not with whatever it is that I do not observe.” As his next thought makes patent, the core terminology of “concentration” itself suggests the image of a tightening or gathering of oneself into oneself, a doubling down on the commitment to the inner, which, in a mysterious irony, is meant to vouchsafe engagement with the worldly: “This being-there-with bears a special character in the case of attention. It is an inner being-gathered-together

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(Zusammengefaßtsein) toward the observed. I am inwardly consolidated (zusammengeschlossen) in the direction of what I observe.”34 This problem of imagining what kind of attentiveness might bring us most effectively out of ourselves and into the world— if such an act is possible at all— brings us finally to the contrast between Ortega and SternAnders, writing two years later and with no apparent connection to the former other than a shared intellectual heritage. Without citing Geiger in his 1927 Debussy essay, Stern-Anders nevertheless picks up on precisely the same vocabulary and problematics of philosophical figuration in order to reorient the image of attentiveness in a significantly different vein.35 Where Geiger and Ortega had laid out a starkly dualistic conception of two competing modes of attention, Stern-Anders’s approach is at first less cavalier. For him, the contrast between the zuständlich (with its concomitant inward orientation) and the gegenständlich (with its concomitant outward orientation) should not be understood as a straightforward binary opposition but instead as instancing a more contoured set of relations. It is surely obvious how immediately such an opposition must depend on a governing one between subject and object, whose prioritization in philosophical discourse any serious student of Heidegger would have judged a threat to good phenomenology and indeed to proper thought itself. Since SternAnders was writing his Debussy essay in the wake of the 1925 Marburg lecture course that amounted to something like a draft of Being and Time (1927), it is not surprising that we should find him eager here to rework these categories into a descriptive modality that did not merely reinforce the thematization of this underlying dualism.36 Some of the preliminary conceptual work toward that end appeared in a separate essay, “On Types of Thing” (1926), which is not overtly dedicated to music but is clearly part of a single broader reflection.37 The “thing” or “object,” Stern-Anders notes there, never exists in isolation but can only show up against a background of other states of affairs. He strings these “states” together in lexically explicit fashion by pointing out how the object (i.e., the Gegenstand, the thing standing “opposite” us as we observe the world) appears initially as a form of resistance (Widerstand) to our perception or action, a pushing “back or against,” such as becomes most directly thematic in the sense of touch.38 But this “resistance” can in turn be felt only on the basis of a more encompassing condition or state (Zustand). The Zustand names that originally subjectless situation which is captured grammatically when one says, for example, “It is snowing.”39 Though personally neutral, this situation is itself nonetheless interpretable only as being involved with yet another situating field, even further in the background:

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the circumstance (Umstand), which describes one’s non-explicit sense of the surrounding world, a familiarity and everydayness of which we have a knowing acquaintance (Kenntnis) without necessarily a knowing realization (Erkenntnis).40 In short, in a chain of conditioning relations moving roughly from background to foreground, the Gegenstand arises only “on the basis of ” some Widerstand, which arises “on the basis of ” a Zustand, which arises “on the basis of ” its conditioning Umstand. It is only in the context of a falsifying understanding of the nature of “things”— one, moreover, that takes the reifying sense of sight as its exemplary but incomplete way of interpreting them— that the isolated Gegenstand has become privileged as the “object” par excellence, whereas in fact we routinely recognize, without thematically realizing, a much broader range of kinds of thing in the phenomena of resistances, states, and circumstances. The Gegenstand is a derivative phenomenon, appearing “belatedly” (nachträglich) against the background of an Umstand through an intentional, quasi-deictic, mental act. For present purposes, most germane is to see how Stern-Anders hoped to reinvest the Zustand with a worldly significance that it had been denied in Geiger’s sharply dualistic conception, which assumed a subjectivity abruptly partitioned off from things. The zuständlich or “stateful” for Stern-Anders is not originally attached to an autonomous subjective “I” or ego, and yet it of course requires a concrete situation of the person in order for things to show up at all. A few months later, in his Debussy essay, Stern-Anders’s analysis of what it is like to hear this music builds upon his earlier foregrounding and reinterpretation of the Zustand. His initial tack appears unpromising, as he seems merely to retool the idea of the “state” in service of a naive description of putative musical qualities, without analyzing the act of listening itself, but then this description abruptly gives way to the primary agenda. Imagine you are hearing something by Debussy— it makes no difference whether it is the first few measures of the overture [sic] to Pelléas et Mélisande, one of the etudes, or something else. That this music subsists at most in a quality of preparing or conditioning action, not of being active itself (whether you are initially thinking of its often nearly static time, its harmonic sense, or of something else): admirers, detractors, and scholars agree on this point. And this “statefulness” (“Zuständlichkeit”) affords this music the name “Impressionism,” borrowed from painting, where it also meant the representation of objects (Gegenstände)— not qua objects, but rather in their statefulness— whose boundaries are of-

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ten blurred. With this, we do not arrive at a complete characterization of Impressionism; it suffices to indicate and appeal to what is generally familiar. What interests us is not the specification of the object, but rather its mode of access.41

Whether or not we agree with the premise that this music lacks dramatic action, if we are at least prepared to agree that it might be described in general as comparatively “non-tendential,” not bound at each moment by a sense of implied harmonic consecution or formal projection, then we can accept the legitimacy of Stern-Anders’s main question, concerning the “mode of access.” His point of departure is the precept, which he attributes to Husserl, that to any thing there belongs a proper way of observing it, a mode of access appropriate specifically to it.42 So, the question he wants to answer is “What is the attention like that directs itself to the stateful (das Zuständliche)?” Or, as he immediately reformulates it: “In a passive state, to the extent that it represents the mode of access appropriate to a thing, how is attentional orientation possible?”43 Here, then, we see that the disposition of the “state” or “statefulness” is to be grasped simultaneously as how something is and as how we apprehend it, and hence involves us in a description of both the qualities heard and the act of the listening. While this thought may be intuitive in some sense, its implications are by no means immediately obvious. To begin with, Stern-Anders notes that attentiveness commonly understood is not just a matter of being oriented toward something, as we normally think of it, but is also, if this something is changing, a matter of being oriented toward its continuation— of being “tensed” for what is to come. The problem arises if we are confronted with something that, on the one hand, is temporally extended but, on the other hand, is itself not evidently tensed— “non-tendential” or “directionless,” as he describes Debussy’s music. This unpreparedness for a specific end, for a specific continuation, the distinct emptiness of the horizon of expectation on the hearer’s part is not only an incidental impediment for attention (as fatigue might impede thinking through a mathematical proof ), but is in fact an essential impediment: attention goes according to its nature not only to what is given “now,” but is rather “tensed” for what is to come. And in hearing Impressionist music, one is just not as tensed for what is to come (where “tensed” is meant in both an intentional and an affective sense), since the Nowness of the music is just not a dramatic one— that is, does not have the unity of an action.

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How, then, does one solve this problem: that Impressionist music, according to its nature, requires an untensed, a passive stance on the hand, but that, on the other hand, it should be listened to?44

How, in other words, do I attend to a music whose very nature seems to resist the disposition of attentiveness, commonly understood? If the question at first seems obtuse (particularly in the wake of reading Ortega, where the matter is presumed settled), this is probably because, unlike most musical commentary, the point of critical intervention here is not at the level of drawing out novel or otherwise unnoticed features of the music but instead at the level of pointing out how incomplete our usual conceptions of attentive listening are. Here, as to some extent in Ortega, Debussy is being used as a test case for revising the thought of a certain kind of aesthetic perception. But whereas Ortega had merely borrowed a pair of available categories from contemporary aesthetic discourse and put them to use in gesturing toward the evaluation of an oeuvre, Stern-Anders takes up related categories while also subjecting them to thoroughgoing critique and renovation as part of a wider philosophical reflection. Against all probability, and without its quite being stated outright, one gets the sense in reading his Debussy essay that Stern-Anders’s earlier rumination on the typology of things is now meant to be borne out or even shown precisely through the qualities he seeks to highlight in certain purportedly exemplary instrumental passages (the etudes, the orchestral writing in Pelléas, etc.). Debussy is not simply “analyzed” here as an example of some general truth but is in fact understood to participate in the work of thinking through a problem. We will come to Stern-Anders’s answer to his own question about the “how” of attentiveness soon, but first it makes sense to consider the single concrete musical example he gives, which is drawn from the famous tower scene near the beginning of act 3 of Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), and quite specifically the fleeting chordal event that accompanies and mimics Mélisande’s hair falling down from the window to Pelléas, who has been engaging her from below (ex. 2.5).45 This brief musical gesture consists of a succession of four inverted dominant seventh chords falling in parallel by whole step, a gesture that is reiterated an octave below. Rather incongruously, Stern-Anders’s brief account of the passage is focused on what is surely one of the most banal of its aspects, namely the chordal identity of its component sonorities (a choice that will prompt further comment below). We have here a descending dominant seventh chord: not a resolution to the usual major or minor triad, in relation to which the dominant

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Example 2.5. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), act 3, mm. 90– 93

would be a provisional, non-independent . . . thing. What had been nonindependent earlier [i.e., both historically and also within the context of the opera itself ] is here endowed with the status of an independent expressive unity. Thus, given the C-F-A-C-E♭-A chord, which follows the first chord D-G-B-D-F-B, the former may not be viewed as moving toward B♭ major. It, too, descends further by a whole tone to the apparent dominant seventh chord of A♭ major. This is in no sense a matter of multiple chords, but rather of a single, wandering one, no different from a genuine melody, which does not constitute the connection of several tones, but rather the movement of a single one.46

Stern-Anders is struck by the possibility of hearing the descending dominant seventh chords in two different, mutually incompatible ways, and his development of this contrast is crucial to the general sense of his essay, though the example appears only near its end. On the one hand, familiarly (if also somewhat improbably), one may hear each individual dominant seventh chord as suggesting a continuation toward resolution in the traditional manner. Hearing the chords in this way, he supposes— as “tensed” for what is to come— is to “apperceive” them. It is to grasp the individual item in its “isolated singularity” in a situation of “clarity and hypermarkedness.” It is, moreover, to turn the Zustand, something with which I can “go along” as in an ongoing state, into a Gegenstand, or as Stern-Anders also writes, a Gegenüber, “a thing opposite” or “across the way,” something that is falsely set apart from me. By contrast, for what Stern-Anders calls “mere perception” (bloße Perzeption) the detail is “not neutral” and yet lacks the same degree of explicitness.47 Quite obviously (and far more likely), I can hear the descending dominant seventh chords without noticing how they might be stopped at

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any instant and diverted toward continuation within a diatonic-functional syntactical field. Indeed, the passage is only intelligible to “mere perception” in this sense, as opposed to “apperception” (Apperzeption), since too much “clarity,” too fine a grain, would destroy the sense of the passage, which seems not to depend on harmonic expectations of any specific sort, beyond a general sense of downward trajectory. Under apperception, with each chord rendered objectival by the reifications of a mentally pointed finger, the passage would take on a quality of being dissolved into a syntactical discontinuity that does not properly belong to the musical gesture. Here, again, it is possible to insist that Stern-Anders’s musical description is flawed— or his lone example ill chosen— particularly when one is hearing these chords in the wider flow of the scene. One may sense a disconnect between the scenic function of this eminently dramatic musical action and Stern-Anders’s characterization of the poetics as lacking dramatic unity. For one thing, even maintaining a narrow focus on harmony, it does not take much sharpening of analytical insight to hear how the proximate association of G and D♭ dominant seventh chords book-ending each four-eighth-note group prolongs a single complex of related sonorities through the device of tritone substitution (common in Debussy’s harmonic language from early in his career), which might in principle suggest a heightened tendency toward “tonics” on either C or G♭. Moreover, from a phrase-rhythmic point of view, the precipitous parallel-chordal descent ruptures the ongoing pattern of two-, one-, and half-measure duplications that had led up to it over the preceding pages of orchestral writing, and hence might be heard to mark a comparatively non-static moment in the larger passage.48 Yet neither the potential functional implication of tritone substitution nor the abrupt departure from duplicated phrase units decisively overrides the central and rather uncontroversial observation that Debussy’s general harmonic, formal, and other procedures tend to neutralize implicative qualities. Tritone substitution rather weakens than intensifies the tendency of any given dominant seventh chord, since its very possibility introduces ambiguity about where the pertinent dissonances are expected to “resolve” (and in any case, the surrounding harmonic vocabulary is equivocal here in orienting the ear around a single tonic). And the very fact of duplication itself would seem to undermine the urgency of some specific succession, such that when the climactic moment of Stern-Anders’s descending chords does appear, it does not seem to bear an intense sense of having been distinctly prepared in the phrase-structural run-up. In short, even if Stern-Anders’s analytical observation is less than pen-

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etrating, there are reasons to give him the benefit of the doubt on the way toward appreciating the broader argument at stake, which merely requires us to consider the suggestion that the music’s temporal orientation could be said to vary under different perceptual modes. Many musical futures are possible at any arbitrarily given moment of this music— more, arguably, than in the relevant precedents of, say, Schumann, Wagner, or Chopin. So, then, if it is true that the apperceptive mode of listening, which SternAnders here equates with attentiveness commonly understood, would be detrimental to the sense of “Impressionist” music, how are we to describe the sort of listening that is appropriate to it? It cannot be precisely inattentive, since it is clear that I may remain continuously involved with the passage of the music without being waylaid by the detail, without, as he puts it, “immediately giving myself up to the pregivenness of sonority.”49 He arrives at an answer by effecting an elementary shift of perspective along a different vector from Ortega’s. The question is no longer one of distinguishing between inward and outward, but instead of observing that for the normal mode of attentiveness to be possible at all— whether an attentiveness to my interior state or to the world at large— there must be some other, more encompassing condition of openness that precedes it, as had been intimated in the category of the “circumstance” (Umstand) entertained in his previous essay. Hence the significance of reinterpreting the relation between Gegenstand and Zustand: it may well be that there is a reifying attention (“apperception,” say) to objects taken as isolated things or even qualities in the world. But just as the Gegenstand does not exhaust the category of thingliness, we equally need to consider what it might be like to attend to something that is more like the Zustand, and this is what an aesthetic experience like that of Debussy’s music allows us to entertain and apprehend with historically unprecedented vividness. In rejecting the prioritization of apperception, traditionally the hallmark of a self-aware and self-controlled engagement with the world, Stern-Anders’s opposition to contemporary psychologism becomes more pointed. Yet the “psychology” to which Stern-Anders seeks an alternative is not quite the same as that which Geiger and Ortega had in mind. Of greatest concern is no longer the ethical limitation of introspective selfabsorption but, more fundamentally, the very image of subjectivity itself insofar as it would be normatively characterized by activity, will, and autonomy. Supposing that such characteristics are partly bound up with an allegedly visualist prejudice in favor of thinking of the world as predominantly “objectival” or gegenständlich, Stern-Anders holds up the contrasting case of attending to a smell.

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When I am in a room that smells strongly of something, in what sense can I attentionally dispose myself toward this smell? What remains, apart from a, so to speak, privative attention: the suppression of other intentions (for example, by closing the eyes) toward attentional possibilities? Something remains that is virtually opposed to that turning-toward (Hinwendung) so often characterized by the expression “tending” (“Abzielen”): a being-open (Aufgeschlossensein) that first fully enables passivity.50

The attentional “remnant” of “being open” is not a condition over which we have immediate control but instead forms the background to attentive receptivity. Stern-Anders complains that the professional psychology literature of his day had contributed to a distortion of the image of attentiveness precisely by focusing so exclusively on the sort of voluntary, narrowing, and “privative” attention that had all but constituted the experimental study of psychophysiology.51 He is presumably thinking of the legacy of Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, and Wilhelm Wundt, with their dogged emphasis on isolated fragments of individual consciousness, canonized in, for example, the reaction-time experiments that had emblematized the discipline in its founding years.52 By contrast, Stern-Anders now wants to describe a precondition to the voluntaristic scenario, which on its own is otherwise too private, too personal— one might even say too “human” (fully aware of the irony of the mechanized character of experimental psychophysiology). So, having set out on a very different path from Ortega in the analysis of attention, SternAnders arrives at a similar, though more circumspectly grasped agenda: a kind of depersonalization or “enworlding” of attentiveness, with the notable difference that, from Stern-Anders’s perspective, what Geiger and Ortega had termed “outward concentration” could only be understood as a secondary form, whose more primordial, enabling one he now sought to name.

Letting Oneself Go “Not much is yet said with this word”— Aufgeschlossensein, being-open— admits Stern-Anders.53 His distinction of “perception” from “apperception” begins to get at what he has in mind, but there, perception is understood in the negative: as a deficient version of the more self-sufficient and definitive apperception. On this interpretation, “mere” perception would read too easily and inappropriately as a failed condition, as in one’s “failure” to observe the potential syntactical or tendential qualities of domi-

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nant seventh chords. Stern-Anders needed a fresh term, then, without the conceptual-historical baggage of “perception,” “apperception,” “attention,” and the like. The modest formulation, applying with equal aptness both to the dissipated harmonic unity of Pelléas and to Mélisande’s act of letting down her hair, is Sich-gehen-lassen, “letting oneself go,” a condition that falls somewhere between the tendential or voluntary and the passive or mechanical. Though the term is initially introduced to characterize a certain quality of the music, it is crucial to see that it is equally applicable to the intentional experience of engaging this music. When I let myself go in a state of openness, I am neither tensed for a particular future possibility nor merely drawn along by events without entertaining any relation to them at all. It is sharply distinguished from the conditions of Hinwendung and Abzielen, which capture modes of being directed to or leaning toward, as well as from the specifically aural Hinhören, “hearing-toward,” or Heraushören, “hearing-out.” Casting about for a concrete musical manifestation of what he has in mind, he hits on the activity of absentmindedly humming or “la-ing”— his term is Trällern— aloud or in imagination, an activity that appears at a level prior to conscious awareness. Trällern, a state of having a melody “on the tongue” yet only “half-realized,” may in some sense happen without even ascending to audibility at all, without being able to “get it out.”54 I can hum to myself, while working or walking, in such a way that I at times articulate snatches of a tune, at times indicate a generic contour or rhythm, at times fall silent. But there must be some underlying unity of somatic potentiality that makes all of this possible, a state of musical familiarity that has a primordial coherence without being shaped by the indications of continuity and consecution that can only be described through attentiveness in the secondary, derivative sense. Hearing Debussy’s music is like that, Stern-Anders wants to say. With this unusual and, to be sure, somewhat opaque thought in mind, now is as good a moment as any to return to a concrete act of listening and attempt to do descriptive justice to the elusive disposition of “letting oneself go” that is being claimed as adequate or “proper” to this music. It is of the essence of this way of thinking that I stumbled on the following example, since it remains difficult, or perhaps impossible, to imagine how one might set out to choose an instance of a mode of listening that by its nature is not a matter of zeroing in on particular details and self-consciously savoring their qualities, as it had been for Ortega. At one point prior to work on the present chapter, I found myself dwelling on the first twenty measures of the Debussy etude, writing a new paragraph or so every day for about a week, more or less casually observing how my perceptions shifted from day to day. In what may strike some readers as a little obtuse, I was unac-

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countably focused on issues of harmony and voice-leading. Yet I would defend that somewhat schoolmasterly focus by noting that my observations were both tacitly and overtly informed by my attempt to interpret SternAnders’s harmonic preoccupations charitably, as assessed above. Further, in my own and Stern-Anders’s defense, I would also point out that the phenomenon of functional harmony in the common practice is really the locus classicus for speculative thought about the general theoretical possibilities of musical implication, tendency, consecution, logic, and so on, all of which are precisely what is being called into question by Stern-Anders’s philosophical project at this point. At any rate, looking back at the development of my reflections on this passage, I would identify three stages of response. At first, I seemed to be enjoying the first few measures’ resistance to focalization or to an affirmed harmonic presence that might reward the commitment to a tonally oriented attention, only to find myself caught up in the seemingly unmotivated brightening and expansion that comes with the C-root chord in m. 5 (ex. 2.1). In the second stage of writing, I became preoccupied with the question (which I would later admit to be academic) of whether or not m. 5 effectively “follows” in some harmonically logical way that I may have missed in the previous stage. I was soon embarrassed to realize that there is a straightforward way in which m. 4 prepares its succeeding material: namely insofar as most of m. 4 is constituted of a diminished seventh sonority, one of whose possible roots, C♭, of course lends itself to enharmonic reinterpretation as the leading tone to the C chord to follow. I nearly left things at that, essentially with the deflating acknowledgment that I had misrecognized a basic harmonic feature, and in a definite sense, failed to “attend” properly to the harmonic meaning as it was unfolding. But the third stage came in recognizing that there is something about the music that goes out of its way to conceal the possibility of the diminished chord’s “leading to” C— or, perhaps more precisely, to keep it alive as one germane possibility of the harmonic idiom that has been activated, without upholding its exigencies as the primary motivating concern. Many factors contribute to a concealment of harmonic implication, but I will note just two here. A circumstantial factor is that by this point in the music, we have already heard one very prominent diminished seventh chord: the one at the end of m. 2, which, rather than resolving along the lines of its various tritone-related dissonances, settles up into a G♭-major triad on the second eighth note of m. 3 in a common-tone resolution, with the G♭ held over. So, the behavior of the diminished seventh sonority has already been established along lines different enough from what comes later that the subsequent diminished connection would have been made

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less available to the ear. The second factor is simply that the voice-leading at the end of m. 4 going into m. 5 seems disposed so as to distract us from hearing too much continuity between the harmonies here. The left hand’s downbeat C♭ in m. 4 is nowhere near a sounding C to which it might resolve, the left-hand A♭ at the end of the bar only tenuously “moves” to the registrally adjacent off-beat G of m. 5, there’s no F-to-E connection, as we might otherwise expect, and so forth, not to mention the melodic distraction of the D♭/B♭ sixth on the last sixteenth note of m. 4 (erroneously represented in the Durand edition as an isolated D♭), a dyad that cannot be elegantly fitted into an interpretation of this harmonic move.55 In hindsight, this sequence of thought, banal as it may be from a certain perspective and at any rate far from meriting much musical interest on its own terms, seems nonetheless to clarify how that initial phase of description indexed something like a hearing of the etude in the “untensed” manner Stern-Anders deemed proper to Debussy— and this not out of a willful decision to experiment along such lines, but rather due to the subtle way in which the passage in some sense coaches one in apprehending it in the “appropriate” way. It does so, moreover, in a more layered and integral manner than had Stern-Anders’s passage of choice from Pelléas (though without the latter’s programmatic appropriateness). In that first session, it had struck me that one way of addressing what I sense to be at issue in this spot was to entertain the idea of “wonder,” which I would later recognize as a loose analogue to what Stern-Anders means by “letting oneself go”: often, in hearing such and such a thing in this etude, one simply thinks, “I wonder where things are going,” “I wonder what will happen next,” “I wonder how we got to this point,” “I wonder why we are pausing here to take in a particular thing,” and so forth. Certainly, it is not the case that the spot in question is especially “wonderful” in the sense of striking a radical rupture in the continuity of the piece, or marking out some characteristic sonorous or phrase-structural peculiarity that must alone arrest our interest out of all probable musical utterances within the field of possibilities available to “late Debussy.” Nor are these observations in general geared toward a full-dress appreciation of all that is unique and valuable about the repertory it purports to exemplify. I would nonetheless submit that the very modesty of the moment (like the one Stern-Anders chose from Pelléas) is strategically helpful in supporting the more immediate agenda of trying to think through Stern-Anders’s critique of a psychologistic notion of attention. “Wonder” is my own improvised placeholder here for whatever it is that we are doing when we are not primarily being guided by the attentional logic of expectation and realization that Stern-Anders calls “apperception”: the narrow image of atten-

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tion, which continues to underlie many present-day cognitivist approaches to musical experience.56 Then, in the second phase of writing, when I reverted to a worry about how the music might in fact observe an implicative logic of consecution that could be called syntactical in terms of the harmonic common practice, I resumed a tendential attentiveness, albeit one that was only derivatively possible on the basis of the first pass. And in the third phase, finally, I began to intuit how one might propose that the piece itself actually shows us what it is like to “open ourselves” in the way that Stern-Anders suggested. In other words, it is not simply a matter of choosing one way of listening or another on a whim. That proposition would suggest too much of the unreflected voluntarism Stern-Anders’s phenomenological method eschews on principle (without his thereby suppressing the essential act-like, and indeed fundamentally personal, character of any listening). Rather the open, perhaps “stateful,” attentiveness with which I began was a matter of, as Stern-Anders puts it, “being with” or “alongside” the music in such a way that I observed its details without listening too much against its temporal grain: “a status, which is actually that of everyday life, which neither always fastens something as something nor always sleeps.”57 The formulation “to be there along with music” (dabeisein bei der Musik), however directly it derived from Geiger’s somewhat less reflected usage, bears an enlarged conceptual burden for Stern-Anders. Its reduplication of the bei relation, though idiomatic in German, nonetheless peculiarly and redundantly insists on what should after all be a familiar experience. Bei has a significance here comparable to its contemporaneous role in Heidegger, who went so far as to appeal to an etymological connection between bei and bin— the first-person singular conjugation of sein, “to be”— in order to maintain that “being” was always originally a matter of “being alongside,” “being there with” the world.58 Yet as early as 1924 (that is, a few years before Heidegger had committed any of these thoughts to the printed page, though nonetheless presumably in thrall to his teaching), Stern-Anders had already been developing similar themes. For one thing, he noted, it is not that I am able to suppress an inherent preferential interest in my own inner state in order to “take an interest” in what is happening in the world, but rather that I am already involved with the world before I come to act on the interest effectively subsisting between myself and the world in the first place. “Interest,” in its direct etymological meaning of “being in-between”— das “Inter-esse,” das Darin-Sein, as Stern-Anders puts it— is not the foil but rather the precondition of “objectivity” (Gegenständlichkeit or Objektivität), since it is only in an actual traffic with things as they surround me every day that I can apprehend how they are.59 “Being with,” which we can read as a slightly later reformulation

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of the “being in-between” of “interest,” would just be a matter of rendering explicit a grounding relation already there.60 I am “with” Debussy’s music insofar as it “interests” me, and it interests me in the historically novel sense that I neither follow along dutifully behind it (as I would, SternAnders thinks, in the case of a Brandenburg Concerto) nor wallow untethered in a situation where I am “here” and it is “there” (which for SternAnders is in any case a fictitious possibility misleadingly sustained by most contemporary psychology). “Statefulness” is not an experience of “empty being,” which is subsequently filled in by content. Rather, the “state” is always a state “of,” “with,” “around,” and so forth. It “inexplicitly obtains a relation to an object” and in that modest but crucial sense cannot be distinguished in any principled way from an act.61 (Here, Stern-Anders is operating in terms of the core phenomenological thesis that there is only ever consciousness “of ” something, not simply consciousness “here” and things “there.”) In other words, “being in a state” and “statefully attending” turn out to be two different expressions for a single basic way of describing what it is like to hear Debussy, such that any prejudices we might have been initially encouraged to entertain about the “passive” character of this music and its apprehension must now be sharply qualified.

Actuality From these observations about the worldly preinvolvement of interest, we may infer further back out to a larger agenda. To be sure, as willing as I have been to entertain what hearing Debussy on both Ortega’s and Stern-Anders’s terms might be like, I will be the first to admit that there is little to be gained in standing too firm by the various critical or historiographical claims made on behalf of musical “Impressionism” in these texts. The scholarly interest lies rather in the prospect of recovering the surprisingly extensive and sustained use to which Debussy was being put within a particular current of aesthetic theorizing. Though Stern-Anders’s Debussy essay never makes the point, it is clear from its continuity with his other writings of the period that the effort to describe an adequate mode of hearing Debussy plays directly into a wider effort to describe an adequate relation to contemporary “actuality” (Aktualität, as per the title of Stern-Anders’s first published essay). What he writes of “Debussy” here, he elsewhere writes in identical terms of “the Today” (das Heute) as a whole— namely that the latter “is not an object (Gegenstand), not an ‘opposition’ (Gegenüberstand), but rather a ‘circumstance’ (Umstand). Not something that opposes (gegenübersteht) us but something that surrounds (umsteht) us.”62 Any honest attempt at an assessment of contemporary experience,

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then, must begin from an account of con-temporaneity, of being “with” the “times” in a radical presentness that the ideas of “being open” and “letting oneself go” strive to capture. Moreover, his remarks on hearing Debussy are prefaced with the assertion that whatever may be said there would also obtain a direct pertinence to what may be said of encountering the world at large: in other words, not just music as heard, nor even the world as heard, but beyond that, the heard as a potentiality contained within any worldly presence to attention. Our question [of how we might hear Debussy] belongs to the total complex of problems concerning how the world is there for hearing at all, but not, on the other hand, as if it were to investigate the world of the blind— the world for someone who only hears. For proper hearing is the hearing of someone who also has the other world: the hearing of someone who is also self-evidently subject to those possibilities of personal life that are not merely musical, not merely acoustical, but among which is the possibility of attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit), attention (Attention).63

The proposition that one composer’s output would open insight into how the world in its present way of appearing is there in general for attentive experience is a bold one, of course, and could only remain raised, not fulfilled. As it happens, the youthful enthusiasm of Stern-Anders’s phenomenological enterprise did not endure long enough for him to see such a project through. By the 1930s, amid the embittering if sadly clarifying experience of German-Jewish emigration, his descriptions of the relation between person and world would take on a far less optimistic tone, his admiration for the rightward-tending, anti-Semitic Heidegger permanently soured. In a pair of essays published in French but drafted in German as early as 1929, Stern-Anders instead emphasizes the alienated character of human activity, and here he essentially defines the human as an animal that is always at first excluded from the world and must therefore constantly forge its affiliations anew.64 By that same year, meanwhile, Ortega had veered somewhat in the opposite direction, recalibrating his image of the balcony figure peering down at violence in the street in favor of a rather different relation to the worldly. “All life means finding oneself in ‘circumstances’ or in the world around us. For this is the fundamental meaning of the idea ‘world.’ The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities. It is not then something apart from and foreign to our existence, it is its actual periphery. It represents what it is within our power to be, our vital potentiality.”65

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From these crisscrossing rearrangements of outlook, we might infer that how one characterizes one’s intimacy with the world is at least partly a function of how hospitable the world is to one’s personhood. The quicksilver inversion of a celebratory being-right-there-in-the-middle-of-it into a wary compulsion to hold things at arm’s length (for Stern-Anders)— and the other way around (for Ortega)— may appear almost too obviously and unsettlingly a symptom of the mercurial nature of the respective climates of Weimar Germany and pre-Franco Spain. But while there is surely some truth to the idea that these figures’ shifting views were colored by their personal responses to the rise of fascism, a reductive biographical mapping would be irresponsible intellectual history. Although the late Weimar student enthusiasm for Heidegger often correlated all too well with such rightist cultural phenomena as the German “Youth Movement” in its later phases, Stern-Anders’s sensibilities lay consistently further to the left than Ortega’s, and in any case his disillusionment with Heidegger did not lead to a complete disavowal of his own early aesthetics. After the war, he would come to articulate a pacifist philosophical anthropology that in many ways prefigured the advent of the various national Green parties— a turn whose implications we will consider in detail in chapter four. In short, although the two main figures of this study may have shown signs of naivety at moments in their intellectual and political careers, in no way can we simply reduce their inclinations to emphasize the priority of worldhood over selfhood— or, as Taruskin has it in a somewhat different context, “the primacy of the ontological over the psychological”— to a passive infatuation with authority, whether of God, State, or some other entity.66 What mattered for these figures was the open and ongoing interpretation of worldhood, which does not entail malignly denigrating personhood, but rather emphasizing how an appropriate attentiveness to the former may in fact lead us to a more expansive apprehension of the situation of the latter. In the very specific context considered here, “depersonalization” or “dehumanization” was never a matter of eliminating the “I” of aesthetic experience, but of trying to elaborate a position from which to ask questions about how the person might be “situated” with respect to music in the first place.67 The goal was to identify a point from which to wonder about the constitution of this relation, which could only be achieved by setting aside accepted ways of inhabiting it, indeed of suspending habit altogether. It may well be that the specifically musical insights that can be won by way of hearing Debussy with Ortega or Stern-Anders will strike scholars today as less than apposite, in the sense of failing to reveal some previously

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unremarked feature that would aid in our “knowing” (that is, “appreciating”) the repertory. And yet, once again, this is likely because the strategy common to the two thinkers was instead to seize upon the fact of certain musical qualities in order to discover the idea that we must be different from what might be inferred from the experience of historically prior musics: for Ortega, in short, that being a person involves something other than just recapitulating within oneself a quasi-lyrical thread of continuous feeling (so that “dehumanizing” is in the end really just a matter of putting aside an unreflected notion of the “human,” while remaining fundamentally humanist);68 and for Stern-Anders, in short, that being in the world involves something other than just beholding it at will in each of its elements, one after the other. “Debussy,” a necessary fiction of the critical enterprise, materializes these possibilities, makes them evident, though certainly not self-evident, since music is not held to think for us, but rather to form an occasion for thought.

[ Ch a pter 3 ]

Hearing-With

Summer 1921, Freiburg, Bertoldstrasse 14, university lecture hall of the Musicological Seminar. Thirty-two-year-old Martin Heidegger (still Edmund Husserl’s assistant) is attending a gathering of the Collegium musicum, founded the previous year by his colleague Wilibald Gurlitt, director of the Seminar. It is a happy milieu for Heidegger, who takes pleasure in his students’ musical talent. Heinrich Besseler, twenty-one, a student of both Gurlitt and Heidegger as well as of Husserl, plays the flute in a chamber piece by Giovanni Gabrieli. Günther Stern-Anders, nineteen and pursuing a similar course of study, is also there, playing violin. Later in the evening, the group sings a medieval motet, discusses its construction and significance, then moves on to some liturgical chant, an experience that will subsequently prompt Heidegger to reflect in the lecture hall that the “hymnody and music of the Middle Ages are historically accessible only on the terrain of a primordial phenomenological interpretation of the philosophical-theological anthropology of the era.”1 That is to say, in order to really “get into” this music, you have to know what it means to be a person, medievally. The Collegium musicum is where you give something as nutty as that a try. On such evenings, a character like Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, twenty-nine, a budding “racial psychologist” finishing his dissertation under Husserl on the laments of medieval minnesingers, might rub shoulders with someone like Heinz Edelstein, nineteen, cellist and eventual author of a fine dissertation on Augustine’s view of music, advised by Gurlitt and Husserl and under the keen influence of Max Scheler.2 Unlike the prolific Clauss, Edelstein will not have occasion to publish again, eventually fleeing the Nazis to Reykjavik, where he spends the next twenty years in exile.3 1935, Rome. Karl Löwith, a German-Jewish philosopher living in exile, runs into Besseler, his former friend, classmate, and fellow Heidegger student, who has in the meantime become a low-ranking officer of the paramilitary Nazi Stormtroopers (SA). Besseler has managed to retain his rank following the bloody purge of antiHitler elements from the SA during the “Night of the Long Knives” putsch the previous June, a circumstance that cannot bode well for the continuation of their friendship. “I told him,” Löwith will later recall, “how the Italians’ sense of justice had been scandalized by the events of June 1934, and he could not understand it at all. To him it was merely a matter of ‘form’ whether people who had become a danger to the state were eliminated with or without a court sentence.” Löwith’s judgment of his classmate is a model of unblinking understatement. “He has not remained the promising young man he once was, nor has he matured. His development was arrested by ambition and his early adaptation to the demands of the job. 99

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His conversation with me about the German situation was conventional and irresponsible. He disregarded all the more serious questions, and I therefore consigned the enjoyable period of our almost daily exchanges to the past.”4

Are we ever really alone when we listen to music? Do we face the music head-on, so to speak, or is hearing music a matter of listening laterally “in concert” with really and virtually present others, whose distinct but parallel acts of listening help orient our own? What would our sense of musical listening be like if we were to imagine it not incidentally but essentially as a matter of being with others?5 For a historical moment of heightened tension between ideals of community and of society— Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, as per the classic social-theoretical distinction— any reflection on the character and ethical value of listening to music would have to run up against these questions. This chapter works through one particularly extended and complex response as developed in the work of Heinrich Besseler (1900– 1969), an especially imaginative student of the phenomenological critique of psychologism, whose studies with Heidegger and others in the early 1920s led to what has been considered the inauguration of the very idea of the history of listening.6 Needless to say, one might quibble with the premise of these questions. Nobody lives in absolute isolation. Particularly prior to the advent of sound reproduction technologies, one could not easily imagine hearing music without the actual co-presence of the bodies of other persons, even if at some remove, across landscapes or through barriers. So, to suppose the theoretical possibility of a solitary listener, even for the sake of argument, has something of the nature of straw and might seem to indulge in truism.7 Yet what is really being asked about is a description of musical listening that would account more than casually for the material communal circumstance that makes listening what it is for us. As a matter of sociological thematics, there are certainly important precedents to the intellectual historical moment explored here, including notably Karl Bücher’s often-cited (if little read) Labor and Rhythm (1896), and the musically oriented first half of Hans Staudinger’s little-cited (and hence even less read) Individual and Community (1913).8 Yet to ask more particularly not just about the history of musical sociality as a self-evident feature of cultural life, but instead about how even an apparently individual listening experience might be constituted in relation to others, is to pose a genuine challenge. Moreover, as ludicrous as a pure notion of the radically isolated listener might seem— the Einzelhörer, as Besseler puts it9— there is a legitimate case to be made that this notion did in fact function historically, if not as

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a reality then at least as an operative ideal, in two seemingly unrelated yet chronologically and geographically proximate locales: on the one hand, the modern concert hall in which individuals hear music “alone together,” silent and motionless and hence (so the familiar story goes) suppressing their relations to one another in order to intensify a singular relation with music alone; on the other hand, the psychological laboratory in which test subjects in isolation from a wider horizon of life are asked to respond to discrete stimuli as if they might meaningfully stand in for a larger field of aesthetic experience.10 It is the rough coincidence of these two culturalhistorical sites, and their ideological cooperation at a distance, that energizes Besseler’s critique of them.11 While both of Besseler’s two major statements on the history of listening, one early and one late in his career, begin by explicitly acknowledging Hugo Riemann’s work as a touchstone in the question of what “musical listening” even is, both texts also go on to hold up Riemann’s naturalistic account as the foil for a phenomenology that gets at more basic structures of the apprehension of music-making. By the mid-1920s, the limited applicability of Riemann’s theory of triadic logic as an account of aesthetic validity had become almost too self-evident to a young academic like Besseler to merit sustained discussion. The deeper problem was rather that Riemann exemplifies a widely shared assumption that the “musical listener” was made in the image of the concert or laboratory scene: listening motionlessly to music that simply presents itself as a quasi-stimulus to be observed in a state of detachment. Even the periodic waves of enthusiasm for an aesthetics of projective empathy observable at various moments in modern European music history only superficially overcome the essential decay of genuinely participatory culture. Any description of music that aims at a broader validity will have to distance itself as much from the prioritization of “autonomous” instrumental music as it will from styles of knowledge native to psychology, physiology, or acoustics. “If in this context we single out the central problem of [musical] listening, we are not to aim at psychologically investigating certain artificially isolated processes,” Besseler insists, since what “psychology” has in general been able to “isolate”— interval qualities, rhythmic perception, at most issues of form— amounts only to a few parochial aspects of compositional technique that are in the end only observable within a very narrow swath of repertory and historical experience.12 The following discussion works through some of Besseler’s copious descriptions of the possibilities of a renewed communal listening and seeks to do justice to the notion of “hearing-with” (Mithören)— echoing Heidegger’s “being-with” (Mitsein)— that is fundamental to his work as a whole.13 It moves in two broad stages. First, it offers a careful reading of Besseler’s

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earliest musicological work, in which the emergence of the genre of the Baroque dance suite is taken as an emblem of the historic extinction of participatory music-making in Europe and the correlative rise of an “aesthetic attitude” that ostensibly regulates modern European auditory comportment. His central and oft-repeated claim, formulated in the spirit of the Weimarera youth movement in amateur music-making, was that the more the social milieu of the concert hall became the paradigmatic site for musical listening, the more the experience of music lost its power to form and sustain communal bonds, as the long-standing intimacy between music and its everyday settings— children’s play, labor, social dance, worship, and so on— was severed. The second half of this chapter explores Besseler’s subsequent turn to a focus on the medieval polyphonic motet repertory that he saw as most clearly enabling a form of auditory engagement he described as a “participatory mode.” It concludes by briefly considering some ideas from germane work by the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner (1892– 1985), whose contemporaneous critique of the concept of community orienting Besseler’s implicit politics poses one of the most insightful, if indirect, responses to the communalism Besseler celebrated. Case One

Aesthetic Hearing (Seventeenth-Century Suite) Joining In A natural point of departure here is the year 1923, a crisis moment in the short life of the Weimar Republic and one that gave rise to the earliest key text in our discussion, Besseler’s unpublished Freiburg dissertation, “Contributions to a Style History of the German Suite in the 17th Century.”14 It may seem unpromising to begin with a dissertation, the unpublished work of a twenty-three-year-old who was as yet almost entirely unknown (though he would become one of the most influential German music scholars of the century). Yet the motivation is straightforward, since in part, what is at issue here, even more than in the foregoing chapters, is precisely the very real passion for thinking, and rethinking, which animated a significant subculture within this disappointed and disillusioned “lost generation” coming of age during the war and immediate postwar years. Beyond this, moreover, there is the peculiar circumstance that Besseler’s entire conceptual apparatus is already on vivid display in his very first scholarly text. What we glean from an attentive reading of it is an especially focused view of his dark historiographical mood, in which the long narrative of music is at each moment

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a narrative of its decay, and of the decay of communal fabric, and thus historiography takes the form of diagnosis, always hinting at a possible cure. Jarring somewhat against its title’s promise of “style history,” the central preoccupation of Besseler’s dissertation is the history of listening. The argument— or really what amounts to a kind of historiographical gesture that is repeated and rehearsed in the manner of a potentially transposable ideational schema— is that formal changes in the distribution of musical material in instrumental dance suites composed in the several generations before Johann Sebastian Bach are correlates of changes in what he calls “modes of access” (Zugangsweise) to music. The notion of a “mode of access” is strategically broad and allows Besseler to include within his purview not just acoustical apprehension of musical sound, but an auditory engagement with music as a component of “life” more generally conceived, a possibility we will develop further in discussion below.15 As his scholarship repeatedly insists, the basic shift discernible in this musical genre in its initial phase was from correlation with a mode of access through “participation” to correlation with a mode of access through “hearing.” Thus, early on in the 1923 inaugural dissertation: If the mode of access to music had once been an act of participating or of using, this mode transformed itself . . . into an act of hearing. Given alongside this phenomenon of listening toward (Hinhören auf ) the work is an exit from the context of factical life as a transition into a particular aesthetic “attitude” (“Einstellung”), and as a correlate to this exit, the isolating withdrawal of the work itself. These aspects of [musical] sense are to be designated in short as distance from life (Lebensdistanz) and accentuation of content (Gehaltsakzentuierung).16

Or, as he would put it both more tersely and also more generally in a lecture on the occasion of his habilitation at Freiburg two years later: “The mode of access to any kind of everyday music was distinguished by the fact that in it, hearing played either no role at all or only a subordinate, accompanying role.”17 In other words, the more music became an object of aesthetic hearing— a centuries-long process that was not fulfilled until the early nineteenth century, in Besseler’s account— the more it receded as the phenomenon it truly was.18 Paying attention to music is to misrecognize it; or, to put the underlying paradox in an extreme form, listening to music is to mishear it.19 Such formulations are obviously loaded, not only in terms of phenomenological and historiographical description, but also in terms of ideological orientation. There is, first of all, the self-evident negative judgment of a

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supposed tendency toward dissociation and isolation, a tendency deemed peculiar to European modernity. As we read along with the writer of this dissertation, we are learning how to tell a story about our musical present that will make its shortcomings obvious in such a way as to prescribe their solution. To remedy the ailment of a musical sphere that has been severed from its origin in “life,” clearly you just need to reintroduce musical activity back into the everydayness of living experience, as well as to acknowledge those everyday sorts of music that had been too long overlooked or denigrated by university music scholars. To some extent, the real historical enactment of this solution, to the extent that it actually occurred at all in the way Besseler envisioned, lies outside my immediate concerns. It has been addressed in histories of the so-called “youth music movement” ( Jugendmusikbewegung), as well as of contemporaneous composition, where a special significance for figures like Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill has become a familiar feature of Weimar music historiography.20 Among other roles over the course of his career, Besseler was a cheerleader for types of activity that he believed might reverse music’s incremental tendency toward “distance from life.” But it should also be pointed out that, in line with other phenomenologically oriented writers, Besseler maintained a bitter animosity toward the figure of the Composer, an at once methodological and ideological distaste that merits some consideration.21 Beyond a concern for composers, compositions, and the social history of music-making in the 1920s, there is a particular value in focusing more narrowly on Besseler’s actual phenomenological description of listening, a rather more speculative and (at first blush) purely “theoretical” task, which was initiated in the 1923 dissertation and would be further developed over the course of many subsequent publications into the following decade. The primary motive for these iterative acts of description was to show that the image of “listening” held by much or most contemporaneous musical discourse was parochial, having been distorted and unnecessarily circumscribed both by the psychologistic prejudice of a subject-object relation to musical sound, and also by the hyper-civilized experience of concert hall comportment, which he understands as separating listeners both from music and from one another. From the beginning of his career, Besseler was driven by an acid disdain for his own cultural milieu, so he is at all moments both responding to that milieu (directly or, more often, indirectly) and also imagining some alternative to it, finding in an unlikely series of music-historical worlds the potential material for fleshing out his imagination. The merits of this rich if ultimately treacherous imagination will stand or fall only with the plausibility of its descriptive detail, so we must now dwell on the kinds of features he wishes to draw out. At issue is the

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paradoxical question as to what sort of musical hearing there might be that is not “merely” musical hearing. We seem to know what it means to hear music hearingly, so to speak, so then what would it mean to encounter it otherwise? How can we tell we are encountering music that is meant to enjoin some other kind of engagement, or “mode of access”? Much of Besseler’s project in his erudite narration of selected moments of European music history comes down to suggesting ways of noticing the historical emergence of kinds of musical detail that index such distinctions.

Vocal Hearing and Instrumental Hearing Returning to the 1923 text, the first such source in terms of the chronology of his career, the initial challenge is to arrange the material Besseler chose for study in such a way as to be able to identify the point at which a modulation from “use” to “hearing” might become evident. The choice of the early Baroque suite as a dissertation topic is canny in that it enables comparative glances both backward to the late medieval precedent of paired dances (socalled Tanz-Nachtanz forms, as in the early precedents of the stock dances appended to the more stately compositions La Manfredina and Lamento di Tristano recorded in fourteenth-century manuscripts) as well as forward to Bach’s more familiar instrumental suites from the first half of the eighteenth century. The structuring interpretive premise of these discussions is that, as of around 1600, there still remained a more or less self-evident affiliation between musical organization (“form”) and the coordinated actions of some real group (or groups) of people, whose lives had long since already been lived. In other words, the “dance” aspect of dance music may be perceived more or less at face value, unconcealed by the intervention of what Besseler calls “style.” The first sustained case in point comes from Johann Hermann Schein’s (1586– 1630) Banchetto musicale (1617), a “Musical Banquet” of some twenty groups of dances, suites in all but name, comprising “pavanes, galliards, courantes and allemandes, which are arranged so that they correspond finely to one another in both mode and invention.”22 The four-dance structure, extended to five with a concluding “tripla” that transforms the allemande’s duple metrical proportions into triple ones, inherits and compounds the arrangement of ancient paired precursors: pavane and galliard relate to one another as stately Tanz and lively Nachtanz, as do allemande and tripla, with the courante standing alone in the middle. Besseler singles out the tenth group for more elaborate discussion, a comparatively unassuming set, oriented squarely within a D mode and unified throughout by certain affective and melodic characteristics (“invention”) whose consis-

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Example 3.1. Johann Hermann Schein, Allemande no. 10, from Banchetto musicale (1617), “for any instruments” (here arranged for modern strings, in the 1923 Breitkopf & Härtel edition)

tency had earned it the classification “variation suite” in Riemann’s nearly contemporaneous commentary.23 Mitmachen, joining in or participating, paradigmatically takes the form either of dancing or of singing, or of both at once. What one would look for in a use-oriented musical idiom in this vein, then, is both the rhythmic and phrase-structural regularity of twoand four-measure forms that would synchronize with conventional dance steps, and also a relatively conjunct melodic style, with points for breathing naturally at regular intervals. Such characteristics are clearest in the allemande and tripla, with their threefold four-bar organization (or eight-bar in the tripla, though the bar divisions are a modern editorial artifact in any case) and an upper voice whose few melodic leaps occur almost entirely between adjacent members of the D-minor triad. They are, moreover, reduced from the predominant five-voice texture to just four, which minimizes occasions for breaking a prevailing homophonic block texture. For Riemann, the allemande-tripla (ex. 3.1) presents the basic material, whose variations precede it in the foregoing dance movements. But the actual ordering of the dances begins with the pavane, the most stylized of the group (ex. 3.2). “Stylization” here specifically means, first of all, a comparative flexibility of phrase structure, departing from the regularity of the dance prototype, such that the first strain is fourteen measures long, in a 4 + 4 + 6 grouping, somewhat obscured by melodic anticipa-

Example 3.2. Schein, Pavane no. 10, from Banchetto musicale

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tions in the upper voice in mm. 4 and 8, as well as the relative continuity from the F cadence in m. 11 to the D cadence in m. 14. “Style” moreover involves the adoption of what Besseler calls “motet technique,” which entails greater contrapuntal independence distributed among the five individual voices, with few moments of homophonic setting, and a bass pedal underneath the entire opening melodic gesture, a feature that works against the possible attribution of changing functional harmonic qualities within the cantus incipit itself. Here “function” is not limited anachronistically to the tripartition of all harmonic events into tonic, dominant, and subdominant, but means more loosely the “mere mutual relatedness of sonorities, a relation not yet more determinate, in contrast to which ‘tonal’ harmony is already a more specific type”— by which he presumably means something like the seeming reference of one (sounding) triad to another (not sounding) triad in the absence of some other evident iterative patterning, in contrast to the explicit linkage of one simultaneity to another through concrete voice-leading procedures, where repetition and transpositional predictability color the relations among musical elements.24 Any sequential activity is likely to manifest this quality of non-“functional” coherence, so the sweeping sequential gesture heading into the final cadence of the pavane draws particular notice.25 Beginning in m. 32 (though in a sense also following directly from the contrapuntally elaborate A-major triad of m. 31, which might otherwise have participated in a cadential formula, albeit somewhat prematurely in relation to the overall phrase rhythm established by this point), the ensemble passes through a sevenfold succession of major triads ascending by step on each downbeat but one (m. 35): in short, an extended ascending 5-6 sequence that effectively spans the octave from lower to upper “dominant” triad. The passage is exceptional in its extent, yet still broadly exemplary of the general role of linear procedures in Schein’s dance music, which suggest the vestiges of a fundamentally “vocal” conception. As such, it ought to provide straightforward support for one of Besseler’s key overarching points, namely that it shows how Schein in one mood (the allemande and tripla) prolongs the traditional structure of “music for use,” in which danceability and singability effortlessly intertwine, while in another mood (the pavane) introducing a measure of distance from “lived experience” by means of stylization, all the while unifying these dances within a single affective, modal, and melodic-figural spectrum of variation. From this perspective, Schein at once communicates with the dances’ social origins while also initiating a longer-range, stylizing motion away from them. But instead, the passage presents Besseler with an unexpected interpretive quandary. The problem lies in how to apprehend the vestige of vo-

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cality that has been imputed to linear counterpoint here. “This sequential passage,” he writes, “though it displays a certain excess of vocal technique, may no more be considered specifically instrumental than the no-longervocal ceaselessness of the voices can be taken to indicate a new instrumental hearing.”26 That is a complex claim, whose formulation in terms of forbiddance— how one may not hear the passage— betrays an underlying ambivalence. The music here (and in the many other passages like it) is at once too vocal and yet also only incipiently instrumental. It is morethan-vocal in that it extends the principle of linearity, the putative mark of a vocal continuity and singability, past the point at which the passage could still be vocally most idiomatic, which is to say, the point at which it would still conform to the phrase rhythm of vocal utterance as normatively determined by rate of breathing and the structure of grammatical periodicity. But at this point of excess, does it then instead become instrumental? No, because it is logically impossible to follow along an established spectrum of vocality to arrive at the point of instrumentality. In terms of the underlying schematic interpretive logic in evidence here, the categories of the vocal and the instrumental may intertwine but never meet. Besseler’s historiographical task is thus to put his finger on those moments, which have otherwise escaped attention, at which the quiet leap from one modality to the other can be said to transpire. Surely, one might object, the quasi-deconstructive instability of this problematic is a vain illusion, nothing but silly wordplay that obscures the obvious historical fact that Schein has simply composed music for instruments, borrowing a variety of available compositional idioms derived from prior repertories, some of which are vocal (including the sixteenth-century motet and madrigal), some of which are instrumental (including any number of inherited if transmogrified dance types from the later Middle Ages onward). But, of course, the crux of the issue does not really concern the peripheral matters of philology and connoisseurship— merely knowing what types of music and techniques are referenced or borrowed— but is instead tied up with Besseler’s commitment to the idea that there is indeed a historically manifest and significant distinction between modes of hearing. For the sake of clarification, we might note (as Besseler does not) that we appear to have discovered at this point that there are really two underlying historiographical shifts being narrated here: one from the disposition to participate in music toward merely hearing it; and a second, subsidiary shift from hearing vocally to hearing instrumentally. We might also note that the vocal-to-instrumental modulation, nested within the second term of the participatory-to-auditory modulation, is roughly isomorphic to the latter in that both pairs imply a movement away from music as it

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fundamentally or originally is— that is, integrated without caesura into life. It seems clear, then, that we need to come to some better understanding of what differentiates a “vocal hearing” from an “instrumental” one. From there, we can move back outward to the broader, encompassing distinction between modes of musical access, including the non-auditory. Besseler’s sense that “the vocal” is paradigmatically understood in terms of stepwise line may seem somewhat arbitrary. Voices are of course by no means constrained by stepwise relations within a background scalar context. But the basic claim would seem to be simple enough: namely, that the stepwise relation is the one that most immediately suggests contiguity or continuity, and hence the sense of continuous consecution that would be required to sustain the image of “the voice” as what quintessentially stands in for the continuity of human being generally. The priority set on the stepwise line can be understood moreover in the context of a longer-range historical perspective in which the precedent of medieval and Renaissance vocal polyphony is formative both for European listening habits and for a sort of informal theoretical understanding of what constitutes the musical space within which idiomatic compositional gestures may unfold. In the simplest sense, a “vocal hearing” would be one in which a listener might in principle imagine tracking a single part or indeed inwardly co-perform it by effectively singing silently to oneself. This possibility of co-performance, or Mitvollzug, is effectively guaranteed by the medium of vocal composition itself, in which an individual human voice is constrained to do just one thing at a time. If we consider the phenomenon at issue here to be not simply the manner of performance but also of sonic attribute, then the phenomenal oneness of a voice is not simply a matter of being tied to one person but of being generally incapable of sounding against itself at any given moment. The concatenation of pitches into a series, the temporal differentiation of sonic events within a single real or virtual locus, both animates that local source and also, precisely in testing the extent of its phenomenal coherence across pitch variation, confirms its identity as a single line. So, the background potential for the activity of a real voice is understood in this perspective as a condition for the possibility of a musical line. Hearing “vocally” is a matter of at all times confirming to oneself the virtual presence of a vocal persona, which seems to be at once reassuring insofar as it provides a grounding for this particular form of perception, and also, precisely in its virtuality, unsettling in that it seems liable to dissipate at any moment, not being quite present in an ongoing and continuously verifiable way. As a “mere” listener, one is always in danger of losing the thread, which is to say forfeiting one’s already tenuous place in relation to the ensemble. Through-

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out Besseler’s writings, this threat, trivial as it may seem, has the feeling of the existential. In a genre such as the suite for multiple non-vocal instruments, as in Schein’s Banchetto musicale, the virtual presence of “voice” remains possible, but not guaranteed. One might sing along (virtually or really) with an individual strand of blown or bowed tones, but the very fact of their instrumentality renders the grounding of this way of engaging the music unstable. What happens to such instrumental textures over the remainder of the seventeenth century is shown incrementally, and with rather fine discrimination, in a series of subsequent examples, two of which merit brief mention. In the 1654 compilation of instrumental suites, Studenten-Music (1654), by Johann Rosenmüller (1619– 1684), the integrity of polyphonic relationships is compromised by the introduction of blocklike alternation of voice pairs, each of which maintains homophonic and largely parallel textural uniformity (ex. 3.3). The result is a kind of watered-down polyphony, in which the independence of the individual voices is further “suppressed by the centralizing force of the sonorous-harmonic.” The ascendancy of “the sonorous-harmonic” (das Klanglich-Harmonische) is a matter of coordinating the individual lines into ever cruder swaths of basic parallel-third and -sixth textures over less rhythmically active bass and middle voices, a kind of cheap counterpoint that compels the texture as a whole to comply with an incipiently functional harmonic organization. What one now hears, or is enjoined to hear by the restructuring of the musical fabric, is no longer an interweaving of individual lines (despite the self-evident presence of discrete parts) but instead masses of quasi-functional sonority. Though Rosenmüller is perhaps an unlikely and out-of-the-way target, the historiographical claims staked upon his example are nevertheless quite grand. In describing his hearing of this music, Besseler posits nothing less than the corrosion of music, its disappearance as something truly copresent with a listener, precisely at the moment of the emergence of modern, tonal harmony, as well as of the ascendancy of instrumental music as the medium for nascently “autonomous” genres. The slow demise of “vocal polyphonic hearing,” a mode of hearing still loosely operative in Schein several decades earlier, has now pushed the last remnants of a virtually coperformative apprehension of music out of the picture. For Besseler, the emerging forms of musical texture provide no motivation for inwardly and silently realizing the effect of intermittent, alternating voice pairs over a homophonic harmonic mass. One is not invited “in” to the virtual space of the music in these cases. As hearing becomes increasingly more “instrumental” and less “vocal,” it also maintains incrementally less affinity for

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Example 3.3. Johann Rosenmüller, Studenten-Music (1654), no. 50, “Paduan” (for “five viols, or other instruments,” arranged by Arnold Schering in 1914 for modern strings with continuo), mm. 19– 28

performing, and becomes more and more a matter of simply “listening to” a musical quasi-object that is unified within itself and removed beyond the reach of the uninvolved. As a result, the locus of musical apprehension, the “mode of access,” seems to fly centrifugally away from the vestigial core of virtual communal participation, outward toward the newly elevated and increasingly reified roles of creator and consumer: “The motet polyphony that had been based on the collaboration of different individuals has been suppressed by the centralizing force of the sonorous-harmonic; one could speak of a perspectival intensification toward the listener and correlatively toward the composer.”27 In short, what Besseler is describing, through a mass of detail that I have only crudely glossed here (while also providing what I take to be necessary stitching in an at-times-seamy argument), is how the listener became isolated. Thus we finally arrive at the case of Johann Jacob Froberger (1616– 1667),

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Example 3.4. Johann Jacob Froberger, Keyboard Suite no. 16 in G Major (c. 1650), “Gigue”

who, more directly than Besseler’s other examples, prefigures the keyboard idioms later favored by Bach. Here, the notion of a “voice” is completely reduced to an anachronistic fiction. What one hears in listening to a piece like Froberger’s G-Major Suite (no. 16 in the 1899 edition by Guido Adler that Besseler would have been consulting) is a rough simulacrum of community, a travesty of the real thing: “the work is from beginning to end particularly forcefully removed from the context of life.”28 This removal is not just a matter of the self-evident fact that we are now confronting an instrumental medium in which there is no longer a one-to-one match between “voice” and non-vocal instrument. Rather, the sense of decontextualizing anti-sociality seeps down into essentially every detail of the sonic procedure. The suddenly pervasive but otherwise innocuous enough presence of anacrusis or Auftaktigkeit, for example, points to “a radical reshaping of melodic structure” through the growing influence of lute and harpsichord idioms (ex. 3.4). Whereas “vocal style” (and to a lesser degree writing for wind and string instruments) could “dispense with such a means because there the living voice produced the flow of movement through the constant renewal of tone,” the implication is that plucked instruments must initiate motion from out of a state of disengagement, activating the mechanism in order to be ready for the onset of the motion proper following the

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Example 3.5. Froberger, Keyboard Suite no. 16, “Sarabande”

tactus.29 Instrumental idioms of the period are seen to involve a greater role for what Besseler calls “anticipation technique,” which, in addition to simple “pick-up” figures, also includes the repetition of tones that generate an effect of intensification leading to a downbeat, as in the upper-voice G in m. 9 of the Sarabande (ex. 3.5), but which can also involve the affective dispensation toward a “pathetic” expressive modality. But it is above all what Besseler terms the “placelessness of voices” (die Ortlosigkeit der Stimmen) in instrumental idioms that fires his critical imagination and supports his characterization of the music as disclosing “a new manner of hearing.” In the first strain of the Gigue (ex. 3.4), apart from the first G-major chordal downbeat, the texture gradually thickens from one to two to three voices over the first two measures, acquiring a fourth voice in the bass in m. 3. But after the imperfect cadence in m. 4, an attentive tracking of voice relationships will find that the upper melodic line, which to this point had consistently played the role of “soprano,” is now superseded by a higher one. To a “polyphonic hearing,” this might appear as a new quinta vox, but it in fact merely reflects a “polyphonically impossible notation” given the actual four-voice framework (41). A certain fuzziness of contrapuntal relationship is of course commonplace in keyboard and lute composition throughout their respective repertories. Fugue and canon, reverently called “strict counterpoint,” merely constitute an exception that proves the rule. Relatedly, there is the phenomenon of what Besseler follows Kurth in calling “false polyphony” (Scheinpolyphonie), the idiomatic instrumental technique of “compound melody” where the appearance of multiple lines

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can be created by weaving registrally segregated streams of stepwise or small-leap relations within an otherwise single succession of tones. Taken together, “all the features mentioned are the expression of the deindividualization of the single voices, which is especially pronounced in keyboard composition by its very nature, but which even in compositions for melody instruments bespeaks a new style of hearing.”30 We are left with nothing but a self-contained sonic event that keeps its distance from us, providing only fleeting moments of opportunity for virtually, imaginatively joining in, which are no sooner conjured than they evaporate or are revealed to be illusory. Besseler’s line of argument may come across as quixotic in so doggedly attempting to call our attention to these seemingly unremarkable stylistic features, yet the merit of this approach must lie precisely in its recentering of focus upon otherwise overlooked phenomena. There is an undeniable wit in his leveraging for the sake of his larger story a historical shift that is in fact so obvious that virtually nobody had paid it any notice. The history of the German instrumental dance suite from Besseler’s perspective— and in fact, even more stunningly, the entire history of the subsequent German “Classical-Romantic” canon— is a history of disillusionment, of being able to perceive, or just make out through the sonic vapor, a lost coherence, people doing things together in concert, but only as an aesthetic image that taunts us in its Ortlosigkeit or “placelessness.” From the onset of modernity, the so-called Neuzeit, “art” music is utopian only in this negative sense: the “non-place” as opposed to the eutopian “good place,” and indeed it can only arouse a certain disgust, often barely repressed below the surface of his rhetoric. Case Two

Participatory Hearing (Thirteenth- Century Motet) Factical Life So much for Besseler’s account of the shift from vocal to instrumental hearing. One reason it has made sense to dwell on this conceptual pathway, as opposed to first commenting more extensively on the larger encompassing distinction between participatory and auditory modes, is that it can be done so easily by reference to score examples, and hence dovetails neatly with conventional scholarly habits of approaching musical facts. Yet doing so has the disadvantage that we still do not have an adequate sense of the contrasting term of the crucial comparison: Mitmachen and its intentional mode of participation. To be sure, despite the constant ghosting presence

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of the lost participatory community in Besseler’s inaugural dissertation, the text does not contain a single concrete example of the antipode against which the “aesthetic attitude” (once again, as in previous chapters, the crucial Einstellung) is to be positively evaluated. One could be forgiven for suspecting that this positive foil is mythical, an infinitely regressing ideal that is dreamed up solely for the sake of argument. This may be the case in part, but the whole truth is more complicated. In order to expand the frame of reference back out to that broader distinction, I want to proceed, first, by considering the central orienting concept of “life” as Besseler adopted and developed it, and second, by working up a description of the specific musical phenomenon that sets the benchmark for Besseler’s sense of participatory music-making: medieval polyphonic vocal performance. To start with, for all of its philological erudition and compositionaltechnical detail, it is crucial to appreciate the significance of Besseler’s framing his inaugural thesis as an argument about the effects of war on the social fabric of German-speaking lands. The text often reads in unabashedly presentist terms (as does his contemporaneous writing on medieval music, which we will visit shortly). Despite the nearly five-year-old armistice, 1923 was still a year of immediate military threat, witnessing the FrenchBelgian invasion of the major industrial region of the Ruhr valley, which in turn provoked Weimar government– mandated workers’ strikes in passive resistance against the armed foreign occupation. Nobody could have missed the obvious parallels between the violent devastation of the present and the violent devastation of early seventeenth-century Germany during the Thirty Years’ War (1618– 1648), which is blamed here for dissolving the “bourgeois musical community characteristic of the first third of the [seventeenth] century,” and for leading to a momentous schism in social agency between church and aristocracy.31 After 1648, with a staggering six to eight million dead (roughly one-third of the prewar German population) and the churches and schools of Central Europe in tatters, widespread institutional disintegration inhibited the flow of musical knowledge and experience from cantoral learning into bourgeois communities. This account observes sacred and secular music-making curdling into their separate spheres, no longer enriching one another as they ostensibly had in the more stable years around 1600. Here, then, lies an apparently traditional historical “explanation” for the weakening of vocal polyphony, as an institutionally promoted and transmissible skill, over against the new fashion for instrumental music in aristocratic settings. With church learning cut off from domestic and civic spheres, new ways of knowing how to make music had to fill the void, and Besseler’s analysis of this moment accordingly suggests the emergence of makeshift replacements for the organic community that

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had been lost during the war. The mid-century “student” of Rosenmüller’s Studenten-Music, for example, is the social-historically real persona who must ready himself to provide entertainment for his patron in the context of Nachtmusik, as per the dedication page of the original score.32 So this collection of suites, dance music in name only, becomes instead a pathetic document of false community, at best “community” pantomimed for the entertainment of one’s social betters. Yet one of the most provocative aspects of the dissertation is that it explicitly casts itself as something other than an essay in traditional historicism. The “history” told here is neither political, nor social, nor cultural history, but is instead the history of a “fundamental structure of musical life” (Grundstruktur des Musiklebens) (3). Clearly, much rides on the notion of “life,” whose simplicity as a methodological slogan, taken on its own, is more mystifying than orienting, all the more so given the frequency with which Besseler reiterates it within compounds such as Lebensweise (“way of life”) or Lebenszusammenhang (“life context”), here and in later writing throughout the 1930s. His gloss on the term at the beginning of the dissertation provides his most thorough formulation: “Life” is meant here neither in a naturalistic sense— that is, as an object of biological or psychological investigations— nor in a metaphysical sense— that is, as an object of speculation within the history of philosophy. It is not in any way thingly, nor to be understood as a “progression” in an objectified sense. The clarifying discourse of “factical” life instead indicates much more the interrelationship of tendencies, encounters, experiences of the self and of the surrounding world, and similar phenomena, a coordination which we have and experience continually in the most diverse ways. . . . Now, as it appears to be the special task of musicology to grasp the position of the musical in the context of factical life and to achieve reliable foundations for historical interpretation, the following will attempt in an unsystematic form, through its particular manner of questioning, to draw out at least some isolated elements that could furnish a contribution toward this goal.33

What Besseler could have said here, in short, is that he was trying out a mode of musicological description that would be “phenomenological,” where that term would need to be understood specifically as distinguishing the method from any kind of naturalism, whether biologistic or psychologistic— or indeed historicist, if we take historicism to be a kind of “analogue to naturalism,” in the sense that both viewpoints see everything in their respective domains as in principle “explicable according to

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science,” which is to say, insistent on the thingly and self-evidently efficacious presence of their respective fields of objects.34 He would, then, have been carrying out something like the presumable aim of the exercise in joint teaching, planned but never realized, by his two most influential teachers at Freiburg, Wilibald Gurlitt (1889– 1963) and Martin Heidegger, who had once discussed the possibility of co-teaching a course on “Exercises in the Phenomenological Foundation of Musicology” (Übungen zur phänomenologischen Grundlegung der Musikwissenschaft) for the winter semester of 1920– 1921.35 To my knowledge, there is no indication (in the form of a prospectus or provisional syllabus) of what kind of perspective might have been held out for scrutiny in Gurlitt and Heidegger’s collaboration. Yet Besseler was obviously and explicitly drawing on a vocabulary that was laid out for him at considerable length in a different lecture course Heidegger did teach the following winter (1921– 1922), “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research,” whose transcript reads like a free-ranging experiment in the description of what was termed in the lectures the “facticity of life.”36 “Life” of course connotes praxis as opposed to theory, doing as opposed to reflecting, useful “tool” (Zeug) as opposed to abstracted “thing” (Ding), the proximity of the everyday as opposed to the distance of the aesthetic, Umgangsmusik (“everyday music”) and its associated Gebrauchsmusik (“music for use”) as opposed to Darbietungsmusik (“performance music”), and so forth. Such contrasts are familiar from a number of prior commentaries on Besseler’s debt to Heidegger (though most of these focus on Besseler’s 1925 Freiburg habilitation lecture).37 But while the concerns of Heidegger’s earlier teaching self-evidently prefigure his major published statement, the course in question also throws certain themes into greater relief, beginning precisely with the notion of life, and how to conceive it in a way that resists the impulse to think of it first in naturalistic terms. Since it is in particular the intense desire to think past a naturalistic account of our general situation that motivates all of the figures in this study, I want to home in on what Besseler had in mind along these lines for the more specific situation of musical listening. In proposing that the locus of a non-naturalistic foundation for listening is to be sought in the communalparticipatory mode, his approach is at once suggestive and problematic and therefore merits a more sustained consideration than it has received. What is Heidegger’s account of “life” in the 1921– 1922 lecture course? The portion dealing with this theme arrives rather late in the lecture notes, but when it does, it has the unmistakable tone of being the main business— unmistakable partly because the second paragraph of the lectures had already floated the claim that the history of philosophy, toward which these

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lessons are meant to gently coax its young audience, is itself “only accessible out of purely factical life” (nur . . . zugänglich aus dem rein faktischen Leben), which in turn implies that doing philosophy at all, “philosophizing,” is a matter of thinking the life one already has in deep historical terms.38 It is essential, first, to understand the sense of “living” not as an empty act of merely subsisting within an environment. Instead, as in many phenomenological reinterpretations of basic vernacular and philosophical habits of thought, living must be understood in a transitive sense, as being constitutively referential. One does not just live, one lives in some orientation toward a world. In Heidegger’s teaching at this stage, the notion of “living” appears to occupy a similar role to that of “intentionality” in Husserl’s work of the foregoing twenty years, but would shortly yield in turn to the more familiar Heideggerian emphasis on “care.” At any rate, the phenomenological reflection on life becomes at the same time an account of a lifeworld. In turn, we can only build up the notion of world on the basis of the “facticity of life”— life as what one already has in advance, a “prepossession” or Voraushabe (though not an abstract “presupposition”)— as opposed to a traditional conception in which “life” is what belatedly takes up residence “within” some preexisting but initially empty world that houses contents in the manner of discrete objects. Life has “the world” as its transitive point of reference, but not its object.39 Further, living can be best understood at first in the sense of taking up relations to the world, which is to say “caring for it.” In contrast to Heidegger’s better-known later passages on care (nearly always rendered from Sorge, as in Being and Time), here the idea obtains an almost explicitly ascetic aspect, reflecting its origins in his more directly theological early work.40 Though Heidegger insists that the “character of caring does not imply that life is one long woebegone affair,” nonetheless there is a basic sense in which “to live is to care about one’s ‘daily bread,’” and hence is a matter of “‘privation’ (privatio, carentia)”— the German here is Darbung, which etymologically connotes “starvation.”41 Life is “wanting” in this regard precisely in the sense that it is originally “deprived” of things, yet when it by contrast comes to “have” or possess things— wo das Leben im Besitz ist— then something worrying happens. “Where life is in possession, for example in a so-called objective life, which is totally lived in the world of objects and which is, as it were, ‘self-sufficient,’ this fundamental how (Grundwie) is even more dogged, because it then secretly bites into and has consumed itself.” When one has the sense of “having” things, of being on top of one’s assortment of everyday this-and-that, then, in a crucial irony, this apparent security is precisely the mood in which these things are least likely to become genuinely accessible and available to experience,

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but will instead tend to vaporize, curdle, or in some sense transubstantiate into something else. “An assured objectivity is an insecure flight from facticity, and this objectivity misunderstands itself precisely in believing that this flight increases objectivity, whereas it is precisely in facticity that objectivity is most radically appropriated.”42 In other words, facticity, living in a “concernful” orientation toward the world, is the basis on which objects become available to us, but a fixation solely on the latter without acknowledging their background will never make objects into the stable, reliable sorts of thing they are held to be. Yet objectivity here is not simply an antipode to facticity. The terminological duel instead reflects a competition among coexisting priorities. Apprehending the world in its facticity is a matter of apprehending it as that toward which one comports oneself in an attitude of “care,” whereas apprehending the world in its objectivity is a matter of apprehending it as full of things that “are at first present as naked realities— say, natural objects,” which only subsequently, in the course of experiencing them, are “attired” with meaning and value “so they do not have to run around quite so naked.”43 So, in other words, following a pattern familiar from his work as a whole, Heidegger describes the possibility of a kind of Gestalt shift, a succession of disparate modes of engagement, whereby one must grasp the ethical advantage of seeing the pregivenness of concernful living first, and only subsequently allow the thingly to flash out in relief against that background. To reverse this succession would be to falsify the phenomenological situation and hence prolong a compromised sense of one’s place in the world. What Heidegger offered Besseler and his classmates in the lectures of winter 1921– 1922 was a way to apprehend the world as laden with value in the face of its evident devaluation. This option was sketched amid fresh memories of all too untheoretical deprivation, with starving civilians foraging for food on the outskirts of cities in the last months of the war, and soldiers and many others reduced to eating sawdust. The lectures were delivered, moreover, on the cusp of the spectacle of rampant inflation, which had just begun to take effect a few months before the semester and would in short order lead to the monetary devaluation of everything “worldly” within the political economy of the new republic. So one was deprived of things, yes, and many continued to live in a state of deprivation, but this factical circumstance, “given” and beyond one’s control, could also be grasped as a goad to reorient one’s sense of what it meant to live in the first place. Heidegger was, of course, proposing something other than a trite moralism in which the material world was to be denigrated over against a higher spirituality, a spiteful turning away from the pursuit of plenty that would in any case lead to inevitable disappointment (though it is more than

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likely that many of his students heard him that way). Rather, the point was to take the theme of privatio— the original privation of the thingly, and its accompanying disposition of care— as a “fact of life” that could now be seen not as an exception to the norm, but rather as the necessary foundation for thinking about what there is and how it is there. Besseler’s gut-level wariness toward the thingly profile of musical sonority— a historical emergence of massed sound in the form of otherwise innocuous phenomena like chords, and further, the consolidation of chordal “objects” under the increasingly unifying force of triadic tonality over the course of the seventeenth century— vividly exemplifies Heidegger’s early analysis of the facticity of life. We have seen how convincingly the history of the German dance suite may be written so as to incline toward a progressively sharpening definition around the sonorous, a quality which does not, however, initially belong to dance music and only comes to arise from within these utterances as a secondary development. The relative ease with which Besseler renders a parallel emplotment of German cultural history from 1618 to 1648 along the lines of that from 1914 to 1923 (or, indeed, 1945, as it would eventually turn out, fulfilling a recapitulation of the thirty-year periodization) is hard to miss. His story depends on the assumption of an initial absence of “things,” even a kind of odd silence at the heart of the musical event. Yet what he ultimately intends to show is that, in focusing on the quasi-history of the acoustic or musical phenomena themselves, to make the narrative of musical “style” the primary lineament in discourses accumulating around musical change is to misrecognize the underlying phenomenon at issue. Musical “things” themselves can only show up against a background of facticity in which they are originally deprived of any real value, and it is only within the historical situation where the possibility of such deprivation has once again become concrete and proximate that we are able to return to this particular mode of historical interpretation and pose the question of how they appear for us. As we have now seen, although Besseler had set out to stake his inaugural claim in terms of the more traditional question as to how triadic tonality came to be in the first place— a question seemingly concerning the history of style, which continues to animate contemporary scholarship— I have attempted to show how this line of questioning enabled him at least to begin taking on a more ambitious one concerning the constitution of that particular mode of hearing for which a peculiar orientation toward harmonic sonority is both possible and even normative. To return, then, to the basic question that had launched this phase of our discussion, what remains to be seen is how Besseler would handle the more difficult question as to whether it is indeed possible to provide

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an account of a form of music-making in which “musical hearing” itself is no longer oriented directly and primarily toward the sonic object, if at all. Besseler wants to posit a form of listening in which there is absolutely no possibility of hearing something as if it is only there for the listener— “the listener” in the sense of the Einzelhörer, which is to say a theoretically supposed kind of aurally engaged subject who is essentially singular, the classical, perceiving subject over and against its object. This gets to a striking irony at the heart of his work. You might think that in order for the form of listening proper to musical community to become possible, let alone prevalent, you would need to promote opportunities for everyone to hear the “same thing,” and hence that something like the modern ideal and experience of the autonomous musical work within the concert scene would be the ticket. This is more or less the perspective Paul Bekker had represented with his notion of the “community-forming force” of the symphony since Beethoven (where “community-forming” renders alternately gesellschaftbildend and gemeinschaftbildend). Bekker’s influential formulation from his short 1918 monograph on the nineteenth-century symphony revolves around the argument that the “essence” of the symphony was to speak to a “mass public” that had only become a historical reality with the democratizing movement of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars (known in German as Freiheitskriege), and that the instrumental medium best suited to addressing that unprecedented public assembly and inspiring in it an appropriate “community of feeling” (Gefühlsgemeinschaft) would be a large instrumental force capable of conveying simple ideas loudly and with an acoustic unity that would match the ideal unity of its auditors. In fact, Bekker goes further, proposing that Beethoven did not simply compose for this mass audience but in a certain sense composed the idealized audience itself: “He composes not just what can be clearly read in the score. He also simultaneously composes an ideal image of space and of the listening audience.”44 Yet the opposite is in fact the case from Besseler’s perspective. When everyone is listening to a single thing, its very singularity becomes paradoxically atomizing, because its remoteness from its listeners has been made thematic if not essential within its very form. At the conclusion of his dissertation, where we find ourselves at the wane of the seventeenth century looking forward toward the age of “pure” instrumental music, the socially isolating, thingly quality of the new proto-autonomous musical work is crudely perceptible for Besseler even at the superficial level at which the sub-opus “movement” begins to emerge: a dissolution of the instrumental suite into distinct “pieces” with no thematic or affective affiliations, so that each dance assumes the appearance of a self-contained moment in itself

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as opposed to allowing for extended flexible deployment over a continuous span more closely matching an evening’s program of activity. “In this type of creation of a musical event through the setting-in-relation of independently formed units, a tendency expresses itself toward the detachment of the musical sphere and its enunciation in the form of a separate world.”45 The best that can be said about this kind of experience is that commonality, community, may arise after the fact, in the form of what Heidegger might have called “idle talk” (Gerede), the empty chatter that transpires at intermission, over post-concert drinks in cafés, in critical writings in newspapers and academic journals in the subsequent days, all of which points vainly toward the event itself yet papers over anything essential to it.

Spacing Where, then, would community musically reside? Not, as we have seen, in the history of the dance suite, despite community’s ironic, spectral presence within the genre. We must instead look to earlier scenes, the sources of those vestigial elements that Besseler perceives haunting later music. In an odd twist of historiography, Besseler’s strongest case for a situation in which music-makers might have routine phenomenological access to an experience of being together musically in fundamental intimacy is the moment of the emergence of polyphonic vocal music in thirteenth-century Paris. One might think that in polyphonic performance, we would become less aware of the particularities of what others are doing, and hence more distant from these others. Why not instead privilege vocal monophony (chant), or homophony (the Lutheran chorale, for example), where performers would be rhythmically synchronized? But then, in such cases, the sheer acoustic presence of the phenomenon would come too much to the fore. What interests Besseler in the experience especially of medieval polyphony is precisely the way in which its peculiar features seem to discourage more than one person from ever attending to quite the same thing as anybody else, whether or not they are in fact actively participating in its production. A polyphonic pre-tonal composition, he maintains, inherently resists being apprehended as an acoustic unit and hence as a quasi-object. Even in a nonparticipatory setting, this must be true since the individual lines never appear to fuse into a succession of mere object-like sonorities or Klänge. Practical involvement in the singing would of course make this characteristic self-evident, since one’s disposition toward the ensemble of vocal lines as a whole would become bifurcated between the performative “location” at the site of one’s own line, and the less involved but still peculiarly interested relation to the others.

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As odd as Besseler’s notion of a music that one might hear other than hearingly might seem, it was in fact quite concrete for him, and moreover not simply as a historical fantasy but in terms of contemporary performance practice. Besseler was a central participant in the amateur though academically oriented performance culture of the Collegium Musicum at Freiburg University throughout his school years.46 But his attitude toward the experience of early music performance is probably most clearly articulated in the context of an extended concert review he wrote of an April 1924 performance of medieval vocal polyphony Gurlitt organized and directed at the Musikhalle Hamburg. The performers included both students from Gurlitt’s musicology seminar and also Benedictine monks, as well as a boys’ choir, which Besseler singles out for praise, finding the “matter-offactness” (Sachlichkeit) and relative indistinctness of the boys’ untrained voices especially suited for conveying a musical ethos that was based on “a servile devotio and complete subordination of the person.”47 Of specific interest is Besseler’s assessment of one example from this performance, the thirteenth-century motet “O Maria, Virgo Davitica / O Maria, Maris Stella” (ex. 3.6). The thirteenth-century Parisian motet is typified here by a three-voice setting, in which the upper two voices (“triplum” at top, “motetus” in the middle) sing different texts while the third and lowest voice (“tenor”) is either untexted (replaceable or doubleable by an instrument) or may supply an appropriate text ad libitum. In most cases, the three voices have contrasting rhythmic settings as well, each organized within a different rhythmic “mode,” or repeating pattern of durations that share a basic tripartite rhythmic unit, or “perfection” (notated as a dotted half note in Pierre Aubry’s 1908 edition, which Besseler consulted for the concert review). It is precisely this quality of vocal desynchronization that most strikes Besseler’s ear, the way the voices coordinate loosely at the level of the repeating durational unit yet otherwise share little beyond the periodic convergence of perfect consonances— fourths, fifths, and octaves— but without anything like a rigid synthesis of global sonority. The manner in which the extraordinarily beautiful motetus in the first rhythmic mode is constructed above the tenor, who sings a reverently slow and refined chorale segment in the fifth rhythmic mode, and the equally independent triplum in the sixth rhythmic mode— this construction, in performance, leaves no doubt as to the radical and peculiarly characteristic mode of access to these works. They are not arranged for listening, but rather for singing or inward singing-along (inneres Mitmachen). That is, they do not wish to be taken in as a unified sonic forma-

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Example 3.6. “O Maria, Virgo Davitica / O Maria, Maris Stella,” thirteenth-century motet (Montpellier Codex), beginning, Pierre Aubry, Cent motets du XIIIe siècle (Paris: A. Rouart, Lerolle, 1908), 168

tion by a listener. Instead, their musical meaning fulfills itself in the living connection among the performers.48

That last sentence reads in a directly phenomenological spirit: according to Husserl’s earliest formulations of the idea of intentionality, a “fulfillment” (Erfüllung) of “meaning” or “sense” (Sinn) is what happens to something when what is initially intended in an act of anticipation, or imagination, or linguistic, or some other signification comes to be present in a different way, typically as what is often vernacularly described as being physi-

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cally present. When we talk or read about things, including musical things in notation, we intend them in one way, but when these things actually happen, in whatever way one interprets “happening,” we intend them in a different way, as what is in fact transpiring. One might say that in fulfillment, two or more different ways of intending the same thing converge, such as when signifying or imagining something is joined by perceiving it.49 Yet here, “physical” presence is specifically not of value to Besseler, if that would mean the acoustical presence of the various successive sonorities that make up the raw “signal” of the motet in some particular sung performance. Instead, what is being “intended” in the mode of access proper to this music is, obscurely and idiosyncratically enough, the “living connection among the performers.” The “fulfillment” of that intended “meaning” here cannot pertain to anything that might have the character of an object, but is rather just this field of interaction that instantiates what had been theorized in his dissertation the previous year bluntly as “life.” So, we must infer, we are to direct not exactly our ears, but instead some unnamed form of intentional awareness to whatever mode of being it is that somehow situates the performers in relation to one another. Presumably, this “fulfillment of meaning” is something with which singers themselves would have a rather more textured and quasi-tactile familiarity, and in fact the question as to whether the music sung in Hamburg was ever meant to be sung for the benefit of anyone other than the singers themselves is left largely unexplored.50 Yet it matters here that Besseler can also pursue a description of what music might be like even for those who are not part of the original community that would have brought it performatively into sounding. In fact, what could be a better test for the strangest of paradoxes that runs through his work: namely, the possibility of hearing music other than hearingly, while also not participating in it (by dancing, playing, laboring, etc.)— in other words, the purest possible form of hearing unhearingly? And yet, there is of course no escaping the sonic event itself. In the very next sentence after declaring that the fulfillment of the intentional object of the early medieval motet must lie elsewhere than in its status as a potential auditory object, Besseler goes on to describe certain of the motet’s musical qualities. If . . . purely listening comprehension no longer causes any difficulties— even with the dissolution of the feeling for tonality today— we must never theless emphatically point out what a misunderstanding it would be to presuppose an outward auditory center (Hörzentrum) here in the conventional manner. This center is located much more in each of the

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equally entitled voices, which is performed just for itself first and foremost, and only related to the others secondhand. A hearing that follows along in this manner directs itself above all to a clear and consistently felt sense of spacing (Abstandsverhältnis) in relation to the neighboring voice. This is how we are to grasp the spacing-consonances (Abstandskonsonanzen) that predominated in the thirteenth century— unison, fourth, fifth, octave— as actual performance immediately reveals. This also makes understandable why only two adjacent voices, but not necessarily all of them together, must be consonant.51

From a phenomenological perspective, the key terms here are the “auditory center” (Hörzentrum) and “spacing” (Abstand). We must read this description, I think, as singling out certain sounding features, “things” that have conventional musical names, mainly in order to get past them, to find a way into the “spaces” between them, a word he uses quite effectively and in two different senses. Or in other words, Besseler is describing the figure, but what he wants to find is the ground. This possibility, curiously enough, first surfaces in the above description in conjunction with the passing implication that the contemporaneous emergence of what one might call post-tonal hearing has already undermined the force of a habitual impulse to hear any musical utterance as something united by an implicit or explicit tonal center. And yet, even without a key-like centricity, post-tonal music as of 1924 still remains “centered” in the less familiar and even sui generis sense of presenting itself as something that adds up to a total sonority, a kind of figural Gestalt that is located, all at once, somewhere in a virtual non-tonal pitch space, a virtual location toward which we seem to know how to aim our hearing from without, so to speak. But with early vocal polyphony, by contrast, we are called to put into practice a form of hearing that comports itself without either the tonal center or the sonoristic center, leading to an even more radical sense of musical decentering. As we approach the conclusion of this chapter, I want to attempt to clarify the description of this form of hearing, which will of course require dwelling for a few more pages on Besseler’s account of hearing the 1924 motet performance. That performance included another motet from the same milieu, “Riens ne puet / Riens ne puet” (ex. 3.7), which shows more obvious traces of the quality Besseler mentions in the last quoted sentence: at the rhythmic perfections beginning on what modern notation indicates as “downbeats” of mm. 11 (“-der”/“j’aim”) and 14 (“mes”/“puis”), there is no way to reckon each complete three-voice simultaneity as an instance of perfect consonance. In m. 11, the motetus forms a major sixth with the tenor below and a

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Example 3.7. “Riens ne puet / Riens ne puet,” thirteenth-century motet (Montpellier Codex), mm. 1– 15; in Joseph Müller-Blattau, Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Fuge (Königsberg: K. Jüterbock, 1923), Appendix [145– 46]

perfect fourth with the triplum above, but the motetus and the triplum clash as F against G (a harshness indirectly prolonged into the prevailingly dissonant subsequent measure).52 In m. 14, likewise, the adjacent motetus/ tenor and motetus/triplum voice pairs are consonant separately but dissonant as a three-voice unit: F– C in the lower pair and C– E in the upper pair, where the triplum’s E might have “resolved” up to create a perfect fourth consonance over C in the motetus, yet the latter moves at the same

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time to evade any simultaneous perfect consonance within the metric perfection as a whole. The net effect, in conjunction with the desynchronization of phrase endings among the voices, is to leave each vocal line noticeably autonomous and hence perceptually salient as an individual gestalt whose immediate aural coordination with other voices really only works in terms of adjacent pairs. Besseler highlights their asynchronicity in “Riens ne puet,” at one point seeming to suggest that, although this kind of construction leaves the door open to a hearing of the total sonic texture oriented toward a flow of successive “vertical” soundings, not only would such a hearing fail to apprehend its particular formal characteristics but, in a peculiar irony, it could even be said in effect to annihilate the very sonorousness it would otherwise put centermost. “It is remarkable that the periodic cadences of all three, or even just of the upper two, voices never coincide here. Since no single voice predominates, the piece, if heard as a whole, appears as formless as it would soundless, while the individual lines are extraordinarily articulated: the tenor remains continuously in . . . rhythmic mode 1, the motetus is divided into twelve lines of verse (with the last four running together), and the triplum is divided into four elongated periods” articulated by quasi-cadences and subsequent silences at mm. 5, 13, 19, and 23 (the end of the motet).53 In supposing that this music could somehow show up or appear (erscheinen) to a sonoristically disposed hearing not just as “formless” but also as “soundless” (klanglos), Besseler’s phenomenology engages a paradox that must be understood in relation to Heidegger’s thesis, in the 1921– 1922 lectures, concerning the paradoxical flight of objects from any concerted effort to stabilize them without attention to their background in the care for a lived world. The very idea of the vertical sonorous “object” is interpreted here as an illusory byproduct of the polyphonic coordination of individual vocal gestures, but Besseler’s claim in this instance seems to be a more radical one. If you attune primarily to complete verticalities throughout these early motet examples, he implies, it is not just that you misapprehend their underlying linear construction, or even the privileging of adjacent voice pairs, but further, that you forfeit access to a desired moment-to-moment sonic presence itself. Even if one were able to place that fleeting sonic foreground genuinely at the center of one’s hearing, which he doubts to begin with, it would always remain provisional and fragile, and would immediately evaporate under the slightest influence of this music’s more intuitive mode of hearing, which orients itself toward the act of vocalizing the lines within the ensemble of individuals. What Besseler offers as an alternative to the sonoristic way of grasping

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the ensemble within such examples is an orientation toward what he calls, in the passage quoted above, the Abstandskonsonanz, or “spacing consonance.” The term is at once particular to this narrow slice of repertory yet also surprisingly revealing in terms of Besseler’s wider intellectual program. Even in its obscurity or conceptual nascence— it was never developed into a full-blown theoretical resource— it begins to identify a more general phenomenon: namely, the situation in which one aurally orients oneself toward the sonic traces of a musical act such that one grasps that act’s basis in a communal situation, and more specifically its basis in the phenomenon of “spacing” that locates musical individuals in relation to one another. Narrowly and concretely described, the Abstandskonsonanz— an untranslatable neologism that, as far as I can tell, occurs only in Besseler’s writings, and even more specifically, only in the context of the early medieval motet— refers simply to the way that two adjacent voices in the motet texture converge on perfect consonances with each recurring beginning-again of a metrical perfection, even to the point that the motetus and triplum are at times loosely reducible to successions of parallel fourths or fifths from downbeat to downbeat (to put it in anachronistic terms). Though there is a whiff of mere rule-following in such constructions— perfect consonances “must” occur with the articulation of perfect metrical units— the practical import is right there, too: if you know your neighbor is going to be singing a fourth or fifth away, you have a clear and concrete basis for coordinating yourself with their voice, tuning in to them with the benefit of the special auditory characteristics of these particular consonances (whether you believe them to be numerologically ordained or merely acoustically privileged). The consonance, in other words, is being deployed here less as an end value in itself and more as a tool-like means toward other ends: in particular, toward the end of establishing and maintaining, observing, a proper distance from one’s neighbor— not too close and not too far. Although Besseler’s description of such circumstances remains complex and not fully articulated— although, somewhat surprisingly, it still did not find a properly explicit elaboration even in his far more thorough two-part study on medieval music, including over one hundred pages on the motet, published in 1925 and 1927 (even though the latter reiterates and extends similar terms of description)— one can nevertheless discern a cogent attempt to model the situation of hearing.54 Both the idea of the Hörzentrum and that of Abstand are original conceptual elements that offer some leverage toward pursuing a description of this repertory beyond the limiting two-dimensional option between “horizontal” (or “linear”) and “vertical” (or “proto-harmonic”) hearing, as had been operative in previous work in

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the same area, most notably in an influential 1921 essay by Arnold Schering.55 Schering’s approach, while it was an important precursor to Besseler particularly from the perspective of the historiography of listening, had boiled down to a simplistic and rather unrevealing question: do I listen to this music as a fabric of distinct but interwoven lineaments that allows me to shift my attention at will from one linear thread to another while nonetheless only ever really hearing one pitch item at a time— punctually, so to speak? Or do I hear this music as a flowing succession of thick simultaneities, quasi-chordal sonorous qualities, which represent a total synthesis of events and hence an effacement of the individual contribution of the singers and their vocal gestures? This basic question leads Schering straight into an unacknowledged cognitive dissonance by way of an implicit translation of linear-horizontal hearing into individualism, and simultaneous-vertical hearing into collectivism: on the one hand, it was axiomatic that an “egocentric worldview was foreign” to the Middle Ages, and hence that “it did not lie within the patterns of its thought to single out the I from the world and make it into the measure of all being and acting, and even less to see itself reflected in things”; yet, on the other hand, a genre like the thirteenth-century motet was, all things considered, still a rather intimate construction of individual vocal lines whose basic characteristics— scalar milieu, ambitus, intervallic palette, contour types— flowed directly from a living tradition of monophonic song (plainchant), with all the lingering ethical pathos surrounding the temptation to hear such lines “empathetically” with an ear toward their possible affective, and even expressive potential.56 In other words, Schering cast the horizontal-versus-vertical question in terms of what the art historian Wilhelm Worringer had famously characterized as a contest between empathy and abstraction. In spite of our best impulses, it would seem, we cannot but hear sung melody in terms of individual expression, empathetically and “humanizingly”— making the ego the “measure of all things”— whereas the historical trajectory toward combining individual vocal lines, whose watershed is held here to have occurred precisely in the thirteenth century, enables an ethically elevating move toward abstraction and transcendence of one’s individual limits.57 By contrast, Besseler’s approach (in the 1924 review as well as in his thinking more generally during this period), though it zealously picks up Schering’s basic impulse to historicize musical listening and to entertain the possibility that incommensurable worldviews may obstruct an appropriate “mode of access” to some given musical situation, nonetheless circumvents his precursor’s limiting binarisms in a rather surprising way, namely by refusing to take the contemporary category of artwork as

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given.58 If we are forced to choose between a kind of artwork that plays on inward affective empathy and a kind of artwork that instead sets itself apart as an abstraction to be contemplated from afar, we are not only constrained within a presupposed subject-object choice, but we are also compelled to grant the priority of the very idea of a musical work, which is held up as the listener’s opposite number— its Gegen-stand— yet seems to come from nowhere, to have no background against which it can be given meaning. For both the empathetic and the abstractive dispositions— for both the orientation toward linearity and that toward simultaneity— the musical work is simply there from the outset. By contrast, what Besseler seeks is instead a perspective from which there might also be a way to apprehend music that does not require an object-like work to begin with, but where the mere possibility of the work might rather be preceded by the grounding value of something else, namely the living community of people engaged in the act of music-making. Yet getting to the description of that founding role of community, of the concreteness of “life” that precedes and forms the possibility for “things” to spring up within it, first requires reorienting one’s sense of the geometry of the musical event. Besseler’s thematization of “spacing,” however underdeveloped it would finally remain, hints at a way such a reorientation might be possible. When he returns to this theme again in 1927, the significance of the Abstandskonzonanz is clarified just enough to render it an operable concept: he now states explicitly that it is the peculiar act of hearing another singer’s part while singing one’s own— Mithören in the most paradigmatic sense— that provides the model for the essential “mode of access” to medieval polyphony (again, Zugangsweise). So, the apparent terminological oddity of the Abstandskonsonanz is in fact not marginal at all, but central, although what is of special interest here is the fact that it is precisely by virtue of engaging a certain sense of one’s auditory “margins” that it assumes its importance. The practice of tuning in to others, a singer’s matching up their consonances with their neighbors’ at the appropriate recurring durational periodicity, is a matter of keeping oneself “oriented,” maintaining one’s “orientation” (Orientierung) within the group. Contrary to a deep-seated characterization of the auditory act, in such scenarios, one does not listen essentially “forward” at or to music, straight ahead, let alone “to” just one thing at a time, but laterally, from side to side. Moreover, and just as crucially, one’s basic disposition, attitude, or posture is not even purely auditory, since the choral ensemble as a whole is itself “directed,” or has its “gaze” turned toward something else that is not in fact the music. “The French motet is in the first instance a work that does not know an inner

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relation to the listener. The shared direction of the gaze of all the voices (die gemeinsame Blickrichtung aller Stimmen) toward a religious goal has of course been transformed into a purely this-worldly, societal play, yet the non-performer, now as then, must nonetheless correspondingly step into one of the voices and from that point co-perform the act of polyphonic music-making.”59 So, in short, a singer is at once directed forward toward the common goal (though not the music), which motivates the ongoing musical act— in fact, the musical sound may in some sense be thought to conjure up a sort of non-image or virtual image before the singers that helps “orient” their collective directedness— while simultaneously hearing “to the side” in order to steady and coordinate the overall orientation. If we take this complex image as emblematic (rather than degenerative) of the listening act, it follows that there can be no musical “center” other than the incidental one that coincides willy-nilly with the virtual location of each individual voice, which a non-performing listener adopts ad hoc, “as if ” their own voice. The orientation is never toward sonority, since even the Abstandskonsonanz is not a matter of hearing, say, a perfect fifth as a simultaneous quality, state, or sensation (let alone object, as should be obvious by this point), but is instead a matter of being made continually aware of the distance that must be maintained between its two constituent voices. The interval is being understood in this context as a regulative device that aids in establishing and maintaining an appropriate relation, a distance, or “standing apart” (Ab-stand) between vocal agents— and this in a way that both idealizes and realizes “social” relationships between people. Sound may well be present, but it is incidental to the main thing, which is conforming one’s musical actions and comportment with others’. At one point in the 1927 study, if only in passing, Besseler goes so far as to distinguish the Abstandskonsonanz from what he calls the Klangkonsonanz. The latter indicates sonorities such as that constituted by the third and octave over some lowest note— that is, simultaneities lacking an “orienting” perfection of fourth or fifth— which would become increasingly common in notated polyphonic composition over the course of the thirteenth century.60 Klangkonsonanz is every bit the neologism as is its contrasting term and, if anything, its cross-etymological redundancy only adds to the phenomenological complexity here. Since both the Germanic Klang and the Latinate sonare (root of Konsonanz) refer to sound, the awkward semantic doubling would seem to suggest that the combined roots must not be referring in the same way, or to the same thing: sonare is phenomenally demoted and must refer to sound as this elusive, unresounding sound.61 All of this amounts to an elaboration of the status of the medieval motet

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as what Besseler calls umgangsmäßig (much later collapsed to the general nominal category Umgangsmusik), in which the root verb umgehen is usually rendered variously as “coping” or “dealing,” and the adjectival form as “functional.”62 Yet, contrary to the common perception that Umgangsmusik or the affiliated category of Gebrauchsmusik is restricted to music integrated with dancing, working, or playing, here we have not only a music that is in no obvious way a precursor to modern secular culture, but also one in which “coping with” or “dealing with” is not precisely an aspect of non-auditory engagement, but is instead an aspect of the paradoxical hearing-without-hearing that I have been teasing out of Besseler’s phenomenology. It is true that Besseler at times rather inventively aims to secularize the basic phenomenon of the thirteenth-century rhythmic mode by pointing to its intimate link with habits of moving one’s body or comporting with a periodic iterative pattern that might guide, regulate, or otherwise structure some ritual act. As far as Besseler is concerned, the rhythmic modes were not so much metrical patterns, not “analytical-technical concepts,” as they were affective and accentual schemas similar to modern dance types: “‘Mode 1, Mode 2 or Mode 3’ should be understood in the same sense in which we talk about ‘waltz, foxtrot or tango rhythms.’”63 Yet it is also worth noting that, in spite of himself— and more particularly in spite of his reception in some contemporary scholarship as a warrior on behalf of modern cultural forms and hence with a full appreciation of the importance of attending to the way one disposes one’s body and takes up somatic, rather than merely “intentional,” attitudes— Besseler’s central focus would remain consistently on the character of hearing as a possibility that he continued to understand as irreducibile to corporeal action. To some extent, this particular emphasis, and its exclusion of the otherwise seemingly obvious embodied character of what Besseler has been describing, is made explicit in the concluding sentence of his 1924 concert review: “Musicologically speaking, the performance can be credited (aside from its special significance for the Middle Ages) with the service of having emphatically demonstrated that the history of music also encompasses a history of sonority and of hearing, and that it is not least a part of the history of mind.”64 In other words, Besseler’s account of musical listening as an activity whose phenomenological grounding lies in a kind of primordial situation of communal belonging is oblivious to a distinction between sacred and secular forms or contexts, and yet— or perhaps for that very reason— continues to prioritize mind and spirit over the human body and the material conditions of sound. Intriguingly, in his 1926 essay “Fundamental Issues in Music Aesthetics,” Besseler does briefly but substantively raise the question of what he

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calls the “feeling of bodiliness” (Leiblichkeitsgefühl). He suggests that we can differentiate the qualities of medieval rhythmic modes from modern dance schemas (or any other contrasting rhythmic context) precisely on the basis of correlative “differences in the feeling of bodiliness, the manner in which the body is there at all, how it animates itself and sways in stylized motion. . . . Musical rhythmicity pertains quite generally to the manner in which we ‘are there at all’ and ‘move’ ourselves; it pertains to the specific basic ‘temporal’ character of our existence.”65 But the explicit reference to the self-evident embodied character of music-making and other forms of musical participation more or less ends there. Instead, Besseler immediately veers off toward his more zealous concern with the thematics of “togetherness” (das Miteinander), which, it would appear, is not grounded by relationships among bodies but on the contrary, and rather surprisingly, in fact grounds the situation of being embodied in the first place. “Togetherness” is the “fundamental category” that is “thoroughly constitutive of our music.” And while this gesture of constitution does occur through the various manners in which coordinated bodily action is organized temporally or enacts different modes of “temporality,” the specifically bodily element of being together is not paramount. Like Heidegger, Besseler pursues a description of practical coordination that is relatively uninterested in the biological fact of embodiment. Even setting biology or biologism aside, this is not a question of any empirical kind of togetherness or concretely observable manner of association, but of something transcendent: “This is not a matter of sociological facts, but rather of a formed, stylized togetherness, such as what lies at hand as an indispensable element in every [musical] work.”66 So much, then, for anything approaching a phenomenology of the body, along the lines of what he might have found modeled in, for example, the intellectual-historically proximate treatment of the body in Scheler’s classic texts.67 On one level, what Besseler seems to think he has provided here, still close to the outset of his career, is merely a description of the act of hearing the repertory of pre-tonal vocal polyphony that privileges a structuring role for perfect consonances. Taken in that sense alone, his work might be thought too niche-oriented to merit much attention beyond the purview of early music specialists.68 Yet the general outline of the character of listening that has emerged from his descriptions clearly plays an outsize role in his career-long effort to establish a non-naturalistic phenomenology of musical listening more broadly imagined. If the thirteenth-century motet, for Besseler, is the last historical moment in which the idealized image of auditory community is instantiated so integrally by some particular music’s own paradigmatic structure, then it does not follow that he simply relin-

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quishes its possibility with the turn of the fourteenth century. Rather, this vision of participatory hearing remains the standard, receding indefinitely while losing none of its salience, against which all subsequent musical developments are to be measured, from the Baroque suite right down to the importation of jazz into interwar European nightlife. Despite the specificity of his initial sketch, then, it also forms the occasion for formulating a more generalizable model of how to define what the listening act is held to be like. If Besseler has offered us anything at all— and it should go without saying by this point that I think he does offer something, in spite of the many charges one might raise against him or his scholarly work as a whole— I would suggest that it is to have formulated, however gropingly, this account of what I have refashioned in short as a “lateral” listening. Besseler attunes us not just to a generic sense of “mass listening,” as in Bekker’s and many other more contemporary accounts, where everyone just seems, as or is uncritically assumed, to be attending to the same thing in a way that supposedly reinforces shared values.69 Rather, he has leveraged specific technical details from within the phenomenon itself to begin to imagine the way that the structure of intentionality— the intentional directedness toward specific relations among elements of the musical fabric itself— could be seen to enjoin the actual techniques of comportment that would arise within a form of community.

The Limits of Community There is a more explicitly articulated case within classical phenomenology that throws the contours of Besseler’s model of laterally oriented intentional structure into sharper relief. The immediate correlate here, which Besseler never specifically cites but which clearly underlies his thinking, is of course Heidegger’s account of the existential situation of “being-with” (Mitsein) others within a “shared world” (Mitwelt), sketched in the 1921– 1922 lectures and refined in Being and Time.70 But it is Jean-Paul Sartre’s vivid gloss of Heidegger on this point that makes the analogue especially clear. Within his larger discussion of “the existence of others” in Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre hits on the image of the rowing crew to highlight the importance for Heidegger of this lateral orientation toward others, and the corollary devaluation of face-to-face encounter. The empirical image which may best symbolize Heidegger’s intuition is that of . . . the crew (l’équipe). The original relation of the Other and my consciousness is not the you and me. It is the we. And Heidegger’s beingwith (l’être-avec) is not the clear and distinct position of an individual

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confronting another individual. . . . It is the deaf existence (la sourde existence) in common of one oarsman with his crew: that existence which the rhythm of the oars or the regular movements of the coxswain will render sensible to the rowers, that existence which the common goal to be attained, the boat or the yacht to be overtaken, and the entire world . . . profiled on the horizon will manifest to them.71

If the reading of Besseler I have been developing is correct, Sartre’s example maps neatly onto the former’s account of the vocal ensemble, even— or especially— given that Sartre explicitly deploys oarsmen who are “deaf ” to one another as individuals. The deafness Sartre discerns in Heidegger’s being-with obviously does not index a clinical physiological or psychoacoustic insensitivity, but rather something more like a disengagement from one another as logocentric subjects or persons who might speak reason to one another. So the analogue in Besseler would not be an image of singers who simply do not hear one another in any way at all, but rather of singers who do not listen to one another in a particular way: namely, they do not listen to one another as subject to subject, persons who stand as one to another over against themselves. Instead, the act of listening to one another is an act of sensing the distance between one another, not “naturally” but preternaturally, so to speak, an act of spacing oneself out within a situational field in which musical sound is not merely acoustic, neither a signal nor even the target of an interpretive or semiotic transfiguration, but is rather simply deployed, tool-like, as a way of dealing with (umgehen) the fact of being-with-others. In characterizing Besseler’s choir as Sartre’s (Heidegger’s) crew, the proper analogue is between the situation of coping with the “spacing interval” (Abstandskonsonanz) and the situation of coping with the oar, both of which are the conduits through which the existence of others is made to manifest itself, other than ontically. And once again, a crucial point here is that Besseler shares with Heidegger a comparative disinterest in the material properties of the “tool” as such, in favor of its efficacy within the situation of setting-in-relation.72 Sartre goes on to develop a critique of the theoretical priority of being-with (Mitsein or l’être-avec), proposing to substitute for the image of tacitly coordinated action what he takes to be the more fundamental role of confrontation within a social dyad, with crucial implications in terms of the structure of selfconsciousness, shame, and so on. Besseler’s own project is not especially well clarified by getting sidetracked along the lines of this subsequent stage of critique (or at least there is probably no simple way to marshal the Sartrean notion of being-for-others into a musical scenario that bears on the immediate issues at hand without undertaking a more wholly original phe-

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nomenology of our own— in other words, a different intellectual project altogether). I do want to end this discussion, however, by gesturing toward a different critique, formulated from a more proximate position, which we are now prepared to approach via just this question of spacing and distance. As we have seen, it is the way the community is “made manifest” to its individual members that makes up the central phenomenological moment in both the case of the crew and that of the choir. “Manifestation,” as in Besseler’s claims concerning the moment of “meaning-fulfillment,” is a matter of making the spaces in between individuals come to the fore in terms of a tacit relationality that is all the more powerful for withholding any overt announcement of its effect. According to Sartre’s vaguely parodic gloss on Heidegger, the in-between is the space in which “existence” manifests itself. For Besseler, oriented less directly toward the possibilities of the existential and more toward simply assessing how to take up a proper attitude toward musical life, the in-between is the space in which, not Dasein writ large, but rather more mundanely, simply Gemeinschaft is constituted. And yet this central phenomenon of distance or spacing between individuals remains ambiguous. At the most general level, we might keep in mind that Heidegger’s extensive analysis of “distance”— alternately Abstand, Ferne, and Entfernung— in Being and Time is among the book’s richest passages, alerting us to the at-once familiar and peculiar paradox in which the effort to bring something “close” often seems at once to push it “farther” away.73 There is good reason, then, even without stepping out of a Heideggerian discursive style, to be cautious in deploying a terminology of proximity and distance. (At heart, this was already the lesson drawn from the contrast between Ortega y Gasset and Stern-Anders in the previous chapter.) Setting Heidegger aside, another voice begs to be heard in connection with these thematics, however briefly and insufficiently. At just the moment that Besseler’s dissertation was published in 1923, with the inflation crisis and consequent political destabilization now in full view, Helmuth Plessner (1892– 1985) was finishing a short social-theoretical pamphlet that took direct aim at what he saw as the dangerous tendency toward invoking the potential of community as a form of association that would heal wounds opened by the recent upheaval. The Limits of Community (1924), subtitled A Critique of Social Radicalism, is a two-fronted attack from an essentially center-left position on both the far right (which Plessner associated with an ideology of Blutsgemeinschaft, connoting community of familial and racial “blood” ties) and the far left (which he associated with an ideology of Sachgemeinschaft, connoting community of “matters” of common class interest).74 While the communities of “blood” and “matters-

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of-interest” differed from each other in certain obvious ways— obvious enough that their militant adherents had been pummeling each other in the streets for years by this time— they were also no less obviously linked in their common distinction from “society” (Gesellschaft), which referred to the forms of association that sprang from the administrative and juridical institutions of a liberal republic like that in Germany between 1919 and 1933. Though written in an at times feverishly poetic style, and neither academic nor popular in tone, Plessner’s book barely deals with questions of aesthetics in any direct sense.75 Yet what is of most immediate interest here is the analysis Plessner gives of the keen ambivalence surrounding the central promise of the politically radical communities he was observing in 1924: namely, the promise of intimacy and of overcoming the social distance that was thought to result from the artificial conditions of modern urban dwelling. This promise, Plessner warns, is problematic for two reasons: first, because it is premised on a misapprehension of what it is to be a person, mistakenly supposing that it is possible to achieve the complete mutual self-disclosure that a radical commitment to the community in either blood or matters-of-interest seemed to seek; and second, as a result of that initial misunderstanding of the potential for true intimacy, the actual politics it undertakes will be necessarily dangerous and violent. Instead, it would be crucial to acknowledge and act upon a basic duality within the structure of selfhood, whereby one recognizes that the desire to open oneself up to others is counterbalanced by the need to wear a mask, to observe tactful distance, to obey social norms, to keep one’s distance, to keep one’s cool.76 “The dual character of psychological being pushes towards and, at the same time, pushes away from being fixed and determined. We want ourselves to be seen and to have been seen as we are; and we want just as much to veil ourselves and remain unknown, for behind every determination of our being lies dormant the unspoken possibility of being different. Out of this ontological ambiguity arise with iron necessity the two fundamental forces of spiritual life: the impetus to disclosure— the need for validity; and the impetus to restraint— the need for modesty.”77 Plessner’s theoretical positioning engages attitudes like Besseler’s in complex ways (much more so than can be adequately dealt with here), but the central point is clear enough: if you think that by entering into relations with people you take to be your communal “fellows,” you are simply and immediately open and available to them via shared values, experiences, beliefs, blood, ideals, or whatever, then you have deluded yourself into ignoring the opacity of human interaction, an essential mutual inscrutability that is both structural and salutary. I have argued here that Besseler’s quest for

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a pure manifestation of being-with-others through non-explicit, lateral apprehension was distilled in his otherwise seemingly throwaway neologism of the Abstandskonsonanz. Ironically enough, though, the significance of “distance” or “spacing” emerged in that discussion despite, rather than because of, Besseler’s own evaluation of voice-to-voice relations and group singing, which remained committed to an assumption of intimacy and mutual understanding, “proximity,” in a way that clearly stumbled into the bad politics Plessner was warning against. Although Besseler has been celebrated at moments in recent Englishlanguage scholarship as a kind of forerunner for more contemporary attitudes often held to be progressive, it should not be controversial at this point to observe that his hardly secret hope for something along the lines of a restoration of the ethos of community he discerned (or fantasized) in medieval musical practices was baldly authoritarian.78 Waxing enthusiastic about the benefits of showcasing these practices in the 1924 Hamburg performance, Besseler slips from a positive evaluation simply of the sonic experience of the music into a corollary characterization of the music’s original communal milieu that is all but wistful. “All living, producing, experiential receiving occurs within community, which presents itself to the individual as a gradated domain of corporate bodies and classes, beginning with the most broadly encompassing circle, the church. The surrounding world (Umwelt), grounded in tradition and authority and ultimately always upon the religious center, embraces all elements as members of a single organism. A sovereign art, which undertakes on its own to give life meaning, is impossible in the Middle Ages.”79 The quasi-fascist tendency of Besseler’s medievalism is already on display in such instances, as it becomes clear that this is the musical environment from which every subsequent one is seen as a falling-off. What has perhaps not been evaluated carefully enough is that his anti-individualist commitment to collective activity is so pure that he sees every juncture at which a composerly figure seeks to assert itself as a nigh existential threat. From Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut straight through Mozart and Beethoven and down to Schoenberg, any focalization of aural attention on the individual traces of composerly aesthetic production— too much single line, too much harmony, too rhythmically idiosyncratic— earns his rebuke. The key point is of course that Plessner’s critique of community foresees precisely where Besseler was heading, and from the very beginning of Besseler’s career. This is a reality overlooked by any retrospective appreciation that would take the musicologist’s antagonism of conservative colleagues like Hans Joachim Moser to be indicative of a defining and laudable contribution. Responding vitriolically to Besseler’s 1925 Freiburg habilitation

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lecture, Moser does him the questionable (and Weimar-typical) service of topsy-turvily aligning him at once with “Bolshevism” and also with proAmericanism, a gesture replete with an anti-Black racism that merely inverts Besseler’s own equally racist celebratory provocations in support of the appropriation of ostensibly Black musical forms (viz., die neuen Rhythmen und Klängen der Nigger-Jazzband).80 In other words, Moser’s misjudgment of Besseler as an agent of both the true Left and also the Western liberal embrace of musical heterodoxy is ironically all too charitable. The truth is that litigating Besseler’s personal-political failings, nearly a century after the fact, is like shooting fish in a barrel, and hence not especially interesting except insofar as it illuminates the degree to which any celebration of “community” in the immediate historical context is tainted by all manner of value commitments made in fairly obvious bad faith. Thus “jazz” is held up as the ultimate iconoclast because it shatters the image of good “form” associated with the concert hall. Yet what else is the enemy of good “form”? Extrajudicial killings, for one thing. In this connection, the Rome anecdote from a few years later recounted by Karl Löwith (at the head of this chapter) is genuinely damning. What Löwith refers to as the “German situation” in his recollection of a chance encounter with his school friend means specifically the crisis provoked, and then violently resolved, in the wake of the monarchist Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen’s historic Marburg Address, delivered in June 1934 to an audience of graduating university students, and quickly disseminated in print venues as visible as the Frankfurter Zeitung before regime officials could intervene.81 Papen called for an end to the violent “revolutionary” tactics employed by the Sturmabteilung (SA), as well as for moderation of the flow of shameless lies flowing from Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. It was to be the last instance of a public critique of state policy from within the government itself until 1945. It not only led to the immediate end of open political discourse but also, on June 30, provoked a bloody reaction in the so-called “Night of the Long Knives” putsch, when SA troops were murderously purged of elements whose leadership seemed to pose a threat to Hitler and to the ongoing consolidation of state power by the National Socialist party apparatus. Estimates of the victims range between 80 and more than 200. We learn from Löwith not simply that Besseler was indifferent to these killings, but in fact that he was clearly happy, under no duress, to signal that he approved of them. This is the most unambiguous possible token of his “irresponsibility.” As Löwith’s anecdote reminds us, Besseler’s contempt for legal “form” was of a piece both with Nazi leadership’s contempt for the mere “formalities” encoded in international laws and treaties, and also with

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the general tendency of Nazi-aligned intellectuals to appeal to the pseudoprofound categories of “life” and “existence” in order to justify the deeds of a “people,” no matter the deeds’ substance. Strangely, Löwith does not mention that, by the time of their Rome conversation, Besseler himself had been a member of the SA for many months, since a few weeks prior to Papen’s address. In May 1934, while still teaching musicology at Heidelberg, he joined a paramilitary organization that at one point numbered four million men, subsequently becoming squad leader (Scharführer) and eventually senior squad leader (Oberscharführer) in 1942— low-ranking positions, to be sure, but nonetheless indications of his commitment not just to the value of belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft, but more particularly to the value of modeling that act of belonging as an exemplary act of citizenship.82 In denazification proceedings between 1945 and 1947, Besseler pursued the common strategy of describing his SA membership as a matter of covering his back in the face of challenges from more radical right-wing students and colleagues. As one might well imagine, this strategy did not convince Allied occupation officials in the U.S. military, and Besseler was not allowed to remain at Heidelberg (though he was enthusiastically embraced in Leipzig, then under Soviet occupation, where denazification was less punctilious).83 It should come as no surprise, in the end, that the value of community, for all its redemptive appeal amid the demoralizing early years of the 1920s, would turn out to have been as corrupting as it was invigorating. Löwith, himself a great thinker, saw promise followed by irresponsibility in Besseler.84 I have tried to show both in this chapter. The theoretical possibilities of “togetherness” and “withness” are real, I believe (or I would not have written any of this), and we can still begin to think them— with Besseler but without his folly.

[ Ch a pter 4 ]

Techniques of Feeling

August 25, 1942, 316 South Kenter Avenue, Los Angeles, Theodor Adorno’s living room. Several German exiles— Adorno, Günther Stern-Anders, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Reichenbach, and Berthold Viertel— convene for an informal “Seminar on the Theory of Needs.” Stern-Anders, now forty, is defending his long-standing thesis that it is human nature paradoxically to be artificial, to become subject to the “needs” produced by one’s own products. The others get sidetracked by the question of whether gramophone records, like milk for all, will be “needs” in the coming socialist society.1 SternAnders knows about artifice firsthand. Failed at screenwriting, he has supported himself at odd jobs while crashing at Marcuse’s: working assembly lines, building stage sets, painting in a furniture factory, and cleaning props and costumes in the Hollywood Costume Palace, all of which has been instructive, as his diary attests. “You can learn a thing or two here, even the fundamental truth of rag philosophy, namely that we humans did not cover our nakedness because we’d freeze to death without clothes, but because without them we’d be unable to pose as persons of status, to establish pecking orders, to attract some fellow beings and scare off others. Of course, real needs stood behind the fantastic invention called ‘clothing,’ but physiological needs only after the fact. Among the pieces hanging around here, hardly any is an implement of warmth alone. They are all instruments of dignity, fear, and flattery, in other words social instruments. This truth is drummed into me in a daily eight-hour course, as I oil, brush, or vacuum one item after another.”2 March 1, 1954, 6:45 A.M. local time, aboard the Japanese tuna trawler Lucky Dragon No. 5, South Pacific Ocean, 80 miles east of Bikini Atoll, U.S.-occupied Marshall Islands. Kuboyama Aikichi, the Lucky Dragon’s chief radio operator, sees a bright flash to the west in the morning sky. Seven minutes later, he hears an explosion. Two hours after that, he is showered with fine gray ash, which continues to rain down on the boat for the next three hours. One of his twenty-two fellow crew members licks it, finding it gritty but tasteless. By evening, all twenty-three fall ill, stricken with nausea and diarrhea, their skin itching and swollen. March 14, 1954, Port of Yaizu, Shizuoka Prefecture. As the Lucky Dragon docks, its crew is suffering burns, headaches, pain in their eyes, and bleeding gums. September 23, 1954, Tokyo First National Hospital. Kuboyama dies, age forty, following extensive treatment for radiation sickness. Cause of death is contested:

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proximally from a bad blood infusion, ultimately from exposure to radioactive fallout from the “Castle Bravo” test detonation, making him the first recorded human victim of a hydrogen bomb.

This Is Not a Test “Most of the features that experimental psychology finds in its test subjects arise as products of the experiments themselves,” writes Stern-Anders in 1965, by this point known almost exclusively as a public intellectual and peace activist. “They are in a certain sense the red pressure marks that the experimental apparatus has produced, has in some cases permanently left behind. What the experiments make visible is not how someone is, but rather what can be made out of them. That one can make many things of them is of course indisputable. But one does not thereby believe oneself to know something about them.”3 In the postwar years, Stern-Anders had come to represent a strain of antiscientific thought, to put it in crude terms, deeply and sometimes blindly skeptical of what he felt to be an accelerating technicization and instrumentalization of the human lifeworld. The very concept of the test was suspect for him because, in the form of human engineering, it masked its power over the test subject with claims to neutral knowledge, extending unchecked from the laboratory to the workplace and to the home.4 It would be easy to imagine that Stern-Anders’s antipathy toward the culture of testing began at home. As mentioned in the introduction, his father William Stern had coined the notion of “psychotechnics” or “applied psychology” in 1903, as well as the classic psychotechnical notion of the “intelligence” or “mental quotient” in 1912, and had in fact taken the child Günther from birth to age seven as a central object of his 1914 study in child development.5 One might then casually read the son’s stance as taking place against an Oedipal background, a reaction to what he saw as paternalistic Big Science, all the more so as Stern’s foundational description of psychotechnics had made explicit that this was to be a style of research that would directly support the institutions of liberal governance, providing concrete techniques for improving the efficacy of pedagogical, medical, and legal institutions (in the latter area promising surer judgment of witness testimony as well as determining more effective punishments). In the end, he was superseded by other psychologists in setting the agenda for a future psychotechnics and in his later career moved away from this project.6 Yet whatever the nature of the filial psychodrama, the very fact that the test from Stern-Anders’s perspective was a scene not of stabilizing

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knowledge but of change and even indeterminacy meant that it leapt straight into the path of history. Though Stern-Anders, over a span of decades, was consistently excoriating on the emergent cultural significance of testing and experiment, the basic claim this chapter entertains is that he also maintained a countervailing positive evaluation of the possibility of “making something of someone” that he otherwise denounced in the test situation. In other words, the following discussion explores what happens at the moments when Stern-Anders inverts his instinctive denigration of human engineering, a suggestion that I will attempt to follow up through a speculative hearing of a kind of musical experiment that directly engages the themes at hand. Though his distaste for the experimentalization of life was given form through antipsychologistic attitudes adopted from his teachers Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, the clear point of articulation came with the onset of the Cold War. In the spring of 1954, the U.S. military tested a series of hydrogen bombs on Bikini Atoll in the occupied Marshall Islands. For Stern-Anders, observing news of U.S. nuclear testing from Vienna, where he had relocated following wartime exile as a German-Jewish refugee, the “Operation Castle” tests, as they were known, showed that the belief that Hiroshima had brought an end to the waves of escalating violence of the previous decades was precisely the opposite of the truth. These detonations were one thousand times more powerful than the 1945 bombs, and their very unimaginable scale and enduring aftereffects made it delusional to refer to them as “tests” or “experiments” at all. As Stern-Anders wrote in his 1956 treatise in philosophical anthropology, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (“The Obsolescence of the Human”), which might be read as an antinuclear manifesto: That one carries them out “island-fashion” on coral reefs or somewhere else in the ocean, that one thus finally resorts to “insularity” in its original geographical sense in order to preserve the principle of isolation, is to be sure quite characteristic. But these final attempts at isolation— that is, the desperate efforts still to perform “tests” [“Versuche”]— remain futile. However fantastically the tests may succeed, the testing [das Versuchen] fails, because every testing immediately goes off course, becomes more than testing. The effects are so egregious that in the moment of the experiment [Experiment], the “laboratory” becomes coextensive with the globe. But that means nothing else than that the distinction between “rehearsal” and “performance” has lost its meaning, that every “experiment” has become “the real thing.”7

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Anders was responding here to the catastrophically mispredicted range of fallout from the first completed test detonation, “Castle Bravo,” which resulted in a massive radioactive coral dust cloud twice as large as what engineers had forecast, contaminating 7,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean. This error led to widespread miscarriages, birth defects, and thyroid cancer among Marshallese Islanders over subsequent years, and seems also to have led to the premature deaths of up to ten Japanese fishermen who were aboard a tuna boat named Lucky Dragon No. 5 and were caught unawares inside the expanded fallout zone.8 Stern-Anders interpreted this event not simply as an isolated scientific miscalculation, but rather as a sign of the essential incalculability of the material result of any engagement of nuclear energy. But he went further. The spectacle of Castle Bravo and of what became known as “The Lucky Dragon Incident” did not just scandalize the idea of the nuclear test; rather, for Stern-Anders, it suggested that whatever had once been called a “test,” nuclear or otherwise, would now require significant reinterpretation. As late as the 1980s, he doubled down on his critique of what he considered a falsely innocent notion of experiment, writing that “our entire activity [as a species] is . . . ‘pseudo-experimental’” in the sense that “whatever we undertake, our undertakings represent experiments that are irreversible and whose consequences we will not be able to foresee.”9 We might dismiss all of this as a kind of uncritical antimodernism. SternAnders made no pretense to philosophy of science, and his reflections on the status of the test and the experiment were purposefully and strategically blunt, intended to jar readers out of complacency.10 More specifically, we might wonder, in the generalizing leap from the specific case of U.S. military nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands to “Testing” with a capital T, what Stern-Anders could have meant by such an indiscriminate indictment. For one thing, there is good reason not to conflate experimenting in general with testing more specifically as a set of strategies for discovering the capacities, limits, properties, or other salient features of human and non-human beings. Moreover, there are obvious differences between psychotechnical tests and field tests (of which the nuclear test is an especially dramatic example). The psychotechnical test was designed to find out how individuals would perform circumscribed tasks that might in principle be translated from a laboratory or testing station to a factory floor or home or battlefield, whereas the field test of necessity takes in a specific environment as part and parcel of what is to be tested: in other words, not just a thing but also its interaction with untranslatable conditions, a feature that allows Stern-Anders to generalize outward to an image of the test fully unbounded. My sense of Stern-Anders’s deployment of terms and emphasis,

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however, is that his primary concern was indeed with testing specifically, not with experimentation more generally, though with the qualifying insight that tests share with experiments the potential to generate something new rather than confirming how something is. In fact, the figure of the test had troubled his thought at key moments from the 1920s on. Yet it appears not to have been particularly, or even primarily, natural-scientific in character; it was rather an element of a background theoretical strain more aesthetic than anything else. Stern-Anders had joined in extended reflections, centering around his friends Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin (who was also his cousin), on how the historical emergence of testing in various domains of more or less everyday experience since at least the end of World War I could be seized upon as material for aesthetic reworking and thereby turned to political or ethical advantage. The question then arises, for Stern-Anders as much as for us, whether this maneuver, a refunctioning of the test, might still be possible in the context of Stern-Anders’s bleak Cold War diagnoses. As I will discuss later, a provisional answer lies in the suggestion that Stern-Anders’s aestheticizing conception of the test is partly a matter of formulating technical strategies, techniques, for exercising one’s moral and emotional imagination. Finally, it will emerge that Stern-Anders, whose career ambitions prior to around 1930 had been in the philosophy of music, sees hearing— and specifically musical listening— as a model form of such a technique. Listening to music, he would suggest in a crucial yet underdeveloped moment of theoretical optimism, might in principle occasion the sort of work on oneself that could be the only honest response to the existential crisis of impending nuclear violence. If the experience of being tested has come to assume a banal ubiquity today, the comparative novelty of, for example, career aptitude testing in the years following World War I was disarming enough to have furnished material for both affirmative and critical reflection in various aesthetic milieus within the Weimar Republic and the early Soviet Union.11 Brigid Doherty has explored Brecht’s and Benjamin’s ambivalent responses around 1930 to a cultural practice that on the face of it would appear to be a matter of rationalizing human potential and converting personal virtues or capacities into discrete, marketable gestures.12 As Doherty observes, the critic and the playwright intuited that the psychotechnical aptitude tests of their historical moment were in a certain sense already quasi-Brechtian: they consisted of a theatricalization of interrupted bodily movements broken down into defamiliarized fragments, as well as Haltungen— postures or attitudes— that could be studied and learned in order, in theory, to disassemble the person in its normal habits and rebuild it in an Ummontierung

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or “reassembly,” fashioning a revised persona from the rubble. “This is something new, and the newest thing about it is that it can be learned,” Benjamin explained in a radio talk in reference to Brecht’s adoption of what may be described as a kind of psychotechnical poetics.13 The larger significance of the analysis of habits of gesture and thought for Brecht and Benjamin was that it would enjoin a manner of detached observation among spectators, mimicking or transposing the position of the test administrator and neutralizing the false satisfaction of merely empathizing with aesthetic events and characters. When Brecht declared in 1931 that “the new school of play-writing must systematically see to it that its form includes ‘experiment,’” the connotation of that term was not simply freewheeling poetic invention, casting about for new modes of expression for the sake of innovation, but rather a more specific putting-to-the-test of given figures of contemporary life.14 As Benjamin set out the idea in a 1934 Paris lecture, “At the center of [Brecht’s] experiment stands the human being. Present-day man; a reduced man therefore, chilled in a chilly environment. But since this is the only one we have, it is in our interest to know him. He is subjected to tests, examinations. What emerges is this: events are alterable not at their climaxes, not by virtue and resolution, but only in their strictly habitual course, by reason and practice. To construct from the smallest elements of behavior what in Aristotelian dramaturgy is called ‘action’ is the purpose of the [Brechtian] theater.”15 Elsewhere, Benjamin had put an even finer point on his belief in the possibilities of retooling psychotechnical practice, identifying the ascendancy of behaviorism as a counterpoint to “the psychology of the individual, which attempts to understand the behavior of the individual essentially through its aptitude (Anlage). To the contrary, aptitude is important to behaviorism only in its malleability. Behaviorism is interested in the profoundly transformative, profoundly invasive effects of the work process on character.”16 Benjamin’s formulations thus involved an important modulation that anticipated the paradox Stern-Anders would observe in 1965: the scene of the test— and its theatrical application just makes this more explicit— does not transparently unveil to an observer the aptitudes, abilities, capacities, or virtues of the test subject but can instead, by interrupting the unreflected course of habits and events, compel a recognition of the potential for changing those habits and events. Since such a change is in principle politically neutral, this potentiality becomes the pivot about which a cultural practice that had entered the world as a technique of human engineering could be reoriented as a technique of emancipation. Stern-Anders picked up this theme in his recollection of a 1941 poolside conversation at Brecht’s house shortly after they had both arrived in Los

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Angeles (just months after Benjamin’s suicide).17 He reports himself observing to the assenting playwright how the Brechtian “test” or “experiment,” alternately Versuch and Experiment, takes its spectators to be like observers of a demonstration test at a physics practicum, such that the proceedings on the stage may reveal the “conditions for possible [social] transformations” (Voraussetzungen möglicher Veränderungen). The aesthetic experiment should not simply represent life, it should “indicate not only what unfolds physically or chemically, but rather also, if the experiment (Experiment) is to succeed, what one has to do or allow to happen.”18 It does not go without saying that an experiment may be didactically transformative, as opposed to merely exploratory or aleatoric, let alone confirmational. There is, again, some slippage here between experiment and test, but it is worth noting that rather than immediately opening up to the more general category of aesthetic experimentalism (though in a sense, it does this, too), the apparent confusion of terms can in fact help keep our focus on a more specific point. What is relevant about Stern-Anders’s rhetoric is the way it seems to characterize the experimental test as falling so evenly between enabling liberatory transformation and opening the person up to manipulations of power beyond its control. This tension had been present in Brecht and Benjamin, but they had optimistically insisted that authors and artists should become conscious and hence critical of their function under prevailing modes of production, so as not to remain complicit in an ongoing manipulation of affect, gesture, and persona. Yet now, after the war, disillusioned, grieving, and numbed, would a similar optimism remain possible?

Techniques of Feeling The answer that appeared in “The Obsolescence of the Human” is not encouraging if one is looking to hope for a better world to come. In that work, where Stern-Anders rages against the delusion that the nuclear test was anything other than pseudo-experimental as it overflowed the bounds of the test scene, these terms and concepts are irredeemably tainted. Hope itself is ironically diagnosed as a cynical attitude that obscures the severity of the situation. The 1956 book contains no vision for an experimental aesthetics per se. What it does contain, and this is in fact one of its primary theses, is an argument for the recognition of the historical malleability of feeling, by which Stern-Anders means an active expansion of emotive imagination— his term is Vorstellung— which is susceptible to historical intervention and experimentation at the level of “technique” (Technik). His philosophical anthropology, articulated in essays going back to the 1920s, was premised on the belief that there is nothing like a fixed human nature

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to begin with, unless that nature is to be understood as lying precisely in its artificiality: The history of styles and morals is a never-broken chain of enterprises in which humanity has tried to compensate for its own indeterminacy through commitments imposed on itself; to define itself socially and psychologically always anew; always to make something new of itself; always something that, “of its nature,” it had not been; but which, insofar as it wants to be at all, it had to be, because it could only function as a defined society, however artificial this might be.19

Anders really made two noteworthy claims on this score: first, the claim that feeling, like “morals,” had a history in the first place, that we should not assume people have always inhabited just those possibilities of feeling presently held open to them; and second, the claim that at junctures where the pace of historical change suddenly increased, as it seemed to have done in the mid-twentieth century, the capacity for feeling in a manner appropriate to the newly formed environment would not spontaneously keep up.20 An undeniable and growing gap, disproportion, or Gefälle, between the astonishingly enhanced ability to execute technical aims (killing or dispossessing large numbers of people at a stroke, with comparatively little forethought) and the shameful inability to imagine their consequences, made it urgent to recognize opportunities for picking up some of the slack in that failed moral imagination, to begin practicing “techniques of feeling”— or at least to pose a question as to whether any transformation or expansion in feeling would be possible in the first place. Near the end of “The Obsolescence of the Human,” Stern-Anders returns to the theme of human engineering, which he had begun the book by scorning. The salutary aspect of “testing” or “experimenting” lies in its capacity not to prescribe a course of action or behavior nor to identify something fixed and innate, but to raise the possibility of imaginative revision, so there must be no inhibition about using the characteristic gestures of an experimental attitude for other ends. “The weapons of the attacker determine those of the defender,” he writes, signaling a “refunctioning” (Umfunktionierung) in the Brechtian manner. “If it is our fate to inhabit a world (produced by ourselves) that in its excess eludes our imagination and our feeling and thereby mortally threatens us, then we must attempt to catch up with this excess.” We must begin an ongoing “experiment” consisting of “moral stretching exercises,” “hyperextensions of our capacity for fantasy and feeling.”21 Artistic practices are uniquely suited to performing the sort of work on ourselves that would be required in order not to “fall behind,” because art by its nature shows feel-

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ing not to be native to a naturalized psyche but constructively available to the worldly, historical person. And what should be the “technique of feeling” par excellence, a tool for pursuing such a repurposed practice of experimental testing, but musical hearing? This is a claim Stern-Anders elaborates in an extended appendix, “On the Plasticity of Feelings.” A Bruckner symphony, he proposes with no small measure of poetic irony, is an “apparatus made by ourselves, with whose aid we expand the capacity of our soul.”22 The proposition that a Bruckner symphony might serve as an apparatus to expand the soul may well seem preposterous, and it is certainly a mark of Stern-Anders’s wild desperation. If the only hope in the face of self-annihilation is to cultivate intensified aesthetic feeling, then hope must be very slim indeed, and his theoretical contribution a laughable selfdeception— the more ironic given his steady drumbeat of warning against this very snare. Worse still, he again and again makes a pointed rhetorical strategy of exaggerating the extent to which humans have placed themselves in jeopardy, a strategy so effective that it all but defeats itself, leaving little room for solution. Yet exaggeration, Stern-Anders maintained, was necessary precisely because people had so completely forgotten how to feel a fear adequate to the present danger. This very line of thought indicates that the style of “feeling” SternAnders had in mind has almost nothing to do with inherited aesthetic categories such as consolation, nobility, sentimentality, sadness, joy, and the like.23 Invested as he is in the possibility of novelty, he can hardly name what he has in mind without risk of getting caught in the status quo, falling further and further behind the world as it is continually made, unmade, and remade again. It is also clear that what is being called for is not moral betterment through culture, but rather anything that might increase the state of alarm, heighten alertness, and restore not just breadth but also precision and attentiveness to what he insisted on calling the soul. We have become “illiterates of fear” (Analphabeten der Angst, in one of his memorable formulations), implying that it would be necessary to learn an affective language of horror that could in fact be highly articulate in its own terms.24 Incongruously enough, however, the only music Stern-Anders names in this context is Bruckner’s: a lyrical late Romanticism that surely bespeaks a certain soulful expansiveness but that can also appeal to cheap sentimental heroization and self-pity (as in the use of the Seventh Symphony Adagio on Nazi radio). It is the temporal breadth of the Brucknerian idiom, the way it often does not seem to synchronize with the habitual pace of thought or accustomed intensities of shifting affect, that recommends it as an exemplary phenomenon to Stern-Anders.25 Yet it is difficult to perceive how one

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might recuperate anything of value from this repertory if one is after an opportunity for exercising the capacity for anxiety as a defensive device in the manner of a high alert. In light of these qualifications, it seems natural to suppose that we might identify more apt examples of what Stern-Anders was demanding. I would suggest that we can discover one in the immediate proximity of “The Obsolescence of the Human”: a composition that takes as its raw material a recorded passage of poetry that appears in a crucial footnote in the text itself. Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama (1962) is a tape work by Herbert Eimert, composer, critic, and founder of the electronic music studio at West German Radio in Cologne, who corresponded with Stern-Anders in the years immediately following the book’s publication.26 Although “The Obsolescence of the Human” was never translated into English and has remained relatively little known to the Anglo-American public, it was widely read in Europe, especially at this early, pre-détente stage of the Cold War, so it is not surprising that Eimert would have been captured by the book’s call for an experimental practice of perception that engaged far-reaching ethical goals. The twenty-minute Epitaph memorializes the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator.27 Sometimes considered the first postwar casualty of nuclear violence, Kuboyama’s September 1954 death was an event of major international significance, with the fate of the Lucky Dragon loosely providing material for Gojira, released one month later (Americanized in 1956 as Godzilla, King of the Monsters!). In “The Obsolescence of the Human,” Kuboyama received an epitaph printed in the guise of an ostensibly anonymous public memorial, which was in fact written by Stern-Anders himself:28 You little fisherman, we don’t know whether you had merits. (Where would we be if everyone had merits?) But you had worries like us, like us, somewhere the graves of your parents, somewhere, on the shore, a woman who waited for you, and at home, the children who ran to meet you. Despite your worries you found it good to be there. Just like us. And you were right, Aikichi Kuboyama You little fisherman, even if your foreign name does not tell of merit, let us learn it by heart for our brief term Aikichi Kuboyama. As a word for our shame

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Aikichi Kuboyama. As our warning call Aikichi Kuboyama. But also, Aikichi Kuboyama, as the name of our hope: For whether you preceded us in your dying or only departed in our stead— that depends only on us, even today, only on us, your brothers, Aikichi Kuboyama.29

Eimert began preliminary work on his tape piece a year after SternAnders’s book appeared in print, taking as its basis a recording of the Kuboyama pseudo- epitaph read by the German radio actor Richard Münch. Much of this preparatory work, carried out in collaboration with studio co-director Robert Beyer and technician Leopold von Knobelsdorff, consisted of what might be described as acoustical etudes, in which the component sounds of the voice were transformed in a number of ways within the available catalogue of tape manipulation techniques: they were slowed down, sped up, reversed, raised, lowered, filtered, and analyzed into constituent phonemes, which were in turn made objects of further manipulation. In short, the text was mined for potential materials with an analytical thoroughness typical of the practices of early electronic composition, especially at Cologne, with the distinction that no single sound appears in the work that did not in some way derive from the source recording.30 The usual way of assessing the significance of the Cologne studio has been to emphasize how it enabled the production and manipulation of sounds from scratch, building them up out of sine tones generated in situ and hence ostensibly under the more direct control of technicians and composers, even when the composition ultimately incorporated other recorded or live sounds. Yet, whatever Eimert’s intervention within the immediate history of the studio, what is of interest here is not a productionside ethos of experimentalism in the sense of charting out new ways of organizing musical sound. Rather, the aim of the remaining discussion is to entertain the question of whether, and how, Eimert’s composition in fact might allow for the kind of listening that Stern-Anders held out as a compensatory technical act proper to inhabiting a long historical moment of perpetually imminent mass violence and fatality. In other words, what recommends this particular piece for consideration in connection with the problem of evaluating the “test” is not so much the brute circumstance of

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the laboratory-like environment of the early electronic music studio, but rather the intuition that its engagement with Stern-Anders prompts us to hear it somehow in the experimental style theorized by Brecht, Benjamin, and Stern-Anders. This is an ambitious goal, however, which can only be gestured toward rather than fulfilled. It will involve a gradual movement over the following pages from some initial concrete aspects of the sonic texture of the piece, through a reflection on the challenges of expression and communication it poses, to end with theoretical proposals concerning the larger action of “feeling” as a historical variable. It is far from clear that the perceptual experiences entertained will in fact show “what must be done” in order to allow for the sort of “transformation” Stern-Anders might have envisioned. A first order of business is to get a feel for the peculiar sonic medium within which an act of feeling might transpire at all. In a sense, a feelingaround of this kind is the very gesture that initiates Eimert’s Epitaph itself, where the inclination to take up an attitude of openness toward suggested, but not entirely specified, categories of sensation and affect becomes essential. The opening two minutes (2:43– 4:46) of the twenty-one-minute piece make a miniature drama of the transformation from the immediately intelligible linguistic presence of the speaking voice to something far less transparent. At the beginning of the piece, we hear a gently resonant metallic swell with a twenty-second decay that seems to function as a call to auditory focus, followed by extended patches of direct linguistic enunciation from the Stern-Anders text (“Du kleiner Fischermann, Aikichi Kuboyama . . . nur von uns, deinen Brüdern,” etc.), which then fades into various shades of obscurity and increasingly nonlinguistic bursts of articulation. Eimert’s own words about the piece highlight two basic poetic concerns: on the one hand, the vestigial, traditional effects of expression and reference; on the other hand, a blurring between linguistic and nonlinguistic sound— that is, a mixture of orienting and disorienting effects: In Epitaph, the speech sounds are predominantly acoustic and phonetic in nature, and their transformation into purely musical material often makes it nearly impossible to determine their origin. But words, with their sense of meaning and their expressive weight and referential content, repeatedly rise to the surface and lend the entire weight of their meaning to single words or phrases. . . . In addition, there are idiosyncratic word or speech constructions made from jumbled syllables or parts of words, words spoken backwards . . . motivic figures which function at a purely musical level but whose origins as spoken words can still

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be recognized, and sentences so unintelligible that we perceive them as unknown foreign languages.31

To take a clear example, the very opening swell (2:43– 3:03), largely unrecognizable as being of linguistic origin, is in fact composed of a threefold layering of isolated and extended vowels from the name “Kuboyama”: U, O, and A. In one regard, a worrying of the edge between word and sound was part and parcel of certain historical peculiarities surrounding the Cologne studio, which had been the site of experimental work on phonetics inspired by the Bonn acoustician and information theorist Werner Meyer-Eppler.32 But it seems appropriate to look beyond a technocentric narrative of the Cologne studio in order to take in a view of the ethical work being performed there on this occasion, peculiar as Stern-Anders and Eimert may have been in wearing their moral aspirations so unmistakably on their sleeves. Eimert’s intent to create “unknown foreign languages”— a widely shared preoccupation in many avant-garde musics from the mid-1950s and later, not just at the Cologne studio but also in Milan, Paris, New York, and elsewhere— could be interpreted as an effort to capture how the sheer act of enunciating even an unintelligible concatenation of phonetic material already produces a kind of communicative presence that is different from any semantically and syntactically integrated utterance. In other words, it seems to want to show us “communication” allegorically writ large as a sort of formal dramatis persona, which ironically means departing from any actual achievement of everyday communication. If music like this seems invested in a kind of depersonalization by moving sharply away from a lyrical centering and continuity, it is far from necessary to hear it as thereby straightforwardly representing the annihilation of the person as a source or locus of value, as some classic interpretations of the postwar avant-garde once did.33 In a related context, in which he is comparing the compositional poetics of early electronic music with the compositional poetics of early modernity, Eimert puts this matter of humanness “showing up” in slightly different terms, describing how compositional material can be “brought to speak,” no matter how unspeechlike it is: And once again regarding the “human”: as far as those who talk so eagerly of “humanitas,” you can bet most of them mean nothing more than the violin cantilena on the G string saturated with vibrato à la Tchaikovsky. / From the perspective of a heightened espressivo, the older, pre-expressive [late medieval and early Renaissance] music would

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[likewise] appear subjectively underdeveloped. And it has yet other traits in common with electronic music, most importantly that of a distinctly material character. The material here is brought to “speak” not because it is itself endowed with speech, but because it has been organized by a human being, to be sure with the help of theology, but quite certainly without the compulsively or sufferingly self-determined subject in the modern sense.34

In other words, Eimert moves to maintain the value of “speaking” while jettisoning that of “expressivity,” or at least expressivity taken in what he calls the “psychographic” sense of self-revelation. What has come to be taken for the musically “human” is to be seen as nothing other than a historical accumulation of imitations of particular kinds of ostensibly self-revelatory lyrical songfulness. For Eimert, this unreflective parody of “humanness” becomes patent and hence ridiculous when the new electronic media are then made to continue the chain of imitations— by, say, synthetically recreating the effect of a bassoon melody, which itself has already been historically treated as a kind of sublimated vocal persona— rather than allowing the novel particularities available in the material to “speak” on their own terms, which is to say, to let them “bespeak” the personhood that has acted on and through them. And here is a point of contact with Stern-Anders’s thesis concerning the historicity of feeling. As with Eimert’s notion of bringing material to speech, “feeling” can be understood as what is being picked out as the salutary counterweight to expressive individuality. It is a value that can be personal, of the person-in-the-world, without being confined to the interior of a solipsistic self. “Aikichi Kuboyama,” we recall, does not just name an individual but, in its manifold reiteration in the source text, is made to name certain other things, which could be described as specific moral feelings: shame, fear (as prompted by the “warning call” or Warnungsruf ), and hope. Eimert does not overtly play on Schande (“shame”) or its associated speech-sounds. Fear and hope, however, are unmistakably at play in the tape work’s poetics. It is almost embarrassing to say outright that something like a feeling of fear is palpable throughout the piece, though in any case, I would note for the moment that what is at issue is less the possibility of an evocation of fear than the more germane question of how fear is meant in relation to the possibility of technique.35 I will return to this. At the composition’s intensive apex (17:21– 18:24), we initially hear a dense passage featuring a collage-like assemblage of overlapping textures and ongoing melodic ideas, including a surprising element of lyrical conti-

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nuity wrought from the speech material in the musical-saw-like gestures in the upper register. An explosive rush of white noise wipes out the ongoing activity but is itself interrupted by silence. The semantic directness of this passage, as well as the sharp chiseling of its aural images, would seem to leave little need for commentary. A rhetoric of fearsome speed and jarring suddenness sonically frames the call to imagine “where we would be” (Wo kämen wir hin?, at 17:54) in the event of nuclear catastrophe with an explicit sonic suggestion of possible acts of violence. And the closing gesture of the passage executes an elegant speech-act in which what is named, the “warning call” (Warnungsruf, at 18:18), does the naming. We have intuited all along that we are listening to some sort of warning, but Eimert indulges in licensed rhetorical excess to allow the ominous to name itself so as to thematize an affective response that might otherwise go unreflected. There would be a programmatic drabness to the notion that all Eimert accomplishes here is a musical paraphrase of Stern-Anders’s point that we should be very afraid: at once telling us to feel fear and making us do so. This would be to open up the loosely shared Eimert/Stern-Anders agenda to the easy charge of propagandistic manipulation of a sort that had disgusted both of them in the 1930s.36 And in any case, for all the importance Stern-Anders attached to fear in jolting one out of complacency, it could only ever be an initial step on the way toward something else. It is more challenging to articulate the structure of that something. To that end, we might turn to a different moral-affective quality attached to Kuboyama’s name: following “shame” and “fear” in the poem comes “hope.” We have already heard an acoustically masked reference to the poetic line in question, “als Namen unserer Hoffnung,” appearing in the opening minutes of the piece (4:05– 4:08). But the text does not recur with any markedness until the very last moments (23:14– 23:22), so that Eimert partly follows SternAnders in withholding the activation of this constellation of ideas until after discharging a range of other, complicating factors. If “hope” in a literal sense gets the last word here, it is nonetheless choked out, barely recognizable as an acoustic image for being registrally smeared from high to low and deprived of its article, “our” (unser), which has been altogether swallowed by distortion. How to recuperate a redemptive element from this is a puzzle, and doing so will require taking seriously Stern-Anders’s reflections on the necessity for the historical adaptation of feeling. Like Eimert, Stern-Anders rejected the idea that what music does is to translate an internally, instinctively felt emotion into a musical code, which can then be decoded so the same feeling can be felt, again internally, by a listener. Rather, it is the process of art-making itself that produces feelings from scratch, as if in a sort of humanist laboratory:

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The variant of subjectivistic aesthetics that sees in the artwork nothing other than the reflection or the “expression” of feeling already felt is completely foolish. . . . What the composer feels in composing their piece, they can only feel by means of this piece. That means: artworks produce feelings, and produce them sui generis; feelings which, without the produced objects, could scarcely be realized; which, independent of the structure of the objects, as mere being-in-a-mood, would remain nonexistent. Even the conditions in which an artwork puts us are artful; if you like, they are, in a word: “artworks.”37

This statement reworks one of the core insights of classical phenomenology, in whose development Stern-Anders was an active participant prior to his friendship with the generally non-phenomenological Brecht and Benjamin: namely that we do not have detached consciousness on the one hand and things on the other; rather, we only ever have consciousness of something.38 Stern-Anders directly echoes a 1921 formulation by Scheler (whose academic assistant Stern-Anders had been in 1926): “In so far as the artist ‘knows,’ they do not know before the process of representation but . . . in the very course of it. Representation is the artist’s way of pressing into the world— and no science can ever be its substitute.”39 We do not simply have detached feeling by itself, prior to some act of poiesis, of artistic making. Rather, the poetic act itself is charged with the production of feeling in one and the same gesture. “Feeling,” once again, is not to be understood as originating within a naturalized, self-contained, inner experience.40 The fact that feeling would arise only through an act of making allows for what Stern-Anders demanded: the possibility of intervening in the historical structure of feelings, which was the opening for an element of hope. Hope would have to lie precisely in seeing aesthetic experience not as a matter of observing art, or even of participating in it— going along with it as a listener— but of coming into a position of being able to grasp the artificiality, or to parallel Künstlichkeit more directly, the “artfulness” of the situation or condition one is in when listening. This is saying more than that there is an “art of listening,” a sort of cultivated skill in the Enlightenment tradition. It is saying that beyond the psychology of feeling, in which one would be reflecting on the state of one’s subjective response to things, there is also a phenomenology of feeling, where feeling is understood to be neither subjective nor objective but part of a shared world of intentional meaning, a matter of worldly personhood. If we are to take seriously the demand to orient ourselves toward felt objects as an intentional act and task, and hence to see them as matters for ongoing work and critical transformation, then even (or especially) the ex-

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plicitly mimetic aspects of the Epitaph, the elements that seem designed to evoke fear and put us on notice, would need to be heard anew. If there are indeed fearsome acoustic objects such as launched rockets, screaming sirens, rushing watery clouds, and so on, attention will nevertheless need to be focused on moments of novelty in the way these objects show up within the fabric of the electronic composition, rather than isolating them as warmed-over sound effects that are meant to cue predetermined responses. To return to the Epitaph’s final sonic image of a choked-out, half-swallowed hope, the artful indeterminacy of what is being presented or produced there (not “expressed”) would need to be described as such. What is apt about Eimert’s way of ending the piece is that in reworking the final Hoffnung text, it manages to yield an opportunity for enacting the sort of hope that can only be imagined precisely because it appears amid a situation of hopelessness that, Stern-Anders suggests, must compel us to imagine things otherwise, and it is only in the exercise of practicing some imaginative perceptual expansion that we can even begin to hear the word.

A Call In an evocative passage concerning his central thesis of the Gefälle, the fateful disproportion or gap between the technical and moral-imaginative capabilities of the modern human, Stern-Anders inverts the question of the audibility of feeling. He suggests that what we are effectively doing whenever we are in the position of experimenting with the unimagined and the unfelt is to enact a kind of prompting, a Vorsagen, in which we fore-speak or foretell by shouting across the gap in an effort to make ourselves heard to ourselves. “As the expression ‘foretelling’ or ‘prompting’ (Vorsagen) indicates, this is a kind of call (Anruf ); not, as in the ‘call of conscience,’ one that is primarily heard, but rather one that we call to ourselves. For one calls out over the abyss of this disproportion (Gefälle-Kluft), as if the capacities that lag behind on the other side of the gap were personae. And it is they, imagination and feeling, which should hear, or which we want to ‘lend us an ear’ (‘Ohren machen’) in the first place.”41 Stern-Anders’s formulation here reworks in the service of his own political critique Heidegger’s characteristically apolitical description of the “call of conscience” (Gewissensruf ) in Being and Time. There, “good conscience” points forward toward and warns against a guilty deed, while “bad conscience” points back reprovingly to a deed already done. In the case of good conscience, the “voice” summons as it were from a moment of anticipation. “The call has the same mode of being as care. Dasein ‘is’ ahead of itself in such a way that at the same time it directs itself back to its thrownness.”42

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I want to conclude by drawing out two ideas from Stern-Anders’s formulation. The first pertains to the image of feeling. If Eimert’s Epitaph is in some sense calling out over an “abyss,” then the suggestion to be entertained from Stern-Anders is that in listening to it, we, too, are calling, along with it in an imaginatively participatory, though not necessarily empathetic, way. In good phenomenological style, the “call” goes out as a kind of intentional “being-directed-at” (Gerichtetsein-auf ) the world, and the composition forms the material occasion for that act, rather than merely being there as a thing to be apprehended for itself.43 The fact that it is so difficult to name or describe the “new feelings” Stern-Anders wishes us to engage is a matter of their not simply being available in the “text,” as it were, but needing to be hailed from a distance, with its help. We are as foreign to them as they to us. The second point, inevitably gloomier, pertains to the implicit temporality of this image. The idea of Vorsagen, of saying what will happen before it happens, is of course central to Stern-Anders’s philosophical anthropology, which is at all times a matter of anticipating an apocalypse, either through genocide or, more emphatically, through nuclear holocaust, to which we must obviously now add the slower and, until very recently, more easily repressed history of climate change.44 But in a sense, Stern-Anders had good news as well as bad news. The bad news was that, although he did not consider it his business to forecast when and how this would happen, that we lived under apocalyptic conditions was a certainty. The kurze Frist or “brief term” that is broached in the Kuboyama epitaph was a consistent theme in Stern-Anders’s postwar work, which was premised on the knowingly exaggerated notion that we had come to live in a historical circumstance of immediate finitude. This was not so much a matter of empirical death as it was a matter of the sheer idea of the bomb now having put us in a situation in which factical death was already imminent, hanging over us at all times.45 But this was also the good news, precisely because the fact of nuclear death was not something that could be either forestalled or quickened. The apocalypse was not just being foretold in a straightforward temporal sense in which “pre-diction” says what the future will bring tomorrow or next year. Instead, it had already happened, was already upon us, simply by virtue of the historical introduction of these devastating new potentialities. Hiroshima ist überall, went one of Stern-Anders’s slogans.46 The “call” to ourselves, in which we were always in a position of catching up with ourselves, was endemic or structural, something to be lived with, and it is in this spirit that a work like Eimert’s may be heard to inhabit a disposition of both hope and hopelessness at once, such that they are completely intertwined. Similarly, what Stern-Anders asks of us is at once

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overly modest and nearly impossible. Reduced to the formulation that we are simply to answer the domination of “human engineering” with a countervailing program of moral exercises or self-tests on the terrain of aesthetic experience, it is impossible to avoid the impression of a quaint humanism unequal to its task even as it becomes aware of its own “obsolescence.” But then, after all, the action of testing is like this: it is ongoing, does not ask in advance for any particular outcome, acquires substance only in relation to its latest iteration, and hence does not entail a particular hope for its success, yet nonetheless wants to offer us some material possibility for continuing and revising.

[ A ppendi x A ]

Hans Mersmann, “On the Phenomenology of Music” (1925)1 [372] Most of the recent attempts to approach musical works analytically show one commonality, over and above any differences in method: they distance themselves more and more from that uncertain form of interpretation, trafficking in emotional associations, images, and poetic descriptions, that had lived an unrelentingly tenacious life since the early days of Romanticism, roughly since the critical writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann. The reason for the remarkable lifespan of this method, whose danger has long been acknowledged, lay on the one hand in the fact that it found support and a certain justification in a contemporaneous psychological aesthetics, but above all, on the other hand, that a new approach had not yet been found. To seek the latter is the overt or covert goal of all meaningful musicaesthetic investigations of recent times; to systematically span its boundaries, suggestively expose its premises, its limits, and its goals, is the intent of the following thoughts. To accomplish this within the strictly limited time allotted me, I want to attempt to outline the whole domain from its periphery inward, and then somewhat more precisely formulate the essential aspects of a [373] smaller area, namely the aesthetics of form. It will be a matter, then, of showing three things: the standpoint, the object, and the application of a phenomenological aesthetics of music.

I. Of these three tasks, the first one seems to me the most difficult. Posing the question of standpoint is relatively new in writings on music. For a long time it was an (often unclear) unstated assumption. Only in the treatment of aesthetic questions has standpoint ever played any significant role. Here antagonistic opinions feuded aggressively with one another, and often, amid the antagonism, the object of investigation— the artwork— slipped from the observers’ grasp. Antagonistic opinions still exist today with un163

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diminished strength. When Paul Moos attempted to establish the contemporary status of music aesthetics at the first Conference on Aesthetics eleven years ago, he arrived at seven “systems,” which sharply diverge or even contradict one another.2 If one surveys the literature of the intervening time, the posing of this question becomes clearer. Through everything of substance that has been pronounced on music and music aesthetics shines the great dualism, which can be roughly indicated as the opposition between a psychological and a phenomenological attitude. This dualism must be taken as given. It strikes me as a perspective from which the development of contemporary music aesthetics can be regarded. It is not so much an opposition of method as of worldview and, as such, the symptom of a major development. This occurs for music aesthetics at a point which, in relation to general aesthetics, seems to lie further back. Just as in music history, music aesthetics seems to follow other arts at some distance. The psychological aesthetics of music is not even now fully assembled or completed, let alone overcome. Only in the last ten years has it attained a new, significant imprint through Hugo Riemann’s formulation of a “Theory of Tone Representations,” which is suited to develop, in a specifically musical direction, the empathy theory (Einfühlungstheorie) of general aesthetics.3 Thus the influence of individual attempts at a phenomenological music aesthetics must be splintered. In the final analysis, it is only a matter of its relation to the psychological modes of observation. The defeat of materialist [374] and formalist worldviews in music-aesthetic thought lies so far off that it scarcely finds a resonance anywhere. But what was understood in music aesthetics by the concept of “sensualism” occasionally intersects in terminology with phenomenology, and yet, due to a divergence of standpoints, nevertheless has no inner connection to it. If I have spoken so far of an antagonism between psychological and phenomenological music aesthetics, this must be qualified. For, first, the phenomenological aesthetics of music has to this point only made initial essays, more negative than positive in nature: it rests upon an instinctive rejection of that kind of projective empathy that, in monographs and analyses, circumscribed the content of the artwork with questionable poeticizing associations— a rejection, that is, from which H[ermann] Kretzschmar’s revival of the eighteenth-century theory of affects arose twenty years ago.4 Second, the boundaries of the systems open themselves to one another here, perhaps more clearly than in the other areas of artistic thought. Despite its psychological points of departure, Riemann’s theory of representations is in no way the consistent elaboration of a psychological system. Third, however, the deepest contradictions can be found between the theoretical

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formulations of the musicians among aestheticians of recent generations and the practical elaboration they have undertaken in analytical works. At its best moments, Kretzschmar’s Führer durch den Konzertsaal is anything but an application of the hermeneutics he himself advocates, and Riemann’s analyses of Beethoven’s piano sonatas have hardly anything to do with his theory of representations.5 So the following essay is conscious of its greatest difficulty: to consistently elaborate a principle of observation and to apply it to the totality of phenomena. From the established antagonisms emerge the tasks demanded of the phenomenological standpoint. It regards the artwork as a phenomenon, which I will translate more freely and fundamentally: as an organism. It attempts to detach this observation from all relations to the observer, as far as this is possible. With this detachment from all “ego-relations,” associative factors of observation fall away, and its subjective, secondary aspects— that is, its tendencies toward paraphrase as opposed to designation— become delimited, while striving for the greatest possible objectivity and relative bindingness of results. The next thing would be to test the relation of pure [375] phenomenology, as it has been represented by Husserl, Scheler, and Geiger, to its application in the aesthetics of music. For me, the results of such an effort have been hitherto completely unsatisfactory. I have not arrived at the following thoughts from aesthetics but from music. And I can only determine that, despite the unity of the standpoint that the application of this concept seems to justify, natural and intractable antagonisms of method arise. Here it must be emphasized above all that the possibility of an exact execution of the applied investigations is much smaller than it is for pure phenomenology. On the other hand, an attempt recently made to introduce into musical thought the exact working methods of phenomenology has yielded no immediately fruitful results for the observation of the artwork.6 I can only deem it a failure at present that these developments are very slight. Music aesthetics of recent decades— indeed, one might say music aesthetics in general— suffers by remaining always at preliminary questions. It is always concerned with standpoint, with its grounding, and its opposition to other standpoints. The philosophers and guild-minded aestheticians of all eras have reinforced this. The artwork always lay selfeffacingly in the background. Or examples were extracted from it, in order to strengthen a standpoint or a thesis. And these examples always fit just right— as was emphasized in a discussion from the previous conference— hence, the thesis was correct. For what kind of conclusion would it be, for which, with a little effort, some example couldn’t be found somewhere? It therefore appears to me that the most important task for the music-

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aesthetic investigation presently undertaken is to concentrate on the artwork. A project must be accomplished similar to what has been recently exhibited in the works of Ernst Kurth, which seemingly grapple with stylistic problems in Bach and Wagner, but which, through the unity of their interrogation, could almost be evaluated as an aesthetics of music.7 May the following thoughts also achieve this kind of applied music aesthetics.

II. [376] The need now arises to delimit anew the object of observation, the artwork, from a phenomenological standpoint. To begin with, its tonephysiological premises would need to be newly examined. Upon them would rest an elaboration of the elements of melody, harmony, and rhythm; as well as the secondary elements, dynamics, agogics, and tone color. A consideration of the elements includes in itself the foundations of an aesthetics of form and content. From this, finally, the problem of style crystallizes. But the investigation of style substantially broadens the domain of questioning. Until now the artwork was seen as absolute— that is, as the sum of the functions and forces enacted within it— thus, aesthetically. The inclusion of the style question entails that we now see it as the product of a development— thus, historically. All the basic questions of music history are thereby introduced and the need arises to assume the same standpoint for the historical consideration of the artwork as well. It leads of its own accord to the kind of morphological view of history that in recent times has attained currency, especially in style-historical investigations. The artwork as an object of the phenomenological observation of music is an organism. Upon further penetration, this organism presents itself to the searching eye as the unity of many forces, woven into one another and conditioned by each other. The natural requirement that arises for analysis is to untangle these forces from one another, to expose and identify them. Methodical work cannot absolve itself from this requirement. That is why it is necessary, both at the beginning and at the end of examining individual parts, to emphasize the organic unity of forces and their mutual conditioning. It is the doom of our music theory that it has lost this sense of coherence and therefore the living forces themselves. A harmonic cadence is not a succession of constructed sonorities, but depends upon the simultaneous growth and the finest balancing of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic forces, each of which conditions the others. The tone succession C-D-C is in the first instance a melodic event, which incarnates a rising and again sinking energy-stream in its three manifest appearances: base, tension, relaxation. Yet it will be apperceived not only as a rhythmic

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and latently harmonic process, but rather also as formal value and content value. The succession of these three tones does not differ in kind, only in degree, from that of a three-movement sonata. For form and content, there are no phenomenal limits [377] within which these categories are neutralized, only limits of intensity. The elementary phenomena of the artwork rest on a continuous succession of such tensional processes, which permeate one another in the most diverse dimensions. The smallest are fundamental melodic or rhythmic facts, which are not perceived as tensions at all. The dimensions ascend up to the symbolic opposition of two themes or up to the representative force of a conspicuously manifest formal antithesis. The schematic image through which this can be understood is not the succession of various curves, but rather their growth from a single point, while their decaying lines become ever larger. It is this, as I would like to call it, centripetal basic character of the elementary forces that in the final analysis conditions the unity of the artwork. For example, it can be clarified well through a harmonic development that, even in its most complicated effects, appears as the evolution of a central force, the originary tonic. Here the concept of evolution replaces the usual term, “modulation,” which is profoundly inimical to the essence and developmental law of the artwork, insofar as it puts a shifting account balance— a modulating, that is, changing, will— in the place of an organic, never modulatory, but always unified growth. From this point on, the posing of problems arises jointly with individual phenomenological investigations. This posing of problems seeks to conceive of the phenomena of the artwork as evolutionary developments of elementary forces. Our music theory takes the manifest as its point of departure. It is largely content to discern and register the phenomena perceptible on the surface. But concepts like sonata form, rondo, and theme obtain their meaning first through their common denominations. The greater simplicity of view hereby gained makes it possible to forge ahead in several directions. The phenomenological perspective does not bind itself to manifest phenomena (as would a sensualist perspective), but rather gets down to their roots, reveals their developmental path, and uncovers the lateral, connecting lines. In terms of method, this results in three phases for carrying out an investigation. The point of departure is the question of forces. From the knowledge of these forces, the laws are sought according to which they form and develop. This development itself, the evolution of forces, becomes the natural focus of the investigation. Within it— in its course, in its intensity, in the boundaries it delimits— are contained the essential questions. [378] Thus the investigation of elementary processes would begin anew

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with the interval, whose size and direction reveal basic melodic facts (Urtatsachen), whose degree of fusion reveals basic harmonic facts, and whose position in space reveals basic rhythmic facts, while its belonging to the basic tonal forms— diatonic or chordal— is a stylistic factor. The investigation of the melodic, which will not be pursued in detail here, grows from the knowledge of those basic facts; through the encompassing of larger melodic evolutions, the establishment of primary and secondary melodic values, the delimitation of the concept of logic in its application to melody; and then on to the unveiling of typical genres like elementary, constructive, cantabile or figurative melody, or of types of melodic intensities. We can understand in a similar fashion the evolution from the harmony of the simple triadic cadence; through the secondary chordal connections (“modulations”) of fifth relations; then through the other degrees of affinity on to the absolute harmony of Impressionism and to the horizontal harmony of the most recent music, as a final branching out of both components of sonority: color and line. Even in the simplest elementary processes, the need arises to include the tectonic forces of the artwork. They are of primary significance in music, taking the place, as it were, of clarity about the object, a clarity that is absent in instrumental music. Even simple melodic formations show the decisive opposition between motive and line; shape sequences, correspondences, oppositions; arrive at variations or developments. The deployment of types in this domain and the production of firm connections between them demonstrate coherences that obtain in the eight-bar folk song just as much as in the four-movement symphony. They indicate in a novel fashion the great unity of all active forces and the impossibility of completely separating them in investigation. The motive is an essential factor for a formal as well as for content-oriented perspective. For both, the necessity arises of establishing terminology anew, distinguishing types, and creating “fundamental concepts.” The concept of content requires special comment in this connection. The phenomenological aesthetics of music openly conceives of itself in an idealistic fashion and treats the concept of content in its full extent for the artwork. It sees the content of the music in the sum of its tectonic elements, just as this concept has been defined above. These tectonic forces are the primary bearers of content for music. In certain [379] genres of music, they can be decisively influenced by the “impact” (this image is to be understood literally) of other subjective or objective relations coming from outside. Objectively: through text, program, epigraph, in other words any extramusical association. Subjectively: through similar associations, which are conditioned by the individuality of the creator and operate

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upon the content as a source of force. Yet these elements only come to appearance by means of tectonic elements. In this particular area, the phenomenological perspective rests upon not only the method but also the terminology of the psychological. It goes back to the starting points, rest-excitement, pleasure-displeasure, and so on; and it avails itself of the categories of psychological aesthetics, albeit modified according to the nature of music. Yet it places the borrowing of these concepts in a new light by dealing with the subjective aspects of the artwork, and thus of the object (but not of the observer!). In these considerations, questions of style have already been implied. The formal and stylistic investigation of the artwork must expand its interrogation in the direction of the historical, or better: the morphological. The laws of organic becoming, which became visible in the phenomenological consideration of the artwork, also emerge into a bright light from this standpoint. The development of genres and forms is likewise an organism. We recognize early stages of development, germinal becoming, first buds, full bloom, and decline. For each form, the time span— in many cases, the rhythm— of development is different. Even dead forms are carried further through development and occasionally awakened by the artist into apparent life, without being capable of development, like the history of the cantata after Bach, or the mass after 1600. The sequence of styles is like the change of generations. It is carried by the law of wavelike, swinging, pendular movement, whose rhythm gives the history of Western music a natural, profoundly lawlike segmentation into eight corresponding periods. The sum total of these viewpoints compresses itself into the analysis of the artwork. It is bound to all the premises that have been indicated here. It limits itself to the artwork, to the exclusion of the observer and his associations, and without the necessity of including the personality and development of the creator. When properly applied, this limitation may at times signify an enrichment. Analysis has the task of summarizing anew the individual results that have been previously taken apart. [380] No single elementary process will be so minimal that it cannot somehow become effective in analysis. What is expressed through it is only one part and a summation of insights that were necessary for the grounding of its results. We must therefore demand of analysis that it gives an image of the individual structure of the single work. It must allow its individuality to be clearly recognized and show that the concept of the sonata scheme would be completely meaningless in a comparison of an early Haydn sonata with a late one by Beethoven. The analysis of the artwork as a phenomenon could only produce a false impression if it did not emphasize the symbolic value of its discoveries. In

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the limit cases of the artwork, its inner foundations must never be effaced: its unique, fateful character as an organism, its incommensurable, symbolic contingency.

III. In order to indicate the application of a phenomenological mode of observation in the delimited context of form, it is necessary even here to go back to the roots of the matter. With Riemann, one normally took the motive (Motiv) as the unitary root of all formal processes and derived all other species of phenomena from it, or reduced them to it.8 Through the symmetrical arrangement of the motive arose the concept of the eight-bar period (Periode), which was established as the measure of all forms, such that asymmetrical parts of any development (as, for example, in the development of a sonata) were comprehended as expanded or abbreviated eightbar periods. I wish to highlight these two facts here, because they have become, in my opinion, the source of numerous misunderstandings. Their domain of validity appears to me thoroughly limited. If the derivation of formal units from the motive is speculatively possible, the roots of the concept of form are nevertheless historically as well as phenomenologically dualistic: motive and line (Linie). Both are primordial forces, both indivisible, therefore elements of form, in reality more ideas than phenomena. For purely linear music is just as rare as a purely motivic music; as form values, both appear only together as a unity.9 The incarnation of this complementarity of forces is given in the concepts [381] of period and theme (Thema).10 In them, line and motive come together as a formal unity. According to their essence, the period is the coming-to-form of the line, the theme is the coming-to-form of the motive. And yet in the phenomenon the forces come together as a living unity; as a tectonic force, the motive belongs also to the period, the line also to the theme. What is common to the period and the theme is their divisibility. Both are typical basic forms and as such are of a complete complementarity, whose expression is the formal whole. This complementarity is circumscribed by the concepts of succession (Ablauf ) and development (Entwicklung). In the complementarity of line and motive a dualism lies hidden, whose significance extends above investigations of form. Line is being, situation, present; motive is becoming, will, future. Line is essentially passive, calming, or decaying force, complete at every moment of its being; motive is fundamentally active, penetrating force, incomplete as a phenomenon, but of the strongest driving force. Motive is seed, line is bloom.

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Example A.1. Duality of “motive” and “line” according to Mersmann’s schematization of form principles

When these two forces come together in a theme or in a period, this occurs in several typical forms. Not always such that one of the forces becomes the single bearer, that the theme or the period is either motivically or linearly constructed (better: [382] grown). Frequently, an unfolding of the motive into line or a concentration of the line into motive occurs within the period. An example of a completed shape for the first case is “O Straßburg,” for the second case, the children’s song “Taler, Taler, du mußt wandern.” But in the theme, the complementarity of motivic and linear forces becomes, since Haydn and Mozart, more and more the immediate bearer of a conflict. Here the motivic antecedent (Vordersatz [= “VS”]) and linear consequent (Nachsatz [= “NS”]) stand against one another. In older polyphonic music, the same complementarity of forces is linked with the relationship of theme and counterpoint. The tectonic complementarity of forces is often connected with the natural complementarity of diatonic

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and chordal formations, and likewise often with a complementarity of directions. In the concepts of antecedent and consequent a principle of division is enunciated, which has unlimited validity for all periodic and thematic formations. Antecedent and consequent are elastic principles. The regulated relations between them subsist in various dimensions (that is, between two and two, four and four, eight and eight, etc.). Thereby the connections produced from the relation between antecedent and consequent, whose specification must be passed over here, become of rich significance. The fundamental complementarity between period and theme leads to the equally complementary structure of their formal processes in the concepts of succession and development. My sense is that these two concepts are of central significance; the dualism they contain is the axis of all aesthetics of form. Line, period, and succession are in the end just as much differences in degree as are motive, theme, and development. The essence of the period is the logical boundedness of a formal tension whose intensity is limited due to a clear relationship of component phrases to one another. The period is already in itself the fulfillment of a formal will contained within it; it is completed in itself. After a first period, only a second one can follow; after this a third; and so forth. The periodic succession (periodischer Ablauf ), which can only be interrupted by intermediate phrases— or, in instrumental forms, by short transitions— rests upon a sequence of independent, coordinated formal parts. The essence of the theme is a one-time formal tension of unlimited intensity and propulsion. The theme is not the completed expression of a formal will but only the demand for one. This demand must lead to its effectuation. After a first theme there follows not a [383] second one, but rather a subsidiary idea, episodes, transitions, a coda (Nebengedanke, Episode, Bewegung, Coda)— that is, functions of the theme. The thematic development thereby positions itself in the sharpest contrast to the periodic succession; it rests on the connection of non-independent, subordinated formal parts, under the central force of a theme (ex. A.2). It hardly needs to be emphasized that the boundaries between succession and development are fluid, and that ultimately a common root lies at the basis of both, and that developmental forms have only grown very slowly out of successive forms. It suffices to have created in this complementation a concept with the capacity to grasp the fundamental difference in the formedness of, say, first and second sonata movements. And from this, it will be understandable if the segmentation of a pure development into eight-bar periods is eschewed, because it so deeply contradicts the essence of form, to precisely the extent that, contrariwise, it must be the nec-

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Example A.2. 1. “Periodic succession”; 2. “Thematic development”; 3. “Theme and its functions”

essary instrument of the analysis of a periodic successive form. The inner reason for eschewing it is the same as it was in earlier cases: the phenomenological standpoint strives for relation and unification, insofar as it tries to understand the formal whole under the viewpoint of an evolution. And if, in the musical form-concept, one can glimpse the sum of all relations that exist between segments of motion, then the standpoint would appear to be given through its end. The evolutionary viewpoint also remains in effect for the derivation of forms in the narrower sense— that is, of types of succession. The (sole) problem of all successive forms is a problem of sequence— that is, the serialization (Anreihung, [again, ex. A.1]) of its parts (succession scheme: A B C . . .). This serialization type is unartistic in its literal transmission and would lead to a potpourri, and in any case a minimum of formal tensional energy. Its entrance into art music remains bound to the older free [384] suite forms, which, just like the serenade, divertimento, and cassation, rested upon the loosest connection or, as in the fantasia, emphasized the improvised character of their sequence. The overwhelming majority of successive forms rest upon a relation of the parts. This relation (Beziehung) type (succession scheme: A B A) consists of diverse modifications (A B A B A or A B A C A B A, among others) and is, in its three-partedness, a symbol of sculptural simplicity, whose typical energy reduces to the basic tension-forms (Spannungsgrundformen) of other points of departure. To this formal type belong all phenomena that are normally designated as “song form,” and to which a rondo belongs just as primarily as does the slow movement of a symphony or a minuet. For this succession type, contrasts can broaden into the absolute; numerous slow sonata movements with independent middle sections offer examples of absolute contrast,

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while all contrasts in the development forms must be relative.11 The energy of this formal relation is not bound to any scope; it already appears within a three-part period (as in the children’s song “Ein Männlein steht im Walde”) with complete clarity. A final succession type can be designated transformation (Abwandlung). It consists in the constant alteration of a period or period group, and thus leads to variation or those forms based on a variation principle (succession scheme A A1 A2 . . .). Where it edges out beyond the narrower limits of the succession form (as often in Beethoven), variation leads to development. The problem of developmental form is a problem of forces and not of sequence. This is determined by the type of forces. In this sense, there are two developmental types: the development of a force or of a contrast of forces. The first case, which can be designated as “central development” (zentrale Entwicklung), consists in the evolution of a force, which requires a complete unfolding out of a seedlike origin. That such developments can occur already within the external framework of an eight-bar period can be seen in the folk song “O Straßburg.” The strongest form-symbols of central developments are the prelude-and-fugue genre. In Bach, their evolutionary path is often parallel; their essential difference consists in the fact that the development of the prelude is based on an (often veiled) motive, while that of the fugue is based on a sharply delineated one. The character of the development often appears purer in the prelude because it can achieve expression here uninhibited, without any formal bounds. [385] There are Bach preludes whose developmental intensity reaches the highest tensions of energy even in the smallest areas. In it, and especially in the fugue, a new disposition of forces enters through the element of polyphony, whose intensity often turns the fugue into the bearer of a conflict (Konflikt), a bearer that does not need to be linked to a vertical contrast, but rather (for the most part) lies within the theme. The free developmental forms ( freie Entwicklungsformen) (overture, symphonic poem, etc.) can be understood according to the same disposition, in which the majority of forces (and here also occasionally actual motives) require development. The evolutionary path of these developments is often determined by extramusical elements (music drama). The purest incarnation of the development of a conflict is given in the cyclical forms (zyklische Formen). In them, the developmental path of a conflict of forces is predetermined with complete sculptural form. The conflict consists originally in the contrast of two themes, which stand at different harmonic levels, then penetrate one another and finally unify at the same level (resolution, not “reprise”!). The other statements in a cyclical form relate to the first like a scale-balance insofar as, in their greater span,

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they offset the tensional heights of the first statement. The aesthetics of form has held fast to this canon of sonata form with remarkable stubbornness, although at the moment of its establishment, it was already poised to be overcome. From Haydn on, the development of cyclical forms is already a struggle between the demands of form and those of content. Even here new developmental paths of the conflict arose, which were completed by Mozart and Beethoven. A fundamental change in the developmental path emerged in the circumstance that the conflict came to expression within the first theme, or developed immediately out of it. In this way, the second theme, the contrast of harmonic centers, the development (in the formal sense), and the later resolution become formal residues, and the actual working-out— that is, the execution of the conflict— begins immediately after the theme. Where its goal is not the restoration of the original contrast of weight, the coda becomes a decisive moment. The other statements become functions of the conflict. The concentrated tensions of the first statement fade away into it, become renewed and borne further. Here, too, typical basic forms appear. One such form is based on force and counterforce coming into effect individually, detached from one another and from their state of conflict. Another basic form is based on this conflict, having been renewed with less intensity, [386] gradually ebbing away. Of essential significance is the finale, which grows out of the song-like, “last-dance” type of the early cyclical forms up to the synthetic roundup of all forces. I synopsize these thoughts by graphically reproducing several characteristic developmental paths of musical forms. This graphic representation, a means of expression otherwise rather remote from the musician in its visual nature, has become an instrument of analysis of ever-increasing significance for me. Curve-based representation is possible for the segmental examination of melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic tensions and can be carried out here exactly. The more numerous the components of the development become, the more approximate becomes the character of the graphic reproduction. It represents the intensity of the corresponding total tension through its distance from the central, horizontal base line, and in this manner provides a sedimentation of the individual physiognomy of the single work. That should be disregarded here. The four curves given as examples refrain from analyzing individual works (their curves would otherwise be far too complicated and more finely segmented), but rather establish typical contrasting statements (ex. A.3). 1. A three-part art song, whose first and third parts consist of a series of independent period groups (the third synthetically goes beyond the tensional heights of the first), while the succession curve of the middle part

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Example A.3. Graphic representations of four abstract formal types: three-part song, Bach prelude, three-movement sonata, and four-movement symphony

breaks through the principle of the serialization of closed period groups and arrives at freer, open evolutions, according to, say, the type of a Schubert song. 2. The type of a Bach prelude, which, on the basis of a harmonic or polyphonic development, swings off from its center into ever larger curves (central development), but refrains from visible segmentation. The growth of this curve is the segmentation principle of the work and consists of a steady proportion and the finest balancing of its parts. 3. A three-movement sonata, in the developmental type of Haydn. Here, where it is a matter of the development of a primary contrast or conflict, the curve expands to the coordinate system, whose endpoints are indicated by the sum of the contrasts between the conflict-bearing forces. The con-

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flict lies between the two themes. The second movement releases the counterforce (that is, the second theme in new transformations), allowing it to come into effect conflict-free (periodic succession). The third movement renews the conflict and lets it play out with ever diminishing intensity in the animated multiformedness of a rondo. In all these cases, the question [387] of the commonality of substance of ideas is greatly significant. 4. A four-movement symphony, in the type of Beethoven’s “Eroica.” The conflict lies in the theme (that is, for example, in the manner of the “Jupiter” symphony, between a motivic, chordal first idea and a linear, diatonic contrasting idea). Its “development” (“Durchführung”) thus begins immediately after the theme. The coda of the first movement attains greater significance, rich in content. The second movement relaxes the conflict in far-flung period groups. The third grasps it anew in brief, lapidary contrast (three-partedness in the smallest spans). From the energies dammed up here, the steep tension curve of the finale breaks out and brings the development synthetically to a peak. It would require just a small step for the incarnation of the developmental idea to break through into word (not in Beethoven’s [388] Ninth but in Mahler’s Second Symphony). The establishment of these types, which may simultaneously serve as a synopsis of the foregoing lines of thought, goes well beyond problems of form. Yet it was to have been shown through them that every aesthetics of form must necessarily fail, if it limits itself to its boundaries. The strongest of the preconditioning forces is content. Thus, at the end of this consideration stands the complete unity of the artwork, which, temporarily elevated in the course of the investigation, now lets the curtain fall again. But through it shines the great law of all organic becoming.

[ A ppendi x B ]

Helmuth Plessner, “Response” [to Mersmann] (1925)1 [392] Kant said that it is of scholarly importance that one know what one should ask in the first place, and his critique of reason sets out from the question of the possibility of mathematical natural science, a historically contingent cultural formation.2 In just the same way the phenomenology of music, as a critique of musical consciousness and its objects, should set out from the question “How is pure music possible at all?”— where, by “pure music,” we should understand those capacities that are fully in accord with the meaning of those words for us in the current historical situation (and, to that extent, completely non-binding for other eras and other ethnopsychological types). The question of the possibility of music reduces to the following considerations: what is given are simple acoustical contents, tones, and tone connections in a specific form of succession. Now these elements, ordered according to a specific rule, themselves have the remarkable trait that they symbolize emotional and intellectual meanings without availing themselves of the aids of an interpreting text (in vocal music) or gesture (in dance) and without any recourse to a programmatic subtext (through a dramatic event on the stage or through simple sonorous imitation in socalled program music). Let us leave the explanation of this fact— in and of itself debatable— simply at this: that often, certain memories of connections heard earlier between specific tone sequences and specific spiritual or intellectual aspects may be influential. What is certain is that, whatever the influence of convention on the corresponding concrete formation of the spiritual-intellectual sense linked with specific tone sequences (the minor mode as expression of a gloomy, depressed emotional state), the possibility of such an immediate symbolization of a spiritual-intellectual sense in the first place is given in the material of sonority. For the striking aspect lies in the fact that the possibility of a similarly immediate symbolization does not appear in the counterparts to tones or sonorities belonging to the optical, or the tactile, or any other sensory domain. Indeed, from history, we know 178

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of ever-renewed endeavors to overcome this strange special disposition of the sense of hearing and to create in other sensory domains an analogue to music. A realization of the idea of a color-keyboard has been attempted many times. In literature, the idea of a scent-keyboard has surfaced. Indeed, people have even imagined symphonies of touch and corresponding, sensuously rich instruments. In this direction belong, [393] too, certain efforts in radical Expressionism, of which in deed and in word, [Wassily] Kandinsky is the eloquent leader. Particularly Expressionism in the visual arts, and also in the area of poetry— we recall certain specimens from the circles around Der Sturm— set out from the principle of the equality of the optical and the acoustical, that is, from the idea that the senses have a certain capacity to substitute for one another in relation to the spiritual will to expression, and also in relation to the communication of mental information.3 What is correct to the ear should also be fit to the eye. One says to oneself: what is granted to the musician— namely, to produce sense immediately through a certain arrangement of tones and a masterful disposition of sonorities— must also be available to the painter and to the poet, insofar as they will achieve sensible effects— the former with colors and forms, and the latter with word-images and word-sonorities— without recourse to their factual meaning and their objective background. The Expressionist experiment thus sets out from the quite correct insight that music, which we call “pure,” makes use of tones and sonorities, both in their succession and in their vertical presentness, without regard for objective meaning— that is, to any imitative value in relation to sounds and sonorities of our environment. We can even say today that this radical experiment of Expressionism is— and must always be— the failed invention of a music for the eyes (Augenmusik), to say nothing of anything else, because it runs contrary to the essential laws of optical consciousness. Some have even pursued the experiment so far as to try to realize a strict counterpart to music in the optical domain through the production of Expressionist films, in which the elementary visual data, colors and forms, succeeded one another in certain variable combinations. Now it is naturally possible to obtain a particular, rather stimulating impression from such displays, just as it is from the sight of certain radical Expressionist images, Cubist constructions, and so forth. But these impressions, even when they maximally accentuate feelings of pleasure, lie in a sphere that may be foundational for aesthetic pleasure yet does not encompass it in its entire breadth. As when we view carpets or wallpaper patterns or other ornamental compositions, certain pleasure-functions, certain impressions, enter the picture that are linked to the simplest sensual color- and form-values. They allow the power of imagination a more or less lively play, but they do not enable

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one thing: to express a succinct meaning, one that may be non-theoretical, non-conceptual, but nevertheless in itself immediate. All radical Expressionism in the optical sphere requires certain [394] middle terms in order to make clear the intended sense in its productions. It can proceed however it wants— by, say, allocating certain spiritual values to certain colors, prescribing a semiotic system, so to speak, for the understanding of images— but by way of contrast, the evident preeminent position of music will always remain unshaken, for which it is possible, even without such an interpolation of symbolic middle terms, to sensualize meaning in a sequence of sonorities. The reason for this non-substitutability of the auditory sense with regard to music-making— that is, to immediately and meaningfully intelligible, regular activation of tones and sonorities, both simultaneous and successive— lies in the essential structure of sound, as distinguished from the essential structure of phenomenal light. [Carl] Stumpf and [Ewald] Hering have identified the essential structure of an optical datum, albeit in different formulations: practically speaking, a shade of color as a flat quale, a datum given in extension.4 By contrast, and in strict analogy with the essential structure of the basic optical datum as formulated by Stumpf and Hering, the basic acoustical datum, the tone, must be identified on the basis of its wave nature as a voluminous quale. Voluminosity in this sense has two aspects or elements: spatiality and distensibility. To the former element is due the fact that one can speak of the relationship of tones at particular locations in phenomenal space. For every tone, there is a specific location value, above or below. To the latter element, distensibility, is due the fact that tones can be ascribed to a particular will to an expression, as an immediate medium, so to speak, and this aspect is the reason for the fact that all music-making must play out in time. In the literature up to now, I find that only the excellent Rostock psychologist David Katz, in his investigation into the so-called vibratory sense, has hinted at this circumstance.5 If, as we would like to add, the element of duration belongs phenomenally to tone thanks to its distensibility, then a certain chord demands to fade away in time or else to be displaced by subsequent sonorities. We see here, then, that movement in succession is necessary to tones by their nature as sound, while it is not necessary to visual data by their phenomenal nature as light. A visual datum is a flat and, to that extent, primarily static quale. Yet this voluminosity of the acoustical material is also the basis for the assonance [sic] and dissonance that are essential for all music-making, and above all for music-making under the sign [395] of tonality. Certainly, we also speak of clashing colors that do not go with one another. One desires other colors, which alleviate unbearable contrasts and can ultimately

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bring about a total harmonic effect. But a different relation is in effect here, a primarily cumulative relation between single colors and forms, which only secondarily, in apprehending them, come into a relation of wholeness— that is, of conflict or of unity. Tones, by contrast, sound together from the outset and form supercumulative complexes of a complexqualitative character. They push toward specific resolutions when they are conflicted within themselves. The voluminosity of sound and of tones, then, is the basis for the fact that we apprehend, in a rhythmically regulated succession, an inner tendency, a direction of movement, which we perceive in the optical domain only when particular objects are given to us, which progress or in which a progression is accomplished. The direction of movement in the rhythmic succession of tones or tone-complexes is always primarily given with a character of expectation, that is, a motivated character, while in the optical domain it must be motivated first by the objective circumstances and the bearers of visual data. That is why all visual art is only possible via the byway of the recognition of circumstances, while art of the ear can dispense with this recognition and can bring to experience, immediately in and with the unfolding of a manifold of tones, not only rhythm but also the rhythmic motivation, not only dynamics and colors but also the “why” of its usage. The answer to the question “How is pure music possible at all?” is thus given by the discipline of phenomenology that we call the aesthesiology of hearing, in that it shows that, through the spatiality and distensibility of acoustic material, the succession and the orientation of succession are motivated within specific limits, and therefore tones can function as immediate symbolic bearers, which is not true of free, materially unbound visual data, since they are subject to a flat, static quale. Phenomenological contemplation is exercised in the clarification of these basic questions, in order thereupon to turn itself toward the objects of musical consciousness, which absolutely cannot, as Mersmann’s essay gives the impression, be sought in the plane of the notated score, or in physiological tone data.

[ A ppendi x C ]

Paul Bekker, “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?” (1925)1 [241] We could answer this question lightly by noting that phenomenology is simply the philosophical rage of the moment, so all the fashionable music critics and aestheticians— among which this essay’s author is well enough known— are turning to it as fast as they can. Yet even if we accept that, the question nonetheless remains, wherein does the particularity and novelty of the fashion actually reside, and what does this phenomenology actually demand? How does its way of looking at things differ from those of other aestheticians, and what are its goals? Is phenomenology just a new name for an old thing, or does the (for this era) new word also signify a new meaning? One might almost guess the former and take the label, as pretty as it is difficult to pronounce, for the shop sign of an old aesthetics painted over with another color. On the occasion of the Second Conference for Aesthetics in Berlin in October 1924, where much was said about phenomenology both in general terms and in specific cases, the Göttingen philosopher Moritz Geiger opined that phenomenology is an age- old mode of knowledge, for which we have only now found the proper name.2 In reality, the aesthetic writings of, say, [Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing or [Friedrich] Schiller— where they were not directly dependent on Kant— were already part of the basic attitude toward the given problem (if not to the formulation of the problem itself ) in accord with phenomenological method. That statement may be slightly too pointed for the purposes of our discussion. It should not be tested as a strict thesis, but only aid in forming associations and in elucidation. It no doubt contains a kernel of truth, but also a risk of incorrect application. The grain of truth would be grasped in the fact that not only phenomenology and the older aesthetics, but all methods of knowledge overlap with one another in some way. This agreement at the deepest level of meaning is conditioned by the agreement of the objects: of people, of nature, of art. On the basis of such a comparison— only observing the ends, not the means— it would be just as possible to demonstrate 182

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Einsteinian relativity in the teachings of Solomon as it would the phenomenological method of knowledge in Lessing and Schiller— and even from this demonstration, a certain rightness cannot be denied. It would not be convincing, however. What is fundamentally important lies not in the unchangeability of the object, but rather in the changeability of the subject; not in the goal that is always the same, but rather in the determination of the viewpoint from which [242] we observe. The history of philosophy and aesthetics shows, above and beyond its variety, the similarity of all methods of knowledge. And yet there remains for us, as a vividly sensed personal essence, only one method we can utilize as the appropriate one, not because it would be better, truer, and deeper than the others, but rather because it results from the particular species of our sensory organism, from the world-image and life-feeling which that organism conditions. The difference with regard to others that is thereby specified should not be camouflaged or made unrecognizable. Precisely that we sense and know thus, and only thus, conditions our self, our productive being. It is not worth emphasizing the agreement or similarity, but rather the differentiation in the apprehension of what is in itself always the same. Yet with that we would already have stumbled into phenomenology, for such a manner of observation in method of knowledge is already phenomenological. Phenomenology is, generally speaking, the study of appearances, of the laws of their essence, as they result from this itself and thereby determine the becoming of form. Since it is not the aim of these remarks to argue a philosophical system ab ovo, but to lead toward the consideration of a single area— music aesthetics— the background of the study with respect to worldview may be set aside for the moment and, at first, the concrete conceptual formations may be established. Indeed, the tendency of the conference mentioned has shown that there are still substantial differences of opinion about just what is to be addressed as “phenomenology of music.” Accordingly, it seems advisable first to establish clearly what we mean at all, before we enter into the discussion itself. Let’s say we have been given the task of presenting the life and work of an extraordinary creative personality. The presenter can make the attempt to project themselves completely onto the individuality of the person being presented, to identify themselves with it. The most exacting research into all the external and internal circumstances of life, immersion in the historical and human milieu, unconditional acceptance of all instinctive wishes, character traits, artistic intuitions— in short, complete self-renunciation in favor of the object, just as an actor might do— are the presuppositions of this manner of presentation. The methodical principle it is based on would be designated projective empathy (Einfühlung).

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A second possibility would be the comparative juxtaposition of the historical phenomenon with the image of its effect on its social world and posterity. Here empathy falls away as the goal that determines meaning. The task can be designated as a clarification and rendering-conscious of the relations between the object, taken as a historical fact, and its [243] environment; as a verification of the impulse, radiating from the artist, toward its temporal conditionality, its general validity, its absolute significance. The emphasis lies on the personality of the presenter, who juxtaposes himself as a judging agent over and against the given artistic individuality. The grounding principle here would be designated as the critical knowledge of history. Its goal is evaluation. There is still a third possibility. It makes use of the means of empathy as well as of historical knowledge, but its goals are neither that of reconstruction nor that of critical determination of value. Insofar as it lets the phenomenon present itself of its own accord, it makes the law of its essence manifest. Insofar as it derives this law from the particularity of given presuppositions, it makes its necessity, fruitfulness, and conditionality comprehensible all at once. The critique of values is of course excluded here as a goal, because it becomes superfluous. To the extent that it comes under consideration, it results as an indirect consequence of the presentation. Just as much as value critique, the apologetic effect of empathy also falls away, since the presenter is no longer the medium, disowning themselves like an actor, but rather an agent of reception and recording, and the productive aspect of his presentation lies in the loyal reproduction of the received and the heard through a critical temperament. They see and show the seen; they see the nature of things as nature. The underlying methodical principle here would be designated as phenomenological observation. Phenomenology is accordingly the study of the phenomenon itself. It thus tacitly assumes, if it is to have meaning and justification for being at all, the knowledge that each phenomenon conceals within itself its proper lawfulness, which determines its existence and its effect. If this were not the case, then it would seem pointless to aspire after the knowledge of phenomena, as this would be capable of saying nothing. But if it is the case, if the phenomenon is a thing of its own naturalness and embryonically given organicism, then it is evident that we must strive after the knowledge of this naturalness and organicism— initially apart from all speculatively discovered value concepts and metaphysical demands. If, and to what extent, these can later come into use as criteria remains undecided for the time being. First we will need to recognize the object itself— the phenomenon— before we can speculate about it.

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But what are the phenomena of music? Is it the forms, is it the personalities, is it the instruments, is it the works, or something else? It is none of these, or, in a certain sense, it is all of them together. In music, there is only one originary phenomenon (Urphänomen); this is sonority (Klang). Sonority is the natural phenomenon, the single elementary phenomenal formation of music overall. One can no doubt contemplate music in the most varied [244] speculative attitudes. The history of music aesthetics shows them to us in unmistakable multiplicity. It should thus certainly not be claimed that all of these attitudes are good for nothing and that only with phenomenology is the philosopher’s stone discovered. With complete certainty, though, it can be claimed: if we speak of a phenomenology of music, then we can only understand by that term the study of nature and the study of the essentiality of sonority, and all declarations of this study must be declarations of the essentiality of sonority. How this is to be comprehended will remain to the various interpreters. Here free rein is to be guarded for subjective interpretation. The basic assumption, though, is given simply. It stands beyond personal interpretive arbitrariness. A theory of, say, formal functions can bring some remarkable bits of information, but as the point of departure for a phenomenology, it will not do. The name certainly does not, and in any case it has proven practical not to label medical science as theology and law as philosophy. And, too, a name is not a free agent but is bound to the sense of the matter. The sense of the matter in this case implies that, in a phenomenology, one must deal with the phenomenon. Phenomena are natural appearances, but natural appearances in music are inevitably sonorous appearances. Animated sonority, sounding force is the fundamental phenomenon. Only on the basis of its observation and investigation can we make the attempt— to the extent that we desire it at all— to arrive at a phenomenology of music. In this regard, the task thereby posed will present itself as the apprehension of the phenomenal life of sonority and of the laws that condition this phenomenal life. This consideration will ultimately lead in its systematic construction to consideration of the life of forms. But before it can be undertaken, it is necessary to gain some clarity about the preconditions for the life of form, to recognize it according to its phenomenological properties. What is melody, what is harmony, what is rhythm, what is consonance, dissonance, homophony, polyphony? On what phenomenologically given preconditions are the formation of the church modes, the more modern scales, the song forms, the instrumental forms based? These and many other questions immediately connected with them must be posed at first, and then, when answered, answered not by the means of music theory, but

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rather precisely by the means disclosed through a consideration of sonority as a natural phenomenon. Certainly, this may not come down to simply proving our inherited aesthetics and music theory false or superfluous, but may on the contrary confirm them through the disclosure of a new avenue of knowledge. A conflict, then, could only arise if the old and the new results contradicted one another. Then, to be sure, it would come down to a critical comparison and verification [245] of the soundness of the methods, and at that point, the phenomenological method would have to prove its right to exist. For the moment, we have not yet gotten that far. First, it is a matter of recognizing what phenomenology is even capable of saying and correspondingly from which points of view the posing of questions can be undertaken. As always, it is necessary, and in fact only possible, to begin with the simple and only from there to progress to the complicated, not the other way around. Only in this way can we find the correct path. I have already indicated of what type the simplest questions may be, as well as the questions immediately following from them. To give an answer here at the moment would lead too far. I may spare myself from this all the more in that I have undertaken the first attempt toward it in a short text, which has just appeared.3 To the individual themes only sketchily treated there I hope to be able to add further-reaching implementation in the course of time. Yet I want right away to emphasize explicitly that it was not my intention that these lines be understood to suggest that I wanted to explain every single finding of the cited text as if untouchable and free of doubt. The area tread upon here is so immeasurably large that its first crossing can in no way give anything more than a brief glimpse, in which many individual items must necessarily be comprehended wrongly or at least insufficiently. On the other hand, what I maintain to be absolutely necessary and correct is the style of the basic attitude, of the construction of thoughts on the basis of an apprehension of the sonorous phenomenon, the systematization on the basis of knowledge won through the essentiality of the phenomenon. Thus, in the meantime, there remains a question already posed at the outset: why must there be phenomenology at all? Do our former critical aesthetic methods of knowledge no longer suffice? Do we have to solve problems of such increased difficulty as in earlier periods that we have to create a new scientific discipline to this end? Is it perhaps only wantonness or an obsession with novelty that drive us to do it, and isn’t it ultimately just a matter of the result, not of the method by which we reach it? These are in principle the same objections people also hold against recent art, to the extent that it drifts away from the given. To them might first be replied that the conceit of being better or cleverer than the past could

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indeed be scarcely more foreign to a historical period than it is to ours, at least where its truly best representatives are concerned. The mania for progress, the theory of development as an ascent, lining up, for example, levels of art history with [246] primitives at the bottom, the somewhat better in the middle, and the fully perfected— that is, present-day developments— at the top: this theory is an exclusive property of the nineteenth century and was borne with it to the grave. At most, we pretend to superiority over this recent past insofar as we repudiate such a conception of the play of forces and do not recognize the related conception of history as a “becoming.” We replace it with the concept of change. Perhaps what results from the depths of this inner and outer collapse of the progressive theory of history is that unwilled yet mandatory urge toward being otherwise, which is indeed always a hallmark of the relation of immediately associated generations and which however comes to consciousness today with particular vividness. This in no way means an antagonistic opposition, however, but instead at first just the knowledge that the dream of perpetual progress has been exhausted, that this path has been trodden to the end— an inner pause, then, and a moment of reflection, and with that, the surfacing of the question “What is that?” But with this question, the turn to phenomenology is already completed. In the “What is that?,” in the will toward a passionate clarification of phenomena and their laws, lies the decisive hallmark of the new problematization overall. It is not constructed wantonly but is urged upon us by the course of events. The era of uninhibited belief in dogma is finally past, and if workaday criticism does not yet entirely allow this circumstance to be recognized, but instead continues to satisfy itself over and over with the old party jargon, then this is due primarily to the fact that it has not yet grasped the reality of artistic events. It is surely all the more important to make these events recognizable in their aesthetic lawfulness. A foundational precondition for this is the correct recognition of the past, from which we all originate. Yet here we must guard against the error of situating the bygone all too carelessly as false merely because for us it is no longer true. It is presently considered good form in music aesthetics to speak of hermeneutics as scornfully as possible, and every young writer who thinks well of themselves regards it as obligatory on every occasion to reaffirm their low regard for hermeneutics. Now it is instructive, and not without an unintended comical side effect, to observe how all of these deniers of hermeneutics— Schenker, Halm, Pfitzner, right up to the youngest literary generation— become hermeneuts themselves the moment they begin seriously to discourse about music. Hans Mersmann, who in his conference presentation on the phenomenology of

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music likewise immediately renounced hermeneutics, in his subsequent remarks gave a textbook example of this. He characterized the musical [247] process of a composition or generic form only incidentally in words, but primarily in graphic images— that is, he drew wave motions, curves, ascending, descending, steep, smoothly oriented lines, and so on. What might all this be, if not “hermeneutics”? Whether I interpretively render in verbal metaphors or in graphic images is merely a secondary difference, not a change of principle. On the contrary, the descriptive word, which is always meant only in terms of comparison, never of coarse realism, preserves a space of free play for the ensuing imagination and more robust stimulation than the pictorial line. But if the reader misinterprets the word in a corrupting sense, is this the fault of the hermeneut, or is it not rather the fault of the reader? I am speaking here of hermeneutics as a methodological principle. Of course, it can, like any other principle, be used well and poorly. Now if this is not a rebuke of the mentioned “hermeneuts in spite of themselves,” then only to the extent that they should exercise a rather more cautious modesty in their denigrations. In their own declarations, though, they are correct when they in one way or another proceed hermeneutically. They are correct because the greater share of music people discuss these days is music conceived hermeneutically, which thus justifies and demands a hermeneutic reading. Aestheticians from the eighteenth century right up to Hermann Kretzschmar were never as unmusical or uncultivated as some now like to make them out to be, and anyone inclined to judge the “theory of affects” with disdain probably has a thing or two to learn before getting anywhere close to these people. They would have to reach the recognition that the theory of affects and the hermeneutics based upon it did have something absolutely right: namely, the aesthetic intuition corresponding to the art to which it was applicable. It could only become a mistaken theory when it was applied to an essentially different art— in the attempt, for example, to elevate it to an epistemological foundation for the consideration of art in general. This is where we grasp the heart of present-day problem-formulation. It can be characterized by the circumstance that there is no music “in itself,” no music “as such,” but only musics. To them correspond various aesthetics, of which each is completely correct insofar as it applies to its own art. Seen in this light, we will of course need to reject the theory of affects for contemporary music— yet not because the theory of affects is in itself “false,” but because contemporary music is no longer a music of affect. It does not therefore need to be “better,” but also not worse, than the music of affect, just as we do not compare Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and

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Empire styles as indicators of value. But that one as much as the other has its own stylistic laws and correspondingly its own aesthetic [248] norms, we fully admit for visual arts. Why do we dispute this for music? Now with this stylistic change comes the associated fact that today we strive to hear the music of the immediate past— call it music of affects, call it illusionistic, call it Romantic music— as much as possible not with reference to these peculiarities, but rather with reference to the immediate sound-organic (klangorganisch) elements that are more important to present-day sensibilities. We thereby overlook the fact that the affective, the illusionistic, the Romantic is not extramusical, but instead a basic constituent part of this organicism of sonority and can by no means be arbitrarily acknowledged or disavowed. If we deny this, then we eliminate in principle an absolutely essential aspect of this music. That is, we falsify its image according to our wishes, instead of correctly acknowledging it in its identity and thereby grasping its specific difference. For this reason, such perspectives can indeed occasionally lead to interesting partial results, but must break down in relation to the whole and pass in silence over the key questions. It is common today, for example, to regard the “poetic idea” in Beethoven as the spawn of unmusical literatis’ brains. Yet among all those who do this, not one has given a precise answer to the question of why their idea-less Beethoven didn’t simply write an Overture in C Minor instead of the Coriolan Overture. That the overture is in C minor is not disputed, yet for Beethoven “Coriolan” was more important than C minor, the former being the primary, ideal precondition for the molding of tonal functions, the latter the secondary one. If we look at it the other way around, then we perpetrate an act of caprice and invert the state of affairs. The idea here is the condition for sound-organic formation. One can have a discussion about the principle of formation as such, but not unilaterally represent it as being other than it is merely because it would better correspond to one’s own inclinations. Contemporary creators have recognized this earlier than contemporary aestheticians and theorists. Upon this rests the younger generation’s turning away from the masters from Beethoven to Wagner, the inclination toward the older masters of a music that is not felt primarily as expressive. Would a single musical aesthetics accordingly be impossible, such that we would instead have a series of individual aesthetics for various stylistic periods? This, however, is the present situation. The question to ask would be whether it is possible to get out of it. That this would be desirable cannot be doubted. There will still remain plenty of differences of opinion, but for the moment all disputation about music is talking-past-one-another, for we all say “music,” yet everybody means something different.

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Thus the first requirement for change would be the realization that everyone is right. Not in order to reach a diplomatic compromise, but [249] because it is in fact the case. The individual aesthetics, with which people labor today and with which people labored earlier, are each correct according to their type. When one recognizes this, one must at the same moment recognize that a musical aesthetics will only be possible as a science of the laws of the phenomena of individual aesthetics. It must unify these individual aesthetics within itself in such a way that they grow from it in a natural order, justified by it and in turn made comprehensible in its conditionality and time-boundedness.4 What currently constitutes the main significance of each individual aesthetic— namely its principle of determining value— thereby sinks to a relative, temporary, accompanying characteristic. The task lies not in the critical assessment of the various determinations of value, but rather in making their phenomena and their transformation comprehensible on the basis of the basic phenomenal contingencies of music. The particular law-like characteristics of formal construction and the associated norms of formation may not count among such phenomenal contingencies. They all already signify empirically specialized value concepts; they are however secondary phenomena and only applicable within a closed stylistic period. Instead one must much more inquire into root principles from which these law-like characteristics, norms of formation, and value concepts have been cultivated, into the root principles of their transformation, into the lawfulness of the root principles themselves. Yet these questions lead back to questions of the phenomenal essence of music overall, of the commonality of all individual aesthetics: of the essence of sonority and of the sensation that the phenomenon produces from it. That we strive toward such a mode of observation today is the peculiar hallmark of our time— not only in aesthetics, but just as much in creative art. The turning away from the value concept, which is always a meaning concept, the inclination to joy in the phenomenon as such, in the living organicism of its being, external to emotional purposiveness, the unstinting recognition of the past as the past insofar as it may be an example, and of the present insofar as it continues to live for itself— all of this can be distorted by superficial chatter, yet remains untouched in its inner force and truthfulness. Parallel to it runs aesthetic contemplation as a theory not of the value, but of the essence of phenomena.

[ A ppendi x D ]

Herbert Eimert, “On the Phenomenology of Music” (1926)1 [238] Art is the objectification of the world according to feeling. It is independent of concepts and non-theoretical. Science is the objectification of the world according to concepts. It is a conceptual thinking-out of the content of the world in a theoretical manner. Now aesthetics as the science of this world, “insofar as it is beautiful,” presupposes two things: first, the ability to analyze logically and conceptually, and second, knowledge of the aesthetic sphere as a meaningful unity, whose essence one must have experienced for oneself as an “originary phenomenon of the beautiful” in order to be able to conceive it theoretically at all. Knowledge of art is thus always and everywhere presupposed by the aesthetician, because its conceptual analysis is nonsensical and unthinkable. This double relation of the theoretical person to art is the only possible and fruitful hotbed for aesthetic knowledge. Although the shaping, imagining “I” can be unified with the thinking “I” in one person, in no way does the possibility arise of permeating the sphere of the one with the means of the other, and aestheticizing attempts at spanning the gap in this direction— even if they are indispensable as mediation and illumination— are non-aesthetic and no more conducive to scholarship than, say, a popular representation of physical relativity would be for the theory of relativity. Regarding basic problems, every scholarly contemplation of music wanting to be more than an empirical theory limited to its own discipline is anchored in philosophy. About this there is no discussion, except as pertains to the principle of this contemplation, to its method, for theoretical contemplation first strives for a theory of the procedure by which its object may be recognized. In the foreground of musical-methodological efforts today, without which no music aesthetics can manage, stands phenomenology. Phenomenologically, one might say each era has that aesthetics which it merits according to its essence. Just as the Greeks’ theory of ethos or the eighteenth-century theory of affects corresponded to the inner structure of their respective musics, the most recent music’s tremendous plea191

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sure in material has its aesthetic equivalent, its “adequate knowledge,” in an objectively oriented aesthetics emphasizing material, one which flows immediately from the basic forces of the time and is congruent [239] with phenomenology in its devotion to the essence of the concrete. Furthermore, however, phenomenology wishes to be not only a transformed but also, in certain basic elements and refinements of knowledge, an ultimate standpoint and is thus thoroughly historically burdened by its relationship to all philosophical efforts oriented toward essentiality (like, for example, Goethe’s “originary phenomenon”).2 Phenomenology means the intuition of essence (Wesensschau). It is an “intuition” (Schau) of the “essence” (Wesen) of a thing. That an ability to intuit is available is presupposed by every philosophy. The essence of a thing is always simple; it is immediately grasped by means of intuition. The cognitive image of the thing that thus arises is therefore the immediate recurrence of the object in the subject, not mediated by an act of empathy (Einfühlung). This intuition, in a certain respect proper to the naive, natural human being, is by contrast rare in the average spheres of “cultivation” nowadays and in the first instance conveys only the trivially self- evident. Yet cultivation and a lack of instinctive sensitivity will lead one to overlook the self-evident, in precisely the same measure as phenomenology is in the first instance an intuitive practice beyond induction and deduction, a philosophy of “immediate givens” (Bergson), of “the self-evident” (Geiger).3 Anyone who expects brilliant intellectual novelty from it will be disappointed. Some have said that the phenomenology of music must set out from sonority as given in nature because the essence of music lies in sonority.4 One could claim, analogously, that the essence of poetry lies in printed letters or words. Indeed, nobody will deny that the immediately given in music is sonority, and it would be conceivable to seek the meaningful significance of sonorities, their “complex apperception,” as a psychological act of consciousness in ourselves. But the basic drift of today’s music aesthetics is to consider sonority phenomenologically detached from the psychological act of empathy— that is, to recognize its “meaning” not in us, but in itself. The sound object confronting the listener will of course always be comprehended by way of an “act,” since an intuition without reason is blind. Phenomenology takes this act of perception not as an imparting of meaning fulfilled by the subject, or as an additive connection, as “association,” but as an object-conditioned act-network of “ideation,” of “ideational intending” (Husserl).5 Sonority is thus given as acoustical matter and is simultaneously comprehended as meaningful [240] “idea”— that is, it is meaningful in itself. It has, like every object, “sensory” and “non-sensory” qualities. Now

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a one-dimensional, idealistic standpoint would claim that the non-sensory qualities of the sound constitute its actual, deeper meaning, just as a sensualist perspective would say the same of the sensory qualities. Yet phenomenology considers both properties immediately. It intuitively knows of the unity of form and content and thus sees sound as a totality free of mediation, as “intuitive plenitude.” The aesthetics of music must place the non-sensory or, to use a historically venerable expression, the “intelligible” properties of sonority in the foreground, since the “sensible” qualities— be it overtone-poor or overtone-rich vocal or instrumental sonorities— are sufficiently well known as acoustical phenomena and moreover are in themselves capable of saying nothing about the essence of music. That only both together constitute the phenomenon of “music” has been explicitly emphasized. The meaning content of sonorities does not lie in concepts but in feelings. (At the outset, concept and feeling were determined to be the two possible intuitions of the world-whole. That music, like every art, deals with feelings should really not be contested.) If I hear a funeral march, I can be in the most cheerful mood and nonetheless clearly and objectively recognize the feeling-content “funeral march.” The objective feeling does not necessarily have to suppress a subjective one. In the same way, an era’s world-feeling can document itself in sound (the era of the medieval or of the Romantic person, say). The phenomenological aesthetics of music thus knows objective feelings, objective moods as well as objective worldcontents. In the relationship between objective or subjective feelings and art, the significance of phenomenology shows itself as an aesthetic form of intuition. We can state with phenomenal objectivity and without passion that an art without “aesthetic fictive feelings,” an art which sets about giving rise to subjective feelings, is non-aesthetic, and that a person who enjoys such feelings— that is, pleasure and intoxication— is situated outside the aesthetic sphere. Now feelings— “outward-concentrated” objective, as well as inwardconcentrated subjective ones— resist conceptual ordering to a great extent.6 [241] (This is one of the reasons for the stagnation and failure of psychological aesthetics.) All feelings— “feeling” always meant in the broadest sense in terms of worldly content— are laden with value, whether it be in objective mood-content like “mournful, cheerful,” and the like, or as aesthetic categories of “heroic, tragic, comic,” and so forth. The actual applicability of these feelings, to which the dichotomies “Gothic-Renaissance,” “Romantic-Classical,” and so on also belong, cannot be decided on the basis of feelings themselves, but only through exact statistics. The molding of sonority according to worldview— style— can be recog-

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nized phenomenologically in the act of setting singular quantities (“style elements”) in relation to the whole (style). The value and intensity of the soundworld-image, on the other hand, underlie the evaluating judgment. In phenomenological terms, that is, they are in themselves qualitatively gradated (as “forms of expressive style” or “content types”). The method of a “pure” phenomenology outwardly embraces the singular criteria in that which appears. The rounding out toward an embrace of the total content of sonority is the task of a theory of the historical and cultural values of music. It lies within the general tendency of contemporary thought to typologize the course of intellectual history, to recognize its essence in the typical. The art-historical view expands from a “history of heroes” to a “history of problems” (Mersmann).7 That recent historiographical thought has given up the concept of civilizational progress and searches instead for the inner necessity and degree of intensity of historical development— this does not have a causal relationship with the status of value judgments within pure phenomenology, but is based on a conceptual affinity with the general direction of contemporary thought, of the turn from subject to object. There are two possibilities for arriving at the essence of sonority: either you describe it, or you compare it with others, but always in its audible and simultaneously sense-laden totality, in “sensory-moral effects,” as Goethe says of colors.8 Descriptive indication of meaning, “exegesis” or hermeneutics (found at the highest level in [ Johann Joachim] Winckelmann for the visual arts), leads to the deepest knowledge of the essence of art. Since music is devoid of an objective meaning and in its general ambiguity cannot be interpreted in a scientific way, aesthetic consideration has turned to the outer mechanics of tonal play and of sound. One speaks of [242] “tensions and relaxations” and of “conflicts of energy in the sonata” (Schering) and has (as in Kurth) uncovered these mechanics down to the roots.9 The intensity of tensions itself can only be treated within certain scholarly limits, namely insofar as it lies at the level of the objectively given. Descriptions of energy that are subject-constrained and psychological lead to the same arbitrariness as poetic descriptions. A view based on the act of comparison leads just as well to the essence of sonority. This is a statistical, typologizing method, with the goal of an axiom, of equating to an identity. What sounds identical (or similar) materially is what means something identical (or similar) intellectually. An “identical judgment” of this kind lies, for example, in the thesis that “style is the sum of all style elements.” Only with this recognition of the same meaning in the same tones can we deal with music history as intellectual history in the first place. The descriptive and comparative method of musical knowledge alone leads to the deepest essence of sound. It mediates intellectual history by way of esoteric informa-

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tion about style and is practiced everywhere as “style criticism” in recent music research (for more than twenty years, by, for example, the Vienna School under Adler, and more recently with explicit emphasis on the phenomenological by Mersmann, Bücken, and Becking, among others; and, furthermore, we might add here that, as far as historiography is concerned, older historians like Fétis, Ambros, and Spitta, among others, made use to a great extent of the predicate of objectivity).10 Recently, Paul Bekker attempted with great determination to include the terrain of phenomenology in his On the Natural Domains of Sound: Outline of a Phenomenology of Music.11 Whatever the author’s unusually great merits in music aesthetics, any outline of a phenomenology of music that sets out from the basic premise that “music is the sensation of sonority” deserves little praise. From this thesis, which quite obviously comes from sensualist territory in its emphasis on the subject, Bekker’s phenomenological program unwinds thoroughly logically and correctly. It is just that the foundation itself, according to what we have indicated here as the essence of the sound-whole, already lies outside of phenomenological discourse. The statement [243] “music is the sensation of sonority” limits itself to the connections between a radiating sound source and the radiated sensation, and it must expand itself, extended to history, to a sociological consideration of music, whose philosophical foundation is the recognition of a subject-object split. Along with the developed system of subject-object relations, there is unambiguously a phenomenology of the object— that is, in our case, of music— and a phenomenology of the subject— that is, of musical pleasure. “Music as sound sensation” accordingly belongs in the region of sociological or of individual subject-object relations, or alone to the subject-conditions of pleasure, but not to the object-idea of the tonal body itself, which alone can be the topic of a music phenomenology. If, moreover, musical knowledge is exclusively oriented by the viewpoint of “sound sensation” (one might almost speak of a degradation down to the disposition of the tympanic membrane), there arises the danger of an absolutization of the empirical. Bekker occasionally speaks very cogently of the “sound monad” (Klangmonad) without however awarding this concept, as an immaterial, consciousness-endowed center of energy (in Leibniz’s sense), the status of an ultimate being underlying any sound-entity.12 The phenomenon of sonority appears immediately as an “ensouled germinal cell” and is thus an ultimate and indivisible unity, as there has never been, from the very beginnings of any sort of music, a sonority that was not at once content and form. The formless, absolute sonority of nature is a matter of natural science. As a pure natural phenomenon applied to the aesthetics of music, it is indeed a historically very late-won insight into

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material construction, knowledge a posteriori or, to speak in the language of phenomenology: an “experiential law,” not an “essential law.” The secretive having-become-a-body of the artistic object— which has proceeded beyond a natural material state solely according to essential lawfulness and can therefore be aesthetically recognized only by this— has grown out of matter as a sensory-meaningful (sinnlich-sinnvoll) form. The first beginning of all art lies in the artistic act of forming, no matter how primitive. What is beyond this act or its consequences no longer belongs to the region of art. Just as little as the essence of a sculpture can be grasped only from the essence of marble, so little can a phenomenology of music be argued solely on the basis of acoustical phenomena. [244] One may object: but the painting is formed precisely of marble and not of brown earth, and the Greek singer used a kithara and an aulos and not a harpsichord and a bassoon. But from an aesthetic standpoint, criteria of this kind now belong to the coloring of an already achieved material. Not chaotic matter, but rather the resistance of matter conditions the beginning and the secret of art. Form first kindles itself upon the resistance of what is to be formed. That there would be such offhandedly crossed bridges here— namely, between the naturally given and formed matter (other than the self-evident givenness of matter, whose existence represents neither a philosophical nor an aesthetic problem)— is a widespread error, which usually expresses itself as the idea that art is stylized nature, applied to music: that music is the stylization of an all-encompassing siren-like, howling chaos. Such an essential misrecognition of the essence of sound springs in Paul Bekker’s case from fallacious wordplay in the ambiguity that phenomenology is supposed to view “the nature of things as nature.”13 What would be more obvious than to regard the nature of art— that is, the essence of art— precisely as art and not as nature! No insightful person will deny that inner connections exist between overtone-poor vocal lines and polyphony, between homophonic and instrumental music, between tonality and a drive toward empathy, and so on. But when the physical concepts of space and time are translated into music historiography as completely unfamiliar terms for the principles of instrumental homophony or vocal polyphony (posing “as the foundation of any art-scholarly examination”), this ultimately leads to cultural-historically untenable constructions such as, for example, the idea that the medieval “image of the world, felt primarily as physiological, is based on the sensation of the human as the midpoint and measure of everything that appears, and elevates the human to the structuring object of all the arts.”14 With regard to the problem of space and time, the development was accomplished much more as follows. The sound consciousness of the North lies in a sound that rests within itself. It is thus

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fundamentally spatial. Through the mediation of the church, this specifically Nordic, naturalistic sound-feeling collided with the tremendous [245] vehemence and the rapture for motion of abstract, Oriental melos. This historically unique and noteworthy collision of both basic musical forces resulted in the sluggishly moving sound masses of organum, a formation made out of movement and a vaguely felt space of (if the expression is permitted) atonal-Impressionistic character. Clearly delimited “space” arose at the moment when the organum fourth dissolved into the naturalistic third. This may well have occurred at the same time that Giotto eked out a new space, just as a later parallel appeared in the Baroque period with Michelangelo’s distorted space along with the chromaticists. The measurement of time on the other hand is a purely rhythmic question, which Nietzsche incidentally distinguished in a lecture on ancient meter as “temporal rhythm” and “affective rhythm.”15 The historical validity of a feeling for space and the process of its changing value is the topic of any comprehensive music-historical consideration (as it is in Bekker), even if it is the space in which the West up to now has become accustomed to breathing. In the present limited context, only the most basic things were to be said about insight into what is artistically beheld— namely, that an aesthetics of music with an exclusively acoustically based standpoint is not thereby free of any standpoint whatever, phenomenologically speaking; that the totality of any phenomenon is double, connected with its inner and outer appearance; that the essence of natural sonority is not the essence of the essence of sound, does not constitute (as Hegel says) “the actual depth of sounding”;16 and finally, that the method for insight into the essence of music— that is, the adequate “form of intuition” of phenomenology for music— is knowledge of style, exact style criticism moving from bottom to top, a method that Paul Bekker pursues in his “Wagner Studies.”17 The phenomenological aesthetics of music cannot attempt to ground the phenomena in a partial phenomenon. Its comprehensive task is, by way of analysis, to synthetically grasp the sounding “gestalt,” form in the broadest sense, of the complete scale of phenomena: from the empirical and coloring sources of sonority to the shaping of sonority according to an artistic worldview, from physical-acoustical law to the concretion of style.

[ A ppendi x E ]

Günther Stern-Anders, “On the Phenomenology of Listening (Elucidated through the Hearing of Impressionist Music)” (1927)1 I. Formulation of the Problem

[610] That every music demands to be heard differently— indeed, that hearing the most diverse musics means something different in each case— is not simply an acknowledged commonplace of the music historian and theorist today, but is in fact their point of method. The phenomenological precept that it is only through the mode of access appropriate to the thing itself that the thing presents itself and that something about it can be detected— this precept is alive for a large number of contemporary music scholars, including [Ernst] Kurth and [Wilibald] Gurlitt.2 This principle, which was already active in concealed and partial form at earlier times, produced decisive results only by being formulated in a programmatic way. For it revived from music much of substance which, because of a limited concept of hearing (largely borrowed from Viennese classicism), had been either not noticed at all or, when noticed, thrown on the scrap heap. And that phenomenological precept of Husserl, no doubt conceived without historical interest, had preserved its fruitfulness precisely in a historically oriented form of knowledge.3 But the attempt to maintain this precept is now complicated in three ways. First, it is (historico-ontologically) questionable whether for a given historical object one (and only one) mode of access is appropriate. Doesn’t the double fact that the historical abides— and indeed, via the most diverse modes of access— and that this abiding constitutes the historicity of the historical object, prove the inappropriateness of seeking only a single privileged access? This is mentioned only by way of posing the problem. The second reason for complication has been lamented often enough. Talk of “authentic modes of access” is accepted as reasonable. And then, in 198

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the actual practice of doing music history— itself questionable enough— the modes of access contemporaneous with the work’s moment of origin are adopted for use without thinking twice. Yet at the same time, the possibility is doubted that these authentic modes of access can be authentically reproduced by someone today. Those who acknowledge these “historicoepistemological” difficulties, if that expression may be allowed, take the question of the possibility of knowledge in even more Kantian terms than did Kant himself. While he set out from the fact of knowledge, in order retroactively to inquire into its rules, these scholars only admit that the possibility of knowledge has been ensured once they have established the adequacy of a mode of access, which itself is not merely theoretical. If it is questionable, according to the first problem, whether we can even inquire about authentic modes of access at all, and according to the second problem, whether these modes of access (which had been realized at one time) can be reproduced today, the third problem is free from the historicophilosophical motif common to the first two; for it asks whether certain modes of access as such (which are thus acknowledged as appropriate to the thing, i.e., to the corresponding music) will not be at least hindered by [611] inherent difficulties in realization, immanent to them. Our investigation is an answer to this question, carried out through a single example. Our ideal example case is the hearing of so-called “Impressionist” music. Imagine you are hearing something by Debussy— whether it is the first few bars of the overture to Pelléas et Mélisande, one of the Études, or something else.4 That this music subsists at most in a quality of preparing or conditioning action, not of being active itself (whether you are initially thinking of its often nearly static time, its harmonic sense, or of something else): admirers, detractors, and scholars agree on this point.5 And this “statefulness” (“Zuständlichkeit”) affords this music the name “Impressionism,” borrowed from painting, where it also meant the representation of objects— not qua objects but rather in their statefulness6— whose boundaries are often blurred. With this, we do not arrive at a complete characterization of Impressionism. It suffices to indicate and appeal to what is generally familiar. What interests us is not the specification of the object, but rather its mode of access. One “listens” (“hört zu”). What does that mean? It means that, from among the innumerable audible phenomena, one is singled out as something isolated and singular, so that it is now (during the act of hearing) the only being there at all, so that everything else falls by the wayside. This attentional modality of hearing-toward (Hinhören), whose difference from neutral mere-hearing (Nur-Hören) is evident, must be sustained during any

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music if one is not to miss anything.7 Our question is then the following: doesn’t the attentional modality of listening contradict the purely passive, stateful character of Impressionist music? Or, to be more precise: does this music not demand, as a subjective entryway, a certain corresponding passivity, which precludes attending as such? This question can only be answered through detailed phenomenological interpretations of hearing and of the forms of attention. We say “interpretations” in order to [612] fend off the idea that, in the investigation of musical hearing, it is only a matter of those singular characteristics normally studied in experimental psychology (pitch discrimination, registral ambitus, etc.). Our question belongs to the total complex of problems concerning how the world is there for hearing at all, but not, on the other hand, as if it were to investigate the world of the blind— the world for someone who only hears. For proper hearing is the hearing of someone who also has the other world: the hearing of someone who is also self-evidently subject to those possibilities of personal life that are not merely musical, not merely acoustical, but among which is the possibility of attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit), attention (Attention). Here it is worth emphasizing from the outset that attending in the acoustical sphere represents a wholly peculiar act, to be fully distinguished from attending in, for example, the optical sphere. The hitherto usual concept of attention has almost always been oriented to the model of the optical, just as experimental investigations on attention privilege the optical sphere. This one-sided orientation was not accidental. It is possible in the optical to turn oneself toward a field in such a way that— purely optically— other fields fall away. One can “look away” from a thing (hence the designative expression “to disregard” [absehen]), a circumstance whose explanation lies in the fact that certain fields of potential visibility are in principle always shut out when another field is sighted. Thus, for example, what is “behind” will never be seen. It is different in the acoustical sphere. Already the fact that the acoustical is not localized to the same degree as the optical (and has, at most, directional indices) implies an entirely different manner of turning-oneself-away or turning-oneself-toward. If the act of seeing has from the outset only one field available to it, it thus comes up as such against attention’s striving toward isolation. Hearing-toward (Hinhören) and hearing-out (Heraushören) on the other hand necessitate as such another distinct faculty: it is not already understandable at all without relation to the constitution of unities of expression and meaning. For example, one can only listen to a piece of music in lively, noisy company because one already constitutes music as an expressive unity and sets it apart against peripheral noises, which fade away all the more.

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We will ignore the limit case of hearing march or dance music, which is acoustically understood only when it is co-performed by the whole person, active-motorically or at least on a motoric impulse. And we will concern ourselves simply with a historically very late “mere-listening” (“Nur-Zuhören”). This much can already be said quite generally: listening “heedingly” comes easily to certain musicians more than to others, is for certain ones more self-evident, so to speak, than for others. Someone who hears, say, an eight-voice fugue without having present the simultaneity of the various phases of a single musical thought as an identitas multiplex: this person hears inadequately. Not that the dignity of appropriate hearing should therefore be granted to a calculating analysis alone. It is unnecessary today to explain that the choice between vertical hearing and horizontal analysis does not exhaust the alternatives, that there is also precisely a horizontal hearing. [613] The extent to which listening is appropriately an active listening is doubtful in Romantic music (indeed even, to some slight degree, at the moment when chordal, accompanimental music historically begins). (On the part of the object, too— that is, in the musical piece itself— the self-sufficient activity of the line characteristically blurs into the statefulness of the chord, which itself demands to be grasped as a final quality, and does not wish to be understood in its constituent tones.) More problematic is the meaning of active listening in high Romanticism, which is only heard while “drowning, sinking unconscious”— to use the characteristic final words of Tristan, rich and appropriate.8 But it seems completely paradoxical still to want “listening” (“ZuHören”) when it comes specifically to Impressionist music. The personal stance of “being-directed-toward” seems to outright contradict this music’s directionless, merely stateful sense of (rhythmic, tonal, etc.) movement. Surely, it is not simply a matter of a mechanical happening that develops musically, in relation to which one should “play dead,” so to speak. The choice between tendency and mechanism is no more exhaustive for the possibilities of modes of musical motion than it is in Lebensphilosophie (which originally tried to rehabilitate every movement-character by attributing a final principle to it).9 There are indeed— in musical matters as in personal ones— movement-characters that are distinctly non-tendential and yet not specifically mechanical either, like, for example, “letting oneself go” (Sich-gehen-lassen). A label of this kind no doubt conveys a certain characteristic aspect of Impressionist music. Debussy’s planing of parallel chords, falling off, “letting go,” the symmetrical chord of peculiar expressive quality— all are typical of this. At the same time, this falling off, this unpreparedness for a spe-

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cific end, for a specific continuation, the distinct emptiness of the horizon of expectation on the hearer’s part is not only an incidental impediment for attention (as fatigue might impede thinking through a mathematical proof ), but is in fact an essential impediment: attention goes according to its nature not only to what is given “now,” but is rather “tensed” for what is to come. And in hearing Impressionist music, one is just not as tensed for what is to come (where “tensed” is meant in both an intentional and an affective sense), since the Nowness of the music is just not a dramatic one— that is, does not have the unity of an action. How, then, does one solve this problem: that Impressionist music, according to its nature, requires an untensed, a passive stance on the one hand, but that, on the other hand, it should be given a listen (angehört)?

II. The Augustinian Choice More important than a premature solution of the problem is a multifaceted formulation of the problem. In practice, as we will see, fully formulated means half won. For now, then, we will stick with a clarification of the question as such. Again in music scholarship today, one of the decisive music-theoretical category pairs is the Augustinian one of cantus and res quae [614] canitur.10 It is not that this distinction merely concerns a potential two-sided mode of observation, which each musical work could be subjected to. It is just as much a matter of attributional categories: every particular phase of music counts as ideally belonging to, as ideally characterized by, one of the two members of the pair. Along these lines, it will be asked: does the very specific sensory quality of the audible temporalization of the cantus belong to this or that music, essentially according to its sense, or is this temporalization (and also the style of temporalization, choice of instrumentation, of key, etc.) comparatively indifferent? (One thinks of the transcription theory in Busoni’s Von der Einheit der Musik.11) Statements that stipulate something essential about the relevance of music as heard (or of music as requiring audible temporalization) are naturally decisive for the meaning of hearing as such: what is primarily “res quae canitur” will be heard as something other than distinct. The cantabile, as distinct cantus, will be heardthrough (hindurchgehört) via the “necessary evil” of an actual temporalization, just as the landscape appears through a pair of glasses— without the glass itself being seen. This manner of hearing, which is already a lookingaway— or better, a hearing-away (Abhören)— is, as hearing-away, more strongly attentional by nature than the hearing that immediately gives itself up to the pregivenness of sonority. The decision about which member

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of the pair Impressionism belongs to will have to shed light on the specific hearing of Impressionist music, even about its attentional character, which poses special difficulties for us. But right away in our example, the Augustinian distinction does not seem to be sufficient for a characterization. As we will see, it is completely unclear under which of the two rubrics Impressionist music should fall. What stands in the way of an unambiguous categorization? The impediment is only understandable to someone who can call up the situation of hearing Impressionist music ad hoc, or better, is capable of realizing it fictively for himself. Those for whom this is not possible can swap in the situation of casually “humming” (Trällern) as a substitute. Humming is relatively accessible as a substitute because its “letting-itself-go” (Sichgehen-lassen), its beginninglessness and endlessness, its additive repetitions all show a pronounced similarity to Impressionist music, and because it is familiar to almost everyone. Everyone can do it. In music of this kind, does the cantatum or the canere stand in the foreground? Surely neither of them. Not the cantatum: the randomness, dependence on situation, and singularity of the tones, tempi, and limits of humming stand in the way of this categorization. But surely not the canere either. How often is it unclear to you whether you are still actually and audibly humming or whether you are only in the act of “humming” without achieving an acoustical realization? Sensory audibility and all its stimuli and timbres are too decisive that one could be disposed toward a [615] categorization under “cantus” without them. In order to become independent of the choice between cantus and res, we need to descend one step deeper into subjectivity— that is, below the act that is meant by the term cantus. This sort of move is common today not only in modern psychology, but also in (e.g., phenomenological) philosophy, which recognizes and investigates the constitutive relation of the act to the object (here, singing and thing sung), just as it does the constitutive relation of the state (springing inherently from the act) to the object. We, too, must go back to that— not merely acoustical— humming-state from which this or that phrase ascends and transforms itself into audibility at one time or another, somewhat accidentally. However, insofar as it belongs to a “humming-state,” the fact of being audible is inherently unimportant, just as from the viewpoint of the perceptibly humming, what is tangibly hummed (something phonographically recordable, for example) would have the objective significance of the res quae canitur. Put another way: just as the objective structure of the res quae canitur is in no way appropriate to the cantus (only a sensory temporalization would be), the humming-state in no way befits the sensory-acoustical structure of the cantus and instead only befits a total-motoric one. Yet the fact that the res quae

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canitur as well as the state lead an existence that is separable from audibility does not allow us to seek some kind of commonality between the two. On the contrary: the independence from audibility has virtually opposite motives in each case. The “state” does not need to transpose itself into audibility, because it is itself the total-sensory impulse of possible audibilities. Thus, often only an anacoluthic, evidently gap-ridden Something will be audible— a Something that would be incomprehensible not only the moment it was fixedly regarded as cantatum, but indeed already were it to be reproduced in the acoustic-continuous manner of the cantare at all.12 Often, the gaps may be comprehensible neither through musical nor through acoustical conjectures, but only when the state’s acoustical motives for being moved are not also conceived alongside it. Now this fact is of the broadest significance. Only here does it emerge that our question about [categorical] attribution is not idle but contributes substantively to the significance of Impressionist music and to the problem of how this music deserves to be heard. The so-often-criticized discontinuity, disconnectedness, and inconsistency are only discontinuity, and so forth, insofar as one demands an aspiration toward unity in the sense of the continuity of the canere or a consistency in the sense of a res quae canitur. For often, it is not so much the utterances as such that form a unity as it is their motoric motivations, which do not always ascend to the level of utterance. It would be wrong, however, to deny the title “artwork” to an enunciative context that is still trapped at the level of the motor in this way on the principle that this artwork must be something intelligible in itself. Indeed, the unity of a work consists not so much in an academic outline, avoiding visible gaps, but rather much more in the way that the audible, also the anacoluthic, and even pauses are intelligible as the expression of one moving principle. Our original problem, though, scarcely at all concerns that of “passive listening,” of humming, for it is fundamentally without a public. On the contrary, the analyses carried out on the example of humming— if they are translated to musical [616] Impressionism within the limits of allowable analogy— clarify our question to an outstanding degree: is listening, in the sense of an act that correlates with an object (Gegenstand), still the appropriate mode of access in a case where the meaning unit of the object is itself the unity of a state (Zustand)? Will not something objectively stateful (like, say, the mood of a landscape) always inherently be truly grasped only in a subjective state? Certainly. And is not this state— as a relatively passive mood— opposed in principle to active listening? Also certainly. Thus we see: with regard to the question of choosing between categorical attributions (cantus or res quae canitur), which had revealed itself as a merely apparent choice in the course of investigation (due to the third

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member: status, ex quo canitur), the problem formulated in the first section of our discussion still forfeits nothing of its sharpness.13

III. Perception— Apperception Surely— the devil’s advocate will argue— even if the mood (Zumutesein) that the subject adequate to Impressionist music represents, insofar as it is adequate, will not be fully opposed to the hearing of this music, it nonetheless prohibits more precise observation of the elements, nuances, and so on that are so typical for Impressionist music. This argument is not correct, however. For the attentional thematization of these details does not lie within the sense of the music itself. They are heard and grasped in their true purpose and their true function when they are (to use the Leibnizian formulation) only perceived, not when they are apperceived.14 This should not be understood to suggest that music is not truly there in an analysis, which hobbles along behind it, but only in hearing. Much more, it means that the difference between hearing and analysis recapitulates itself, so to speak, within the possibilities of hearing itself. Not that one must be able both to perceive and to apperceive every medieval work and every period of music itself, though this may also be the case. What is important to us is only that the authentic mode of access to some music (in opposition to other, apperceived music) is mere perception. That may be scarcely comprehensible at this level of generality, so let us clarify through an example: say, an instance of parallel-chordal planing so characteristic of musical Impressionism— say, Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, act 3, mm. 90– 93.15 We have there a descending dominant seventh chord: not a resolution to the usual major or minor triad, in relation to which the dominant would be a provisional, non-independent, proclitic thing (to make use of an expression borrowed from the study of Greek accentuation).16 What had earlier been non-independent is here endowed with the status of an independent expressive unity. Thus, given the C-F-A-C-E♭-A chord, which follows the first chord D-G-B-D-F-B, the former may not be viewed as moving toward B♭ major. It, too, descends further by a whole tone to the apparent dominant-seventh chord of A♭ major. This is [617] in no way a matter of multiple chords, but rather of a single, wandering one, no different from a genuine melody, which does not constitute the connection of several tones, but rather the movement of a single one. That is as far as a description would need to go. Its object, to be sure, is certainly still the res quae canitur and certainly the object that presents itself in hearing, but not this: how it presents itself in hearing. That is: although

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the description wants to present exactly what is heard, the heard thing itself is less explicitly there. Now this inexplicitness, in which the individual item is not neutral and yet is not grasped in isolated singularity, is no flaw. It is the mark of every perception in contrast to apperception. But some objects— as with the Impressionist musical piece— are meant to be perceived. Because outright apperception works destructively— through inappropriate clarity and hyper-markedness— an Impressionist image by Monet, Signac, or Seurat, regarded at the level of detail, becomes unintelligible. Yet attention can always end (or temporalize itself ) in an apperception. The merely perceptible resists the act of attending: for the third time, we stand before the same result.

IV. Conclusion Even an intellectually specialized question about possibility (here, about the possibility of hearing Impressionist music) can never mean, in a truly critical sense, “Is it possible or not possible?” Rather, it must end with the fact that there is something like Impressionist music, that this will be heard, played, conducted: it can only concern the how of possibility. It is thus to be assumed that our three first sections, which had made the possibility of a proper mode of access in hearing improbable, set out from overly narrow concepts of hearing and of the states of apperception/ attention, concepts that are not appropriate here. Our first question modifies itself thus: “What is the attention like that directs itself to the stateful?” This question is of universal significance. It concerns not only hearing, but also seeing (indeed, seeing Impressionist paintings, for example), smelling, and so on. We therefore ask, first of all, in a universal sense: in a passive state, to the extent that it represents the mode of access appropriate to a thing, how is attentional orientation possible? Perhaps this question answers itself at a practical level, when we first inwardly exemplify it to ourselves in a sensory domain that is even more inherently limited to statefulness than is hearing: for example, smelling. When I am in a room that smells strongly of something, in what sense can I attentionally dispose myself toward this smell? What remains, apart from a privative attention, so to speak: the suppression of other intentions (for example, by closing the eyes) toward attentional possibilities? Something remains that is virtually opposed to that turning-toward (Hinwendung) so often characterized by the expression “tending” (Abzielen): a being-open (Aufgeschlossensein) that first fully enables passivity. To be sure, not much is yet said with this word. Still, even if the distinction seems trivial, establishing it is not at all gratuitous for the aims of

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knowledge. For the broader professional psychological literature [618] on attention has until now always examined only the first attentional type. But our result now also appears not to be a final one insofar as “being-open” is only possible on the basis of an act of opening up. Is this problematic not simply deferred by one stage? In a certain sense, yes; but, then, only to the extent that this passivity (as a wholly particular mode of being of life) distinguishes itself from the, so to speak, bad passivity of dead things, to the extent that all suffering is activity. And, not incidentally, for every phenomenon that we disregard, language uses medial or reflexive, not passive expressions: “opening oneself,” “letting oneself go,” and so on. But how does this type of attention distinguish itself from the usual one? Is it simply a matter of two parallel possibilities? Does one condition the other? Or are they both different implementations of one original? This much must be clarified before we characterize the specific being-open that is relevant to Impressionist music. Attention as a tendential “looking toward” (Hinsehen), “hearing toward” Hinhören), and so on— in other words, the only type hitherto dealt with— is the secondary one. As a voluntary disposition toward something, indeed to one thing, it occurs (apart from the case of being-made-attentive and from the unnatural and falsifying situation of experimental-psychological investigation) when, and essentially only when, one has already been bound, open, opened-up to this one thing. Any selection in the act of attending would be otherwise incomprehensible. Now one may say that being-open as “stateful attention” (as opposed to active attention) is appropriate not only for Impressionist music. But it is of some importance that a joining-in (Mitmachen) with a Brandenburg Concerto (which is of course anything but a disinterested, complacent listening) completely differentiates itself from the being-with (Mitsein) of, say, a Debussy Prélude. Surely, even in joining-in as unreflected deed, the possibility of reflective listening is problematic. But for this doing (Machen) (as following-after, not only as being-drawn-along), the possibility of keeping the thing followed in sight is incomparably easier than in the case of beingwith. What seems characteristic is following along in the score, an act that is not yet proper analysis, inept for no music more than for Impressionism. And yet: the solution to the question is deferred up until the end, indeed precisely because statefulness, which we had designated at the beginning as the mode of access appropriate to the thing, now exposes itself not as some kind of empty being, but rather as “being there alongside (bei)” music, as “being with (mit),” and so on. The pertinent concept of statefulness thereby displaces the revised concept of attention. What does that mean? The difference between act and state is not a principled one. In any event, almost

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every state inexplicitly obtains a relation to an object, a relation which until now had been taken into account only for the act (as intentional). Not in the way we might think of the causal relation (of dependence)— that is, that a specific state arises from some kind of preceding state of affairs. The thought of the causal lies just as far from us here as it had lain from Husserl in the demonstration of intentionality. What is meant is the following: there is the [619] state of, for example, my being there with (bei) person X. This state is not, so to speak, solipsistic and only for me, as a pure being-so realizable by me. But neither does it resolve itself in a number of intentions toward X. It is a matter of a third option, which one could designate as indicative state. An indicative state of this kind is also at issue in “being-there-withmusic” (Dabeisein bei der Musik): a status, which is actually that of everyday life, which neither always reifies something as something, nor always sleeps. Both possibilities are contained in it. For our musical example, that means: the possibility of falling off into pure passivity, and the possibility, following the pointed finger of the state’s indices, of turning that which previously had been merely “with” (bei) into the intentional thing opposite (Gegenüber). Now, although the attentional reference had initially appeared to us as a completed metabasis eis allo genos, a step no longer appropriate to Impressionist music— since we had been thinking of a neverrealized pure passivity, an objectless statefulness— what now appears to us is the transformation of that “with which” we are, “in which” we are, to which we stand even in the distinctly attentional relation of dedication and being-open— a relation to something toward which we stand, which we in fact attentionally lead, no longer as something fundamental, indeed not even as something extraordinary. And yet, without our thereby changing it, it always becomes World, through the act of attending to the counterpart thing opposite, from out of the diffuse “beings-with-me,” “beingsaround-me,” and so on (“Bei mir-,” “Um mich-” usw. -Seiende). We are at the end: this kind of modification of reference takes place in actual fact while conducting or playing Impressionist music. The movements of being-there-with (Mitdabeisein), the whole conditional motor habitus, are permuted, imparted with the conducting and realization of this event, in which one has a share oneself, of which one oneself is part. Yet this imparting or conducting— and here we come to a comforting conclusion— is not accidental or imposed. It is the originary path along which the composer, too, had objectified the motor condition in a thing-like composition. It is the genuine detour (via object, or object-disposition, or objectattention), by which what is born of some state again becomes state for the hearer.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I must thank Marta Tonegutti, whose encouragement and understanding of the project was indispensable from early on in the writing of this book. The editorial team at University of Chicago Press (Tristan Bates, Caterina MacLean, and Dylan Montanari) has been outstanding. A special thanks goes to Marianne Tatom for expert copyediting. I am ever grateful to series editors James Davies and Nick Mathew for helping find this book a home in the New Material Histories of Music. A vital year of research leave to get this project off the ground was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Additional funding for research abroad came from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Columbia University Summer Grant Program in the Humanities. Early in my work, Emily Ferrigno provided helpful assistance with the Paul Bekker Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University, as did Johanna Kozber and Kerstin Putz with the Günther Anders Nachlass at the Literaturarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, for access to which I am grateful. For their generous reading and insightful critique of the manuscript, I especially thank Mike Gallope, Brian Hyer, and Tamara Levitz. I have been fortunate to be able to share work in progress from this book on many occasions and would like to single out the friendly advice and feedback of Carolyn Birdsall, Lee Blasius, Lino Camprubi, Ryan Dohoney, Veit Erlmann, Alix Hui, Brian Kane, Patrick Keating, Mariusz Kozak, Mara Mills, Julie Napolin, Carmel Raz, Alex Rehding, Jan Philipp Sprick, Jonathan Sterne, Kate Sturge, and Viktoria Tkaczyk. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Viktoria, who hosted me for two stints in her wonderful Epistemes of Modern Acoustics Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, an opportunity I will always treasure. The sunny front yard of Dick and Gwen Steege, where I write this page, puts me in the spirit of the genre, gratefully acknowledging just how much of 209

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the following was accomplished during visits to their home. Finally, in a category to herself is the incomparable Brigid Cohen, who has been “with” everything thought, read, and written for this book. I am immeasurably thankful for that withness. Chapter two appeared in slightly different form as “Antipsychologism in Interwar Musical Thought: Two Ways of Hearing Debussy,” Music & Letters 98, no. 1 (February 2017): 74– 103. Chapter four was first published as “This Is Not a Test: Listening with Günther Anders in the Nuclear Age,” in Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality, ed. Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra E. Hui (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 327– 48. I thank Oxford University Press for permission to republish both. For permission to publish translated texts in the appendices, I am grateful to Nikolaus Topic-Matutin, for Hans Mersmann, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1925): 372– 88; to Suhrkamp Verlag, for Helmuth Plessner, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” in Gesammelte Schriften 7, Ausdruck und menschliche Natur, ed. Günter Dux, Odo Marquard, and Elisabeth Stroker (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 59– 65; to Dorothea Eimert, for Herbert Eimert, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” Melos 5, no. 7 (April 1926): 238– 45; and to C. H. Beck Verlag, for Günther Anders, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens (Erläutert am Hören impressionistischer Musik),” in Musikphilosophische Schriften: Texte und Dokumente, ed. Reinhard Ellensohn (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017), 211– 25.

Notes

Introduction 1. Helmuth Plessner, “Bei Husserl in Göttingen,” in Edmund Husserl, 1859– 1959, ed. H. L. van Breda (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 29– 39, at 35. “Als wir einmal zusammen vom Seminar nach Hause gingen und vor seiner Gartentür angelangt waren, kam sein tiefer Unmut zum Ausbruch: ‘Mir ist der ganze deutsche Idealismus immer zum K[otzen] gewesen. Ich habe mein Leben lang’— und dabei zückte er seinen dünnen Spazierstock mit silberner Krücke und stemmte ihn vorgebeugt gegen den Türpfosten— ‘die Realität gesucht.’ Unüberbietbar plastisch vertrat der Spazierstock den intentionalen Akt und der Pfosten seine Erfüllung.” All translations are my own unless noted. Where I cite a published translation, I do not include the original language. 2. See Lotte Klemperer, Die Personalakten der Johanna Geisler. Eine Dokumentation in Stichproben (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 136– 37; and Peter Heyworth, Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 141. As it happens, Klemperer was also close friends with Plessner, from their youth until Klemperer’s death in 1973. 3. For an eloquent response in these terms, see Steven Connor, “A Short Stirring to Meekness,” in Carolyn Birdsall, Maria Boletsi, Itay Sapir, and Pieter Verstraete, eds., Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Humanities (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 193– 208, at 199. 4. For “perpetual interwar,” suggesting a constant anticipation of future military violence, see Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 303– 16. For “short twentieth century,” see Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914– 1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). 5. Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg (Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher, 1915). Two years earlier, he had published Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913); The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954). 6. Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 128. 7. In this respect, Scheler fits a characteristic pattern within twentieth-century German intellectual history of locating violent conflict at the scene of “culture,” as opposed to human life. See Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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8. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges, 308. 9. Nor was Scheler inclined to acknowledge the genocidal violence perpetrated between 1904 and 1908 by German troops against the Herero, Nama, and San peoples living in the colony of German South West Africa— part of a wider “prehistory” that clearly gives lie to the popular image of 1914 as a sudden rupture in the peace. 10. Ernst Haeckel, Englands Blutschuld am Weltkriege (Eisenach: Oskar Kayser, 1914); Charles à Court Repington, The First World War, 1914– 1918, 2 vols. (London: Constable and Company, 1920). Contrary to the common belief that nobody at the outbreak of war could foresee its ultimate immense scale, Haeckel for one grasped as early as August 12, 1914, just eight days after Germany invaded Belgium, that “the course and character of this feared ‘European War,’ which must also directly or indirectly touch all other parts of the globe and thus become a first true ‘World War,’ will vastly outstrip all prior wars” (3). (“[D]er Verlauf und Charakter dieses gefürchteten ‘Europäischen Krieges,’ der direkt oder indirekt auch alle anderen Erdteile berühren und somit zu einem ersten wahren ‘Weltkriege’ sich auswachsen muß, [wird] alle bisherigen Kriege weit übertreffen.”) 11. For a sustained argument along these lines, see Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), esp. 87– 148. 12. Scheler, “Kategorientafel des englischen Denkens,” in Der Genius des Krieges, 442– 43: “Gesellschaft” vs. “Gemeinschaft”; “Interessensolidarität” vs. “Liebe”; “Recht” vs. “Sittlichkeit”; “sich selber mit einem ander Ich verwechseln” vs. “Sympathie”; “Mißtrauen aller mit allen, die sich gegenseitig hierdurch in Schach halten” vs. “Demokratie.” 13. Edmund Husserl, “Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie,” Book 1, “Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1, no. 1 (1913): 1– 323, at 48– 51; Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 1, “General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), at 48– 50. 14. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges, 294. “Meine Antwort auf die Frage, welcher Art Einheit denn dann das ‘Europa’ ist, oder der ‘Europäer,’ von dem ich rede, ist daher diese: der Kern dieser Einheit ist eine bestimmte Geistesstruktur, z. B. eine bestimmte Form des Ethos, eine bestimmte Art des Weltanschauens und der tätigen Weltformung. Gerade dieser europäische Geist, den man immer ‘ableiten’ möchte, sei es aus Rasse, Klima, Milieu— ist der unableitbare Kern im Begriffe des Europäischen.” 15. “Culture,” a notoriously porous term, does not align perfectly with Scheler’s “world,” though it might initially serve as a kind of handrail to orient us. Among other distinctions, “world” does not as obviously or integrally carry the moralistic baggage, which “culture” always has, of individual and group perfectability through cultivated skill, taste, and accumulation of symbolic capital. It is worth noting that, at the precise moment he was writing his war polemic, he was also refining his terms in a nonpolemical forum. The simultaneous deployment on two fronts, professional-academic and public-intellectual, makes for a fascinating case study in the weaponization of philosophical thought. For a full treatment of “worldhood,” see Scheler, “Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik,” part 2, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 2 (1916): 21– 478, at 266– 89; Formalism in Ethics and NonFormal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personal-

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ism, trans. Manfred Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 393– 415. 16. Vanessa Agnew, “The Colonialist Beginnings of Comparative Musicology,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 41– 60. 17. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges, 262. “. . . Differenzen des musikalischen Gehörs zwischen Europäern und Nichteuropäeren . . . die vordem kaum auch nur für möglich gehalten wurden.” 18. This view was in fact widely held by European scholars at the time. See Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 241– 50. 19. Stumpf ’s full statement on the topic is “Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen,” Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 3 (1901): 69– 138, at 84, though what Scheler indicates as a quotation appears to be paraphrase. 20. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges, 263. “Das ganz befremdliche dieser Erscheinung ist, daß diese Völker vom Prinzip der Konsonanz, diesem natürlichsten Prinzip aller Leiterbildungen, nur für das Ganze der Oktave, nicht für den Oktavenraum Anwendung machen. Eine harmonische Musik ist mit diesem Prinzip der Leiterbildung von Hause aus unvereinbar. Gehört auch diese Eigentümlichkeit des siamesischjavanischen Gehörs kaum schon der Besonderheit ihrer äußeren Sinnesorgane und ihres inneren Sinneszentrums an, so ist es doch eine schon sehr elementare Variable, die dieses ihr fehlendes Konsonanzbewußtsein bedingt.” 21. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges, 275; original emphasis. “. . . jene letzten Strukturen des Weltanschauens und Weltseins, jener Gliederungs- und Geformtheitsarten der sinnlichen Stoffe verstehe, von denen irgendeine Art— gleichviel welche— zum Wesen der Weltwirklichkeit selbst notwendig gehört.” 22. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges, 286. “. . . durch unbewußte, seelisch-leibliche Ansteckung, durch Mitdenken, Mitleben, Mitausdrücken, Mittun in den ersten Kinderjahren bis zur ‘Mündigkeit.’” 23. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges, 284. “. . . die sinnlichen Stoffkomplexe zu eigentümlichen und grundverschiedenen Form- und Werteinheiten zusammennehmen.” The locus classicus for Riegl’s influential notion of Kunstwollen (“will to art” or “artistic impulse”) is Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1893), 20; Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, trans. Evelyn Kain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30. The concept was meant to call attention to sites and moments where art-making seemed to be pursued by an “impulse” to disregard technical affordances or constraints— for example, maintaining textile motifs on objects where a woven element may once have been structural but was now ornamental, even to the point of undermining function. 24. Here Scheler directly prefigures Martin Heidegger’s 1938 critique of humanistic self-understanding, where the orientation around Weltanschauung and Weltbild— with a humanistic “subject” set over against the “world” taken as picture— is assessed as obscuring access to the more fundamental truth of being-in-the-world. Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 75– 113, esp. 93– 96; “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57– 85, esp. 70– 72. 25. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges, 282– 83; original emphasis. “Und eben das müs-

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sen wir lernen, daß es nicht nur einen europäischen ‘Gesichtspunkt’ auf die eine reale Welt gibt, d.h. eine Art der subjektiven Einschränkung des Sehens der ‘Welt’ (im bisherigen Wortsinne), sondern gerade umgekehrt eine faktisch bestehende Europäerwelt, die dem Ansich der Dinge näher steht als andere ‘Welten’; und daß gerade jene ‘eine’ Welt, die vorgeblich das objektiv bestehende Korrelat des vermeintlichen europäischen ‘Gesichtspunktes auf die Welt’ wäre, faktisch nur eine ganz subjektiv menschliche Sache internationaler und interrassenhafter Konvenienz ist— nicht aber jene eine wahre Welt Gottes, für die wir sie so lange fälschlich hielten.” 26. This is the guiding orientation of Scheler’s ethics more generally, expressed especially clearly in his description of “the philosophical attitude” (die philosophische Geisteshaltung), in his postwar Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag, 1921), 65– 95; On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (London: SCM Press, 1960), 72– 89. Though Scheler wrote little on aesthetics per se, the relevance of his ethics to his aesthetics is summarized in Wolfhart Henckmann, “Max Scheler (1874– 1928),” in Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, ed. Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 303– 6. 27. I explore this further in Steege, “Between Race and Culture: Hearing Japanese Music in Berlin,” History of Humanities 2, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 361– 74, proposing that comparative musicology emphasized psychologistic methods as a way of attempting to forestall the prejudices associated with both culturalist and racialist approaches to ethnology, only to show inadvertently that psychologism did not prove adequately stable for the purposes. 28. Alexander García Düttman, The Philosophy of Exaggeration, trans. James Phillips (London: Continuum, 2007). 29. Stumpf and von Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst,” Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 6 (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1911): 102– 15, at 103. “In beiden Gebieten lehren uns ethnologische Betrachtungen, das, was wir an uns finden, nur als einen speziellen Fall unter vielen Möglichkeiten anzusehen, aus denen es sich allmählich abgesondert hat.” 30. Stumpf and Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen,” 105– 8. 31. Stumpf and Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen,” 108– 10. 32. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927) (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 150– 51; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 147– 48. 33. Scheler, Die Idee des Friedens und der Pazifismus (1927) (Berlin: Der Neue Geist Verlag, 1931); “The Idea of Peace and Pacifism, Part 1,” trans. Manfred S. Frings, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 7, no. 3 (October 1976): 154– 66, at 154. 34. For recent uses of this epithet, see Carl F. Graumann, “Psyche and Her Descendants,” in Historical Dimensions of Psychological Discourse, ed. Graumann and Kenneth J. Gergen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83– 100, at 83; and Nikolas Rose, “Psychology as Social Science,” Subjectivity 25 (2008): 446– 62, at 447. 35. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1900). And yet it seems more than plausible, if not outright obvious, to acknowledge that psychoanalytic theory was possible at least in part “because an unconscious mode of thought had already been identified outside of the clinical domain as such, and the domain of works

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of art and literature can be defined as the privileged ground where this ‘unconscious’ is at work.” Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetics of the Unconscious, trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 4. Rather more interesting, if perhaps too clever by half, is the spin Jacques Derrida puts on the relation between the historical periodization of psychology and psychoanalysis (which, for proverbial reasons of scope, will remain a resolutely underexplored blackout zone in my writing here anyway): traditional psychology, in the sense of a non- or pre-psychoanalytic promise of unfettered access to thought, would remain an unrealized dream throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, only to become instantly superseded the moment psychoanalysis arrived on the scene. So, the moment at which a true psychology held the field without the competition of Freudian skepticism narrows to the point at which it becomes virtually non-existent. Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 79– 80. 36. Edward B. Titchener, An Outline of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1896). On Titchener’s historical significance, see Laurel Furumoto, “Shared Knowledge: The Experimentalists, 1904– 1929,” in Jill G. Morawski, ed., The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 94– 113. And on the wider history of the psychologization of everyday discourse in the United States, see Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 37. William Stern, “Angewandte Psychologie,” Beiträge zur Psychologie der Aussage 1 (1903– 1904): 4– 54, at 28– 33. 38. The topic has not generally been treated in music studies, with the compelling exception of Alexander W. Cowan, “Eugenics at the Eastman School: Music Psychology and the Racialization of Musical Talent,” paper presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Rochester, NY, 2017. 39. Hendrik de Man, Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, 2nd ed. ( Jena: E. Diederichs, 1927), 316; The Psychology of Marxian Socialism, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), 406. 40. This synchrony was noticed by Michel Foucault, “Dream, Imagination, and Existence” (1954), trans. Forrest Williams, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 19, no. 1, special issue, “Dream and Existence,” ed. Keith Hoeller (1984– 85): 29– 78, at 34. Much more recently, one can find a contemporary practitioner like Michel Henry claiming, by contrast, “Phenomenology will be to the twentieth century what German idealism was to the nineteenth, what empiricism was to the eighteenth, what Descartes was to the seventeenth,” and so forth. Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1. 41. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen 1, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900); Logical Investigations 1, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970), 11– 161 (“Prolegomena to Pure Logic”). 42. Theodor Lipps, “Die Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie,” Philosophische Monatshefte 16 (1880): 529– 39, at 530– 31. “[S]ie sind identisch mit den Naturgesetzen des Denkens selbst. Die Logik ist dann auch nach dieser Auffassung ihrer Aufgabe Physik des Denkens oder sie ist überhaupt nichts.” Quoted in Husserl, Logical Investigations 1, 42. 43. Two valuable exceptions to the general scarcity of culturally textured intellectual histories of phenomenology are Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology,

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Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); and Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 44. Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos 1 (1911): 289– 341, at 297– 98; “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” trans. Quentin Lauer, in Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 166– 97, at 171. 45. Scheler, Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle; The Nature of Sympathy. For the relation of Scheler’s position to a longer-term phenomenological insistence on the importance of radical alterity, see Dan Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 5– 7 (May 2001): 151– 67. In fact, the thematic of empathy will remain unfortunately underdeveloped in this book, but for a brilliant essay sympathetic to its promise within an adjacent phenomenological scene, see Jessica Wiskus, “On the Petite Phrase of Proust and the Experience of Empathy: Exploring the Rhythmical Structure of Music,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 50, no. 3 (2019): 264– 77. 46. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 50. 47. José Ortega y Gasset, “Max Scheler: Un embriagado de esencias (1874– 1928),” in Obras completas 4 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1983): 507– 11, at 510. 48. The wartime experiences of the Husserl circle are intimately documented in Nicholas de Warren and Thomas Vongehr, eds., Philosophers at the Front: Phenomenology and the First World War (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018). 49. Hannah Arendt, “Bertolt Brecht: 1898– 1956,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 207– 49, at 219– 20. The fact that she was writing in reference to a decidedly unphenomenological thinker in no way renders the description less applicable here. 50. Günther Anders, “Nihilismus und Existenz,” Neue Rundschau 5 (October 1946): 48– 76, at 51. “Einige wenige, in limitiertesten Gebieten Gewißheit verbürgende Doktrinen lockten die verzweifelte Jugend: so trotz ihrer Nüchternheit die Phänomenologie Husserls.” The harshest terms would of course be reserved for the milieu around Heidegger, who drew many Husserl students to his less classically academic style. For Stern-Anders’s friend and classmate Hans Jonas, “the Heidegger cult among the philosophy students was hard to take. Its chief characteristic was a kind of bigoted arrogance, with members of the group almost going so far as to claim a monopoly on divine truth. This wasn’t philosophy; it was more like a sect, almost a new religion, which I found profoundly repellent.” Jonas, Memoirs, ed. Christian Wiese, trans. Krishna Winston (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 59. 51. The intellectual history of Marxist critical theory is familiar enough— especially to music scholars, for many of whom Theodor W. Adorno’s work remains foundational— that I feel stubbornly justified in underplaying its relevant episodes here. Adorno’s classic critiques of phenomenology appear in Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); and Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). For a recent account of some specific musical implications of this critique, see Stephen Decatur Smith, “Awak-

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ening Dead Time: Adorno on Husserl, Benjamin, and the Temporality of Music,” Contemporary Music Review 31, nos. 5– 6 (October– December 2012): 389– 409. 52. Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” (1936), trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum Press, 1972), 47– 128, at 91. 53. This is not to underplay the authoritarianism that recent historiography has argued persisted and thrived throughout the Weimar years, despite or even because of threats to military and aristocratic dominance from the war years on. See Anthony McElligott, Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916– 1936 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). A keen sense of the everyday psychological effects of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication can be gleaned from Nadine Rossol, Kartoffeln, Frost und Spartakus: Weltkriegsende und Revolution 1918/19 in Essener Schüleraufsätzen (Berlin: Bebra-Verlag, 2018). Meanwhile, Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987– 1989), remains a valuable psychoanalytic account of patriarchal anxiety and violence among returning German war veterans. 54. Husserl, letter to Winthrop Pickard Bell, August 11, 1920. Briefwechsel 3, Die Göttinger Schule, ed. Karl Schuhmann with Elisabeth Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 10– 17, at 12. “Dieser Krieg, der universalste und tiefste Sündenfall der Menschheit in der ganzen übersehbaren Geschichte, hat ja alle geltenden Ideen in ihrer Machtlosigkeit und Unechtheit erwiesen. . . . Der Krieg der Gegenwart, zum Volkskrieg im wörtlichsten und grauenvollsten Sinn geworden, hat seinen ethischen Sinn verloren. . . . Die diabolische Kunst einer über den ganzen Erdball sich erstreckenden Formung der politischen Gesinnungen der Menschheit, ihrer politischen Urtheile, ihrer praktischen Zielsetzungen, zeigt uns zum ersten Male, was unter vertauschtem Vorzeichen gegenüber den Alltags- und Kleinkünsten der Menschenbeeinflußung und einer auch wolgemeinten socialethischen Literatur, gewagt und praktisch erstrebt werden könnte, somit auch erstrebt werden müsste zu einer ethisch-politischen Erneuerung der Menschheit. Was uns wahrhaftig bitter notthut, ist eine klar fixierten, höchsten ethischen Idealen getragene Kunst universaler Menschheitserziehung, eine Kunst in Form machtvoller literarischer Organisation, die Menschheit aufzuklären, sie aus Wahrhaftigkeit zu Wahrhaftigkeit zu erziehen.” 55. A useful concise overview is Bruce Ellis Benson, “Phenomenology of Music,” in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (New York: Routledge, 2011), 581– 91. For a sophisticated critical history of phenomenology within the broader tendencies of philosophy of music, see Tamara Levitz, “The Twentieth Century,” in Jerrold Levinson, Tomas McAuley, and Nanette Nielsen, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). A recent monograph that deals intensively with some of this literature is Erik Wallrup, Being Musically Attuned: The Act of Listening to Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), esp. 64– 93. A contemporaneous book-length overview, Werner Ziegenfuß, Die phänomenologische Ästhetik (Berlin: Arthur Collignon, 1928), has the advantage of proximity to its topic, but suffers from the same in failing to provide much in the way of critical framework for evaluation. Otherwise, the relevant bibliography consists largely of valuable yet stand-alone articles, primarily by German scholars, including Felix Wörner, “Form als Wesen des musikalischen Kunstwerkes: Zur phänomenologischen Musikbetrachtung von Arthur Wolfgang Cohn und Hans Mersmann,” Musiktheorie 22, no. 3 ( January 2007): 261– 73; Christian Grüny, “Geflickte Tonlinien oder

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vibrierende Luft? Phänomenologie und ästhetischer Konservatismus,” paper presented at the Deutscher Kongress für Philosophie, Essen (September 15, 2008); Grüny, “Im Diesseits des Bezeichbaren— Schwierigkeiten einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” Journal Phänomenologie 33 (2010): 42– 55; Arne Blum, “Die Anfänge der Musikphänomenologie,” Journal Phänomenologie 33 (2010): 6– 19; and Tobias Janz, “Qualia, Sound, Ereignis: Musiktheoretische Herausforderungen in phänomenologischer Perspektive,” in Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, Special Issue, “Musiktheorie/ Musikwissenschaft: Geschichte— Methoden— Perspektiven,” ed. Janz and Jan Philipp Sprick (2010): 217– 39. 56. Husserl, Ideen 1, 35; Ideas 1, 34– 35. Cf. Husserl, Logical Investigations 1, 168. 57. I will not, for example, try to give an account of an intractably obscure work such as Walter Harburger, Die Metalogik: Logik des überbegreiflichen Denkens (Munich: Musarion, 1919), which, despite being cited once by Theodor Adorno as a representative attempt for its time to articulate a logic of musical “language” on the phenomenological model, remains in my view as unintelligible as it is fascinating, possibly an artifact of Harburger’s apparent autodidacticism. Adorno, “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music” (1953), trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 135– 61, at 145. But for a sustained challenge to my evaluation, see Ralph Martin Steffen, “Metalogik: The Music Theory of Walter Harburger” (PhD diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1999). 58. Roman Ingarden, On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. Arnór Hannibalsson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), is a sustained argument for continuing to bear in mind Husserl’s early realism (written with the zeal of one of his more devoted students), but it is doubtful that contemporary scholars on the whole remain sympathetic to this image of Husserl. 59. Karl Schuhmann, “Johannes Daubert und die Logischen Untersuchungen,” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered, ed. Denis Fisette (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 109– 32, clarifies the early divergence between Husserl’s agenda and some of his followers’ effort to extract a “phenomenology of objects” from his work. Herman Philipse, “Transcendental Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 239– 322, teases out the distinctions between the Kantian and the Husserlian strains of this notion. 60. See, for example, Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925, trans. John Scanlon (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1977). The phrase “descriptive psychology” was originally associated with Franz Brentano and kept alive for an early twentieth-century readership in such works as Wilhelm Dilthey, “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” (1894), Gesammelte Schriften 5, part 1 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924), 139– 240; “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” trans. Richard B. Zaner, in Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 21– 120. 61. Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 73. On the other hand, with the benefit of hindsight toward subsequent developments, particularly in Gestalt psychology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty would subsequently interpret the relation between psychology and phenomenology in Husserl’s project as coextensive rather than successive and mutually exclusive. Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man” (1961), trans.

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John Wild, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 43– 95. 62. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 2, trans. Thomas M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 626. 63. Ernest Ansermet, Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1961); Yoko Ono, “The Word of a Fabricator” (orig. 1962), in Imagine Yoko (Lund: Bakhall, 2015), 113– 19; Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966). For recent evaluations of the postwar retooling of phenomenological resources, see Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Aaron Hayes, “Discourses on Time in the European Avant-Garde” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2016); and Brigid Cohen, “Ono in Opera: A Politics of Art and Action, 1960– 62,” ASAP/Journal 3, no. 1 ( January 2018): 41– 66. 64. See Ingarden, “Phenomenological Aesthetics: An Attempt at Defining Its Range,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 257– 69, which shows his otherwise intensive sense of historical precedent. 65. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); F. Joseph Smith, The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979); Judith Lochhead, “The Temporal Structure of Recent Music: A Phenomenological Investigation” (PhD diss., SUNY Stony Brook, 1982); Thomas Clifton, Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); and David Lewin, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” Music Perception 3 (Summer 1986): 327– 92; to cite only the major long-form studies. An interesting linking figure here, whom I have slighted mainly for reasons of scope, is Alfred Schutz (1899– 1959), whose incipient work on musical sociality can be glimpsed in the posthumously published “Fragments Toward a Phenomenology of Music” (1944), in Collected Papers 4 (Dordrecht: Springer, 1996), 243– 75. 66. See the typically clear-eyed analysis of Helmuth Plessner, “Zur Soziologie der modernen Forschung und ihrer Organisation in der deutschen Universität,” in Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens, ed. Max Scheler (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1924), 407– 25. The classic, though much later written (and even later published), account is of course Husserl’s final, incomplete work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 67. Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995). 68. This is as good a moment as any to voice regret at not being able to discuss certain texts that, while demonstrably rich and still of great value, simply could not find a place within the final design of this book. One such case is what is most likely the earliest publication on music that thoroughly incorporated Husserl’s teaching: Waldemar Conrad, “Der ästhetische Gegenstand. Eine phänomenologische Studie,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 3 (1908): 71– 118. Yet Conrad’s essay was essentially an outlier prior to World War I, which simply goes to the underlying argument that it was in fact the fallout from the war itself that motivated young people’s turn to phenomenology. The second case is Günther Stern-Anders’s unpublished habilitation dissertation from around 1930, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen,” in Anders, Musikphilosophische Schriften: Texte und Dokumente, ed.

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Reinhard Ellensohn (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017), 15– 140, a magisterial document that fully deserves a thoughtful reading— as well as an English translation— but is being largely sidelined here on the premise that it went unread until its recent publication (under the caring editorial hand of Reinhard Ellensohn) and hence did not actively participate in an unfolding public discourse. Similarly, a third unfortunate omission, Roman Ingarden’s earliest text on “the problem of the identity of the musical work,” “Zagadnienie tożsamości dziela muzycznego,” Przegląd filozoficzny 36, no. 4 (1933): 320– 60, although it is deeply Husserlian in its own heterodox way, has been excluded here since it was only accessible in Polish until the early 1960s, and hence does not immediately play into the central narrative within the Weimar context. 69. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3– 4. 70. Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 71. Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günther Gaus” (1965), trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Essays in Understanding, 1930– 1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 1– 23, at 3. In actual fact, the scene was not exclusively homosocial, though you need to get your hands on the right accounts to find out much about this, another lacuna resulting from phenomenology’s stubborn resistance to cultural historicization. One valuable window into the milieu, though stopping at 1916, is the incomplete autobiography of Husserl’s brilliant student and assistant Edith Stein (1891– 1942), Life in a Jewish Family, ed. L. Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, trans. Josephine Koeppel (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986), which testifies to the liveliness of women’s student groups and suffrage activities before and in the early years of the war. As far as I can tell, however, no women published on music phenomenology until, much later, Zofia Lissa (1908– 1980), an Ingarden student whose extensive work between the late 1930s and her death remains largely untranslated, though for selections in German, see Lissa, Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik: Eine Auswahl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1969). 72. Stern-Anders was called Günther Stern at birth but adopted the surname Anders around 1930. Because I will be discussing his work from both before and after that date, I refer to him throughout as Stern-Anders, in order to avoid confusion, though he himself used the hyphenated version on only a few occasions. 73. Some readers may wonder about the extension of an otherwise Weimaroriented narrative into the postwar period, but the case of Stern-Anders, and particularly his determination to follow up on theoretical loose ends left dangling around 1930, compels the historiography here. This is, moreover, in sympathy with a recent tendency to see postwar Germany as a field occupied by players whose activities and orientations were continuous with the pre-Nazi period. See, for example, Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); and Noah Benezra Strote, Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

Chapter 1 1. Arthur Wolfgang Cohn, Das Tonwerk im Rechtssinne (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1917); Cohn, Kann das Geld abgeschafft werden? ( Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1920). In the

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latter, see Adolf Weber, “Zum Gedächtnis an Arthur Wolfgang Cohn,” 141– 42, for biographical details. 2. Hans Mersmann, Lebensraum der Musik: Aufsätze— Ansprachen (Rodenkichen: P. J. Tonger Musikverlag, 1964), 12– 13. “Privatstunden . . . Bildung kleiner Gruppen im Sinne eines geistigen Widerstandes [durch zehn Jahre wöchentliche Zusammenkunft mit einem abgesplitterten Volkshochschulkreise im Hinterzimmer einer Kneipe am Kreuzberg]. Schallplatte als unentbehrlicher Mittler.” For his comparatively tepid enthusiasm for the new Reich, whose investment in the Volksgemeinschaft he judges as bringing both “gains and losses,” see Mersmann, Eine deutsche Musikgeschichte (Potsdam: Sanssouci Verlag, 1934), 505– 7. 3. For a compelling and highly germane exploration of this theoretical image, see Harris M. Berger, Stance: Ideas About Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009). 4. A similar point is made by Sebastian Luft, “Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude,” Continental Philosophy Review 31, no. 2 (April 1998): 153– 70, at 155. 5. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1928). 6. This second part had earlier been published separately as Probleme der Tonalität: Eine kritische Untersuchung (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1927), having been accepted as Güldenstein’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Basel in 1926. 7. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 184. “Tonart ist nämlich auch nicht bloßes Naturprodukt, wenn es auch auf einem Naturphänomen basiert. . . . Wenn wir aber einsehen, daß Tonart ein Stilprinzip ist, so müssen wir auch sehen, daß in einem tonalen Musikstück gewählten Klänge nicht nach ihrer akustischen Beschaffenheit bewertet werden dürfen, sondern nach ihrer Stellung im Systeme. Das geistige Prinzip der Bewegung ist das Primäre, der reale Klang das Sekundäre.” 8. Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), vii. 9. Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, 232; quoted in Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 183. 10. Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, 123– 77. 11. See Suzannah Clark, “Seduced by Notation: Oettingen’s Topography of the Major-Minor System,” in Music Theory and the Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, ed. Clark and Alexander Rehding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 161– 80; and Rehding, Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15– 35. 12. Georg Capellen, Die “musikalische” Akustik als Grundlage der Harmonik und Melodik. Mit experimentellen Nachweisen am Klavier (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1903). In an earlier chapter on “problems of the minor key,” Güldenstein had taken aim at a number of more influential theorists, especially Riemann and Oettingen, but it is only in these later passages that he puts a finer point on what he means to accomplish from a broader methodological perspective. 13. Capellen, Fortschrittliche Melodie- und Harmonielehre (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1908). 14. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 185. 15. Labels follow Scientific Pitch Notation conventions. 16. In a revealing oddity of Helmholtz’s similar approach, he notes, albeit somewhat

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in passing, that major triads in second inversion, not root position, would produce the fewest number of acoustical beats of any of the six major and minor triad inversions in close position. Yet a second-inversion triad is, in the practice of classical music, almost always treated not as a consonance but as a contextual dissonance. All of this is reckoned in the context of diatonic scales in just intonation. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 214. 17. Capellen, Fortschrittliche Melodie- und Harmonielehre, 59. “Man muß annehmen, daß sich seit Bach ein Umschwung in der Auffassung des schließenden Mollklanges vollzogen hat. Sogar beim authentischen Schluß . . . wird der Mollklang nicht mehr als umgangener (alterierter) Durklang, mithin als dissonant, sondern als Doppelklang vom Typus ACe(g), mithin als konsonant gehört, indem durch die unbewußte Erhebung des C zum Nebengrundton ein Gegengewicht gegen die Vorherrschaft der Basis A geschaffen wurde, so daß die physikalisch vorhandenen Schwebungen der Terzen psychologisch ignoriert werden kann. Der wahre Effekt des authentischen Mollschlusses, kraß dargestellt, ist heute so wie in Fig. 75, vor Bachs Zeiten dagegen Fig. 76.” 18. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 188. “Aber weit entfernt davon, diesen Ton in die Auffassung mit einzubeziehen, bemühen wir uns im Gegenteil bewußt oder unbewußt, ihn zu überhören. Genau so bemühen wir uns, die eventuell mitklingende große Terz des Grundtones zu überhören.” 19. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 59. “Nichts anderes, als eine Art zu hören, welche Oberstimmen auf einen Baß bezieht. Und diese Art zu hören, die man als harmonisches Hören bezeichnen könnte, ist aufs engste verwandt mit den Voraussetzungen, die im Bewußtsein gegeben sein müssen, damit Tonart sich überhaupt konstituieren kann. So wird es verständlich, daß innerhalb der Tonart dieses Hören das Vorherrschende ist.” 20. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 2. “Die Behandlung der Frage, wie ist ein Bewußtsein beschaffen, in welchem sich Tonart konstituieren kann, ergäbe ein Werk für sich (das auch früher oder später geschrieben werden muß): Phänomenologie des musikalischen Hörens. Hier werden die Bedingunen, unter welchen das Erlebnis ‘Tonart’ auftreten kann, stillschweigend vorausgesetzt.” 21. The dates of Güldenstein’s registration for lectures are given in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel 7, ed. Karl Schuhmann with Elisabeth Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 103n2. Güldenstein’s curriculum vitae appears in Probleme der Tonalität, 91– 92. 22. Husserl, Briefwechsel 7, 103. “Ich habe den Eindruck, daß Ihnen diese Theorie viele Freunde erwerben wird. Mögen Ihnen auf dem großen Forschungsfeld, das nun offen vor Ihnen liegt, immer neue schöne und große Einsichten zuteil werden. Ich werde mich an allen Ihren Fortschritten mitfreuen.” 23. A lacuna here is the relative lack of information concerning Güldenstein’s application of Dalcroze methods, about which he did not write much, though see my discussion below. 24. Indeed, many of the ideas initially presented in Theorie der Tonart were repackaged as “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Music,” a series of short pieces published in a magazine for singers and musical amateurs, showing their communicability and relevance beyond the guild-minded community of harmony teachers and speculative theorists. Güldenstein, “Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” Schweizerische Musikzeitung und Sängerblatt 71 (1931): 100– 103, 135– 37, 215– 18, 379– 81, 526– 29, and 570– 73.

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25. The basic description of the natural attitude is Husserl, Ideen 1 48– 50; Ideas 1, 48– 52. 26. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 4. “Nehmen wir folgendes Beispiel: Der losgelöste Ton sei ‘g’ und würde auf einem Klavier oder auf einem Violoncello als tiefer Ton erzeugt. Nach einiger Versenkung in den Klang wäre dann deutlich zu hören: g-g-d-g-h-d-f-g (a). Diese Tonreihe ist eigentlich nichts weiter als die Entfaltungsform des Tones und ein Ton, der sich nicht entfalten kann, trägt die Tonreihe, die seine Entfaltungsform ist, wenigstens latent in sich. Diese im Ton ruhenden Energien geben ihm einen Charakter, den wir— vorweisend— als Dominant-Charakter bezeichnen. Wir finden diese latente Energie sogar im bloß phantasierten Ton-Phänomen, sofern es wirklich isoliert vorgestellt wird, sodaß man allgemein sagen kann: Der aus dem Zusammenhang gelöste Ton (absolut = losgelöst) hat als ‘Funktion an sich’ DominantFunktion. Eine Dominante aber ist ein Ton, der nach seiner Tonika strebt. Wir erkennen also, daß der losgelöste Ton sogleich wieder eine Verbindung anstrebt. Dieses Streben eines Tones nach der Erfüllung seiner Funktion an sich nennen wir die musikalische Gravitation.” 27. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 53. “Man muß hier klar sehen: Der Dominantseptimenakkord und der Dur-Dreiklang werden als musikalische Erscheinungen nicht gerechtfertigt durch Obertöne, sondern umgekehrt, die Obertöne interessieren uns, weil sie in musikalisch bedeutsamen Erscheinungen eine Rolle spielen.” 28. Husserl introduces the term near the beginning of Logical Investigations 1, 13. 29. Güldenstein, “Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” 215– 16. “In dieser Einstellung, die einer akustisch-psychologischen gleichkommt, ordnen sich die Klänge nach ihrer Verwandtschaft und ihrer Verschmelzung.” 30. A distant pre-echo, to which Güldenstein makes reference only via citation within texts he is quoting, is the harmonic theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683– 1764), in which musical sense only obtains in the presence of a chain of virtual cadential movements. 31. For one of the few substantive discussions of Güldenstein’s harmonic theory, see Jan Philipp Sprick, Die Sequenz in der deutschen Musiktheorie um 1900 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2012), 198– 208. 32. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 194. “Es würde zu weit führen, eine phänomenologische Analyse von ‘Tonleitern’ hier durchzuführen und es wäre insoferne sogar kaum möglich, als hierfür Analysen vorausgehen müßten, auf welche diese sich rückbeziehen könnte.” The question is pursued marginally further in Güldenstein, “Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” 570– 73. 33. Husserl, Ideen 1, 35; Ideas 1, 34– 35, translation slightly modified; quoted in Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 191. 34. Husserl, Ideen 1, 35; Ideas 1, 36. 35. Husserl, Ideen 1, 10– 11; Ideas 1, 12. 36. Güldenstein, “Unterrichtsprobleme,” in Rhythmik: Theorie und Praxis der körperlich-musikalischen Erziehung, ed. Elfriede Feudel (Wolfenbüttel: Georg Kallmeyer, 1926), 140– 50, at 143 and 149. “‘Unrichtig’ ist jede Übung, welche gegen die Natur der Bewegung verstößt, und solche Übungen sind auszuschalten. . . . Es kommt nicht darauf an, daß eine Bewegung, welche der Schüler macht, korrekt sei; es kommt nicht darauf an, daß seine tänzerische Leistung ‘Kunst’ sei— : es kommt hier jetzt vor allem darauf an, daß er den Mut bekommt, sich überhaupt zu äußern.”

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37. Therapeutic retoolings of phenomenological themes were legion, however. Their practitioners would include, perhaps most originally, Ludwig Binswanger, whose deployment of the Husserlian analysis of the “lifeworld” was developed contemporaneously with Güldenstein’s tonal theory, and Binswanger’s student Eugène Minkowski, who pursued psychiatric implications of the phenomenological analysis of “lived time.” 38. Hugo Riemann, Handbuch der Akustik, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1913), 87– 88. 39. Riemann, “Ideen zu einer ‘Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen,’” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1914– 1915 21– 22 (1916): 1– 26, at 2; “Ideas for a Study ‘On the Imagination of Tone,’” trans. Robert W. Wason and Elizabeth West Marvin, Journal of Music Theory 36, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 81– 117, at 82; translation modified. 40. Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners “Tristan” (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1920), 3– 4. “Der Klang ist tot; was in ihm lebt, ist der Wille zum Klang. . . . Musik ist eine Naturgewalt in uns, eine Dynamik von Willensregungen. . . . Der Blick in die Musik ist durch Klänge verhängt. Die Theorie aber hat das Ohr für das Unhörbare verloren und damit für die Erfassung der Grundvorgänge, die durch Töne und Klänge nur hindurchschimmern.” 41. Somewhat surprisingly, Heinrich Besseler, one of the most reliable authorities on the question of what might qualify as properly phenomenological in the classical sense, does indeed make some effort to read Riemann’s position as potentially in line with the Husserl tradition. In Besseler’s account, had Riemann merely read Husserl, he would have understood that what Riemann describes as a “representation” (Vorstellung) ought to have been understood in the sense of a Husserlian noema, which is to say not an “object” as subjectively perceived, but rather the intentional sense of the musical object as correlated with the noetic act of representing it. I think Besseler was slicing matters more finely than Riemann’s epistemological concerns will allow. Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1959), 10– 11. Far less philosophically informed is Rudolf Schäfke’s claim that even someone like Heinrich Schenker should be counted among the phenomenological theorists, merely because Schenker was averse to “psychologizing” and historicist hermeneutics. The sense of “psychology” in such cases becomes too loose to make a meaningful comparison. Schäfke, Geschichte der Musikaesthetik in Umrissen (Berlin: Max Hesse Verlag, 1934), 410– 12. 42. This line of argument, despite its obvious intertwining with the matters at hand, clearly points to a different (more social-theoretical) kind of scholarly project. A compelling example of the latter is sketched in David Hesmondhalgh, “Towards a Critical Understanding of Music, Emotion and Self-Identity,” Consumption Markets & Culture 11, no. 4 (December 2008): 329– 43. 43. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 196. 44. Ingarden’s earliest writing on the phenomenology of music was in fact already complete in 1928 but was for many years only available as a short excerpt from the appendix of a longer work, published in his own Polish translation from the original German as “Zagadnienie tożsamości dziela muzycznego,” as cited above, which ultimately survived in lightly revised form as chapters 1 through 4 of “Das Musikwerk,” in Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst: Musikwerk— Bild— Architektur— Film (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1962), 3– 51; Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work— The Picture—The Architectural Work—The Film, trans. Raymond Meyer with John T. Goldthwait (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), 7– 46. 45. Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart, 193. “So bleibt schließlich nichts anderes übrig, als zu bekennen, Dieses eine Unveränderliche ist die Idee der betreffenden Sonata. Sie

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ist der ideale Gegenstand, der mit allen realen Veranstaltungen gemeint ist. In dieser idealen Schicht, in der es sich also weder um psychologische noch um akustische Vorgänge handelt: finden sich allein die musikalischen Phänomene, mit denen es derjenige zu tun hat, welcher Aussagen machen will über musikalische Zusammenhänge. Wir wollen sie die phänomenologische Schicht nennen.” 46. Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 53. 47. Judith Butler, “Foreword,” in Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), ix– xvi, at xii. 48. Husserl, Ideen 1, 81– 82; Ideas 1, 79. For a pertinent recent reading of this passage, see Jonathan De Souza, “Timbral Thievery: Synthesizers and Sonic Materiality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, ed. Emily Dolan and Alexander Rehding (2018), doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.8. 49. Gustav Güldenstein, Intervallenlehre (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1989), 71– 94. 50. Of the few studies of him, see Wörner, “Form als Wesen des musikalischen Kunstwerkes”; and Martina Stratilková, “Hans Mersmann and the Analysis of the New Music,” Musicologica Olomucensia 22 (December 2015), 109– 19. 51. Although the terms were used by earlier writers like Johann Gottfried Herder and Novalis, Einfühlung did not appear in Grimms Wörterbuch, the authoritative nineteenth-century lexicon of High German, and only seems to have gained currency toward the end of the century. “Empathy” first appeared in English as Titchener’s neologistic translation for Einfühlung in Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 21. 52. Mersmann, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1925): 372– 88, at 374; translated as “On the Phenomenology of Music” in appendix A below, at 165. “Er betrachtet das Kunstwerk als Erscheinung, ich übersetze freier und wesentlicher: als Organismus. er versucht, diese Betrachtung von allen Beziehungen zum Betrachtenden abzulösen, soweit dies möglich ist. Mit dieser Ablösung von allen ‘Ichbeziehungen’ fallen die assoziativen Faktoren der Betrachtung, werden eingeschränkt ihre subjektiven, sekundären, d. h. mehr umschreibenden als bezeichnenden Momente, wird angestrebt eine möglichst große Objektivität und relative Verbindlichkeit ihrer Ergebnisse.” 53. The analysis was published in Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 5, nos. 4– 5 ( January– February 1923): 226– 69, at 255– 62. 54. Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” 241– 42. “Linie ist Sein, Zustand, Gegenwart, Motiv ist Werden, Wille, Zukunft. Linie ist wesentlich passive, ruhende oder ausschwingende Kraft, in jedem Augenblick ihres Seins vollendet; Motiv ist wesentlich aktive, durchstoßende Kraft, als Erscheinung unvollendet, aber von stärkster Triebkraft. Motiv ist Keim, Linie ist Blüte.” 55. Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” 256 (figure) and 258 (discussion). 56. Paul Bekker, “Was Ist Phänomenologie der Musik?,” Die Musik 17, no. 4 ( January 1925): 241– 49, at 246; translated as “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?” in appendix C below, at 187. 57. Lee Rothfarb, “Introduction,” to Ernst Kurth, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Rothfarb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 17– 20; Wörner, “Form als Wesen des musikalischen Kunstwerkes.”

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58. Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” 262. “Bei allen war eine starke Vertiefung des künstlerisches Eindrucks bemerkbar, welche . . . in einer nie ganz abirrenden Diskussion zum Ausdruck kam.” 59. Moritz Geiger, “Phänomenologische Ästhetik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1925): 29– 42, at 37– 38; “Phenomenological Aesthetics,” in The Significance of Art: A Phenomenological Approach to Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Klaus Berger (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1986), 3– 16, at 11– 12; translation modified. 60. Mersmann, Angewandte Musikästhetik (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1926), 3. 61. Geiger, “Phänomenologische Ästhetik,” 31; “Phenomenological Aesthetics,” 4– 5; translation modified. 62. Bekker, Von den Naturreichen des Klangs: Grundriss einer Phänomenologie der Musik (Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1925); and “Was Ist Phänomenologie der Musik?,” 243– 44. For a recent appreciation of Bekker, see Nanette Nielsen, Paul Bekker’s Musical Ethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), esp. 88– 96. 63. Herbert Eimert, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” Melos 5, no. 7 (April 1926): 238– 45; translated as “On the Phenomenology of Music” in appendix D below. 64. Eimert, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” 239– 40. “Die Phänomenologie nimmt diesen Wahrnehmungsakt nicht als subjekterfüllte Sinngebung oder als summierende Verknüpfung, als ‘Assoziation,’ sondern als objektbedingtes Aktgewebe der ‘Ideation,’ des ‘ideierenden Meinens’ (Husserl). Der Klang ist also als akustische Materie gegeben und wird zugleich als sinnvolle ‘Idee’ erfaßt, d. h. er ist in sich sinnvoll, er hat, wie jeder Gegenstand, ‘sinnliche’ und ‘unsinnliche’ Qualitäten. Ein einseitig idealistischer Standpunkt würde nun behaupten, daß die unsinnlichen Qualitäten des Klangs seinen eigentlichen tieferen Sinn ausmachten, wie eine sensualistische Betrachtung dasselbe von den sinnlichen Qualitäten sagen würde; die Phänomenologie jedoch betrachte beide Eigenschaften unmittelbar, sie weiß intuitiv um die Einheit von Form und Inhalt und sieht so den Klang als vermittlungsfreie Totalität, als ‘anschauliche Fülle.’” 65. An important exception is Geiger, “Das Bewußtsein von Gefühlen,” in Münchener philosophische Abhandlungen, ed. Alexander Pfänder (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1911), 125– 62, which, however, does not accept the premise that feelings must have an intentional character, unless they can be understood to have an object. Yet the question of the very possibility of the object-likeness of musical phenomena remains extremely difficult, as we will see in chapter two, where the latter essay of Geiger comes into play. 66. Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2012), 166– 67. 67. Eimert, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” 240. 68. Eimert, Musikalische Formstrukturen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Versuch einer Formbeschreibung (Augsburg: Benno Filser, 1932), 21 and 37. Eimert’s references to Being and Time pertain to notions of temporality (Zeitlichkeit), attunement (Gestimmtheit), and affect, which he appears to have gleaned not directly from the source but via their more discipline-specific retooling in Besseler, “Grundfragen der Musikästhetik,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1926 33 (1927): 63– 80. The dissertation cannot properly be considered a work of phenomenology. 69. Two exceptions are Wörner, “Form als Wesen des musikalischen Kunstwerkes,” and Tobias Janz and Jan Philipp Sprick, “Einheit der Musik— Einheit der Musikwissen-

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schaft? Hugo Riemanns ‘Grundriß der Musikwissenschaft’ nach 100 Jahren,” Die Musikforschung 63, no. 2 (April– June 2010): 113– 33. 70. I will not deal with the first here, though it is not very far in the background. See Cohn, Das Tonwerk im Rechtssinne. 71. Cohn, Kann das Geld abgeschafft werden?, 2. “Was ist Geld? Was bedeutet es? Welchen Sinn hat es?” Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik. Neue Bücher und Schriften,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1, no. 11 (August 1919): 669– 79, at 674. 72. Husserl, Ideen 1, 4; Ideas 1, 5. Husserl attracted a number of economists to his school of thought, many of whom became influential liberal and neoliberal theorists. The classical liberal, proto-libertarian Ludwig von Mises noted Cohn’s money book with some admiration in “Neue Beiträge zum Problem der sozialistischen Wirtschaftsrechnung,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 51 (1924): 488– 500, at 489. A similarly Husserlian streak is evident in Cohn’s posthumous “Wirtschaftslehre oder Sozialwissenschaft. Zugleich ein Versuch zur Systematik der Wirtschaftswissenschaften,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 49 (1922): 170– 97. For comment on affiliations between Husserl and Austro-German liberalism in this milieu, with its axiomatic aversion to “naive naturalism,” see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 101– 28. 73. Cohn, Kann das Geld abgeschafft werden?, 6. “. . . zwischen tatsächlicher Erfahrung und reiner Spekulation, zwischen individueller Zufälligkeit und leerem Formalismus, zwischen historisch-statistischer Induktion und hypothetischer Deduktion.” 74. Cohn, Kann das Geld abgeschafft werden?, 7. “. . . wenn wir auf das sinngebende Bewußtsein, die ‘originär gebenden Akte’ (Husserl) zurückgehen, in denen wir das Geld in seiner Eigenart erschauen.” 75. Husserl, Ideen 1, 35; Ideas 1, 35. Dahlstrom renders originär gebender Akt with the more precise and eloquent phrase “act that affords [things] in an originary sense.” The more quotable, if somewhat more obscure, “originarily presentive act” comes from the older translation by Fred Kersten: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 35. 76. Cohn’s contributions to the question of aesthetic and cultural “value” stood near the beginning of an extensive series of similar reflections, which would include (to mention just the participants most germane to this discussion): Arnold Schering, “Musikalische Analyse und Wertidee,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1929 (1930): 9– 20; Mersmann, “Versuch einer musikalischen Wertästhetik,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 17, no. 1 ( January 1935): 33– 47; and, beyond music, Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme (1923), trans. James Cleugh (London: C. W. Daniels Co., 1931), 60– 77; and Wolfgang Köhler, The Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1938). 77. Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 669– 70. “. . . urteilsmäßige Formulierung des in der tonkünstlerischen Erkenntnis evident Gegebenen.” 78. Scheler, “Der Formalismus in der Ethik,” part 1, 470; Formalism in Ethics, 69. 79. Scheler, “Der Formalismus in der Ethik,” part 2, 125; Formalism in Ethics, 260. 80. Husserl, Ideen 1, 66; Ideas 1, 64; translation modified. Quoted in Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 676. 81. Cohn’s remaining posthumous publications on music include an overview of work on Expressionism by Arnold Schering in “Bücherschau,” Zeitschrift für Musikwis-

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senschaft 11, no. 2 (August 1920): 671– 76; “Hugo Riemann als Systematiker der Musikwissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 3, no. 1 (October 1920): 46– 50; and “Das musikalische Verständnis. Neue Ziele,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 4, no. 3 (December 1921): 129– 35. 82. Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 678. 83. Arthur Wolfgang Cohn, “Die Erkenntnis der Tonkunst. Gedanken über Begründung und Aufbau der Musikwissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1, no. 6 (March 1919): 351– 60, at 356. “Auch der Gelehrte, der Theoretiker, ist Mensch, ist nicht bloß mit Verstand, sondern auch mit Gemüt und Willen begabt; neben seiner Intelligenz (Einsicht) besitzt er Fantasie (Einbildungskraft) und Energie (Tatkraft). Mag er die Umwelt auch vorwiegend sachlich, unpersönlich betrachten— diese Einseitigkeit erklärt und bestimmt sich aus der Unvollkommenheit alles Realen— so ‘lebt’ er doch und ‘erlebt,’ denkt nicht bloß, sondern fühlt und handelt auch. Und so schreitet er vom Erkennen zum Bekennen, vom Urteilen zum Beurteilen, vom Theoretisieren zur Praxis des Erkennens vor. Nunmehr erhält dieses neben seiner sachlichen Richtigkeit wie jede Praxis des menschlichen Lebens Wertgeltung; das naturhaft-unpersönliche Erkennen wird zur Kultur, der Wertidee der Wahrheit zugeordnet. Die Erkenntnis als solche ist jetzt nicht mehr nur Tatsache und Begriff, sondern . . . Gut und Werk, Schatz und Zweck, Maßstab und Ziel; das Erkennen ist ebenso Wertschätzung und Wertschöpfung,— als Forschung, Wissen, Mitteilung. Die Erkenntnis in diesem Sinne, als kulturelle Verwirklichung der Wahrheitsidee, heißt Wissenschaft.” 84. Scheler, “Der Formalismus in der Ethik,” part 1, 469; Formalism in Ethics, 69; translation modified. Compare the discussion deriving from this in Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 678– 79. 85. An especially keen recent reader of Scheler is Dan Zahavi, who however does not see the value theory as Scheler’s most “enduring” contribution. See Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy,” 151– 67; and Zahavi, “Max Scheler,” in Keith Ansell-Pearson and Alan D. Schrift, eds., The History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 3, The New Century: Bergsonism, Phenomenology and Responses to Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 171– 86. 86. Bekker, “Was Ist Phänomenologie der Musik?,” 246; “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?,” 187. “. . . zunächst nur die Erkenntnis, daß der Traum vom ewigen Fortschritt ausgesträumt, daß dieser Weg zu Ende geschritten ist— ein Innehalten also und Sich-Besinnen und damit das Auftauchen der frage: ‘Was ist das?’ Mit dieser Frage aber ist bereits die Wendung zur Phänomenologie vollzogen.”

Chapter 2 1. José Ortega y Gasset, “Musicalia,” in Obras completas 2 (Madrid: Taurus, 2004), 365– 74, at 372– 73; orig. pub. in El Sol (8 March 1921): 3, and (24 March 1921): 3. “A veces se abre en el fondo de nuestra intimidad un manantial de deleitables recuerdos. Entonces parece que nos cerramos al mundo exterior, y recogiéndonos sobre nosotros mismos, permanecemos atentos al íntimo hontanar, degustando ensimismados el trémulo brotar de las fragantes reminiscencias. Esta actitud es la concentración hacia adentro. Si de pronto suenan unos pistoletazos en la calle, salimos de la inmersión en nosotros mismos, emergemos al mundo exterior, y asomándonos al balcón, ponemos, como suele decirse, los cinco sentidos, toda la atención, en el hecho que acontece en la rúa. Esta es la concentración hacia afuera.” 2. Günther Anders, Ketzereien (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982), 242. “[Er] hat . . . mich

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zuerst fassungslos unter seinen Brillenrändern angeblickt. Dann aber war plötzlich der in seiner Würde beleidigte Ordinarius in ihm aufgewacht. ‘Ich tanzen?’ fragte er, als wäre das das Unmoralischste, was man einem wohlbestallten, ordinierten Philosophen unterstellen konnte. In der Tat hat er mich, seinen Doktoranden, als ihm ‘zu Ohre gekommen war, daß ich eine Faschingsnacht kostümiert durchgetantz hätte,’ zu sich bestellt, um mir fürs Leben mitzugeben: ‘Ein Phänomenologe tanzt nicht und zu allerletzt kostümiert!’ Als ich ihm antwortete, ich hätte nicht als Phänomenologe getanzt und mich nicht als solcher kostümiert, fragte er— und das meinte er— zurück: ‘Sondern als was?’” 3. See Adorno’s denunciation of Stravinsky’s supposedly quasi-phenomenological “renunciation of all psychologism” in Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert HullotKentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 107; and its extension along a different critical trajectory in Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” in Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 133. In this connection, however, it is worth noting that the charge of “depersonalization” has equally been claimed from a rightist aestheticcritical position, most conspicuously in Hugo Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry, from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), in which the leitmotifs of Enthumanisierung and Entpersönlichung morbidly accompany a long view of the disintegration of the lyrical poetic tradition. 4. Ortega’s intellectual autobiography, which emphasizes his investment in the shifting stakes of Central European philosophical culture, appears as “Preface for Germans” (1934), in Phenomenology and Art, trans. Philip W. Silver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 17– 76. On his ambivalent and evolving relationship to Husserl’s work, see Philip W. Silver, Ortega as Phenomenologist: The Genesis of Meditations on Quixote (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Robert O’Connor, “Ortega’s Reformulation of Husserlian Phenomenology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40, no. 1 (September 1979): 53– 63; Nel Rodríguez Rial, “Ortega— Phenomenologist,” Analecta Husserliana 29 (1990): 106– 34; Antonio Rodríguez Huéscar, José Ortega y Gasset’s Metaphysical Innovation: A Critique and Overcoming of Idealism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995); and Jesús M. Díaz Álvarez, “José Ortega y Gasset and Human Rights,” in Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon, eds., Husserl’s Ideen (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2013), 3– 18. 5. Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 60. Also see Chandler Carter, “The Rake’s Progress and Stravinsky’s Return: The Composer’s Evolving Approach to Setting Text,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 553– 640, at 567– 72. 6. Though he had initially praised the 1923 military coup by the aristocrat Miguel Primo de Rivera, Ortega turned against the ensuing dictatorship and fully embraced Republicanism, was equally alarmed by mass movements on the left and the right, and can ultimately be considered “conservative” only in the sense of the “conservative liberal.” Prior to his 1936 self-exile to Buenos Aires, he briefly held office as member of a party supporting socialist republican policies. See Francisco López Frías, “Ortega y Gasset: On Being Liberal in Spain,” Analecta Husserliana 29 (1990): 149– 66; Walter N. Tuttle, The Crowd Is Untruth: The Existential Critique of Mass Society in the Thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Ortega y Gasset (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 121– 63; and Maria João Neves, “The Dehumanization of Art: Ortega y Gasset’s Vision

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of New Music,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43, no. 2 (2012): 365– 76. 7. Ortega, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. Anon. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), 48, 58, and 62; La rebelión de las masas (1930), in Obras completas 4 (Madrid: Taurus, 2004), 347– 528, at 401, 409 and 411; my emphasis. 8. My best inference is that Ortega was drawing on either Geiger, “Das Bewußtsein von Gefühlen,”; or Geiger, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1– 2 (1913): 567– 684, at 636– 42. For the terminology of Innen- and Außenkonzentration, Geiger in turn refers to F. E. Otto Schultze, “Einige Hauptgesichtspunkte der Beschreibung in der Elementarpsychologie,” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 8 (1906): 241– 383, at 372– 77. 9. Ortega, “Musicalia,” 373. “En vez de atender al eco sentimental de ella en nosotros, ponemos el oído y toda nuestra fijeza en los sonidos mismos, en el suceso encantador que se está realmente verificando allá en la orquesta. Vamos recogiendo una sonoridad tras otra, paladeándola, apreciando su color, y hasta cabría decir que su forma. Esta música es algo externo a nosotros: es un objeto distante, perfectamente localizado fuera de nuestro yo y ante el cual nos sentimos puros contempladores. Gozamos la nueva música en concentración hacia afuera. Es ella lo que nos interesa, no su resonancia en nosotros.” 10. Ortega, “La deshumanización del arte,” in Obras completas 3 (Madrid: Taurus, 2005), 847– 77; “The Dehumanization of Art” (1925), trans. Helen Weyl, in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), 3– 54. 11. Ortega, “La deshumanización del arte,” 863; “The Dehumanization of Art,” 29– 30. 12. Taking a longer view, Ortega can clearly be read as pointing ahead to the postwar avant-garde. Particularly germane is the Darmstadt reception of Debussy as represented by Eimert (see chapters one and four), who describes the composer’s late orchestral music as “bound in a natural way to the world, without naturalistic blatancy, without a detour through functions of meaning, without a shift to ‘depth.’” Eimert, “Debussys ‘Jeux,’” Die Reihe 5 (1959): 5– 22, at 20. 13. Geiger, “Das Bewußtsein von Gefühlen,” 160– 61. “. . . derjenige [würde] von Debussys Tonfolgen kaum ein Genuß haben, der sie in reiner Außenkonzentration erfassen wollte.” Geiger, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genußes,” 638n2. “. . . schärfere Analyse zeigt, daß auch sie, wie alle Kunstwerke, in Außenkonzentration genossen werden, nur in einer anderen Art von Außenkonzentration als etwa Bachsche Fugen.” 14. The best introduction to his musical writings is Reinhard Ellensohn, Der andere Anders. Günther Anders als Musikphilosoph (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). Also see Thomas H. Macho, “Die Kunst der Verwandlung. Notizen zur frühen Musikphilosophie von Günther Anders,” Merkur 46, no. 6 (1991): 475– 84; Franz-Josef Knelangen, “Günther Anders und die Musik oder ‘Der Klavierspieler mit dem Zeichenstift,’” Text + Kritik: Zeitschrift für Literatur 115 (1992): 73– 85; Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 307– 42; and Ellensohn, “Von der Musikphänomenologie zur Technikkritik: Zur frühen Musikphilosophie von Günther Anders,” Musik & Ästhetik 19, no. 75 ( July 2015): 5– 20. Laurent Perreau, “Günther Anders à l’école de la phénoménologie,” Tumultes 28– 29 (2007): 21– 34, is a useful overview of his early intellectual background.

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15. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens (Erläutert am Hören impressionistischer Musik),” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 9, nos. 11– 12 (1927): 610– 19; translated as “On the Phenomenology of Listening (Elucidated in the Hearing of Impressionist Music)” in appendix E below. 16. Ortega, “La deshumanización del arte,” 863; “The Dehumanization of Art,” 30– 31. 17. In this connection, and in anticipation of the themes of chapter three below, it is worth noticing the polar opposition between Ortega’s characterization of Neoclassicism and Heinrich Besseler’s contemporaneous characterization of Neue Sachlichkeit (sometimes seen as Neoclassicism’s German cousin) as a self-conscious corrective to “the rupture, become unbearable, between life and art.” Besseler, Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 1 (Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1931), 22. And see the discussion of Besseler in chapter three below. 18. Ortega, “An Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface” (1914), in Phenomenology and Art, trans. Philip W. Silver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 146– 48. 19. Ortega, “La deshumanización del arte,” 858; “The Dehumanization of Art,” 22. 20. This is admittedly a big presumption. Though Ortega does not say so, one of the clearest antipodes to his approach would have been the aesthetic theory of Einfühlung— projective empathy, or “feeling-into”— as exemplified by Theodor Lipps. On this discourse, see Juliet Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (March 2006): 139– 57. 21. See Butler, “Foreword.” 22. I am aware that these suggestions run roughshod over a critical tradition in which the question of musical “persona” is more extensively reflected, but I do not believe the basic intuitions at issue would be disqualified by engaging that tradition more directly. 23. See Alexandra Kieffer, Debussy’s Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 24. Elaine Barkin, “Notes in Progress,” Journal of Music Theory 22, no. 2 (Autumn 1978): 291– 311, at 291. 25. Ortega, “La deshumanización del arte,” 858; “The Dehumanization of Art,” 21. 26. Ortega, “La deshumanización del arte,” 859; “The Dehumanization of Art,” 22– 23. 27. Leslie David Blasius, “The Mechanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Romantic Musical Experience,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3– 24. 28. The contrast with Chopin’s lyrical etudes (op. 10, nos. 3 and 6; op. 25, no. 7) is clear in that the latter are effectively nocturnes in all but name and do not involve genre hybridization at the level of expressive content. This is all the more obvious when we think of the various vocal adaptations of op. 10, no. 3, from Chopin’s lifetime through Tin Pan Alley and the Swing Era and beyond. 29. This is the aspect of the piece that attracts the most sustained attention in the analysis symposium devoted to it in Journal of Music Theory 22, no. 2 (Autumn 1978): Robert Gauldin, “An Analysis,” 241– 51; William Benjamin, “‘Pour les sixtes’: An Analysis,” 253– 90; and Barkin, “Notes in Progress.” 30. Geiger, “Das Bewußtsein von Gefühlen,” 161. “Hanslick will, daß man Musik im Zustand der Außenkonzentration genieße.” 31. Geiger, “Das Bewußtsein von Gefühlen,” 143. “[D]ie erlebte Beziehung zwischen

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beiden wird dadurch beschrieben, daß man sagt: Das Gefühl scheint vom Gegenstand herzukommen, von ihm auszugehen, von ihm erregt zu werden. (Solche Erregung des Gefühls durch den Gegenstand ist hier eine erlebte Beziehung und hat natürlich nicht das Mindeste zu tun mit der psychophysischen Kausalitätsbeziehung zwischen äußerem Gegenstand und Gefühl.)” 32. Bryan Parkhurst, “The First-Person Feeling Theory of Musical Expression,” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 9, no. 2 ( June 2012): 14– 27, at 17– 22, addresses the ambiguities in deciding on the locational phenomenology of “in here” versus “out there” with regard to musical sound. 33. Geiger, Zugänge zur Ästhetik (Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag, 1928), 42. “Denn die ästhetische Forderung der Zeit lautet: jenen Dilettantismus der Innenkonzentration wieder zu überwinden, der . . . unser künstlerisches Erleben vergiftet hat.” 34. Geiger, “Das Bewußtsein von Gefühlen,” 148– 49. “Das innerliche ‘Dabeisein’ ist ein wesentliches Merkmal der Aufmerksamkeit. Ich ‘bin’ innerlich stets ‘bei’ demjenigen auf das ich meine Aufmerksamkeit richte, und ich bin nicht bei demjenigen, das ich nicht beachte. . . . Dieses Dabeisein trägt im Falle der Aufmerksamkeit einen besonderen Charakter. Es ist ein inneres Zusammengefaßtsein auf das Beachtete hin; ich bin innerlich in Richtung auf das, was ich beachte, zusammengeschlossen.” 35. A few years later, in a footnote in the unpublished habilitation dissertation he had once hoped to submit to the University of Frankfurt, Stern-Anders did explicitly critique Geiger’s distinction between outward and inward concentration on these grounds. He notes there that a musical artwork is not quite the same thing as an object (Gegenstand) of outward concentration but is instead something that seems to render that exterior object transparent in a special sense that he does not further develop. Anders, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen,” 294– 95n190. 36. Heidegger’s Summer 1925 lectures appear as History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 37. Stern, “Über Gegenstandstypen. Phänomenologische Bemerkungen anläßlich des Buches: Arnold Metzger ‘Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis,’” Philosophischer Anzeiger: Zeitschrift für die Zusammenarbeit von Philosophie und Einzelwissenschaft 1 (1925– 1926): 359– 81. In the absence at that point of any published material by Heidegger, Stern-Anders could only cite the older philosopher in generic terms, noting that the “essay is very much indebted” to his suggestions, “though in this different context they have led to other positions that probably do not overlap with H[eidegger]’s original intentions” (359). 38. Stern-Anders most likely derives the contrast of Gegenstand and Widerstand from Max Scheler, for whom he was serving as academic assistant at this time. Scheler develops the idea, in a very different context, in Formalism in Ethics, 135– 38, where Widerstand is rendered as “with-standing.” 39. Stern, “Über Gegenstandstypen,” 374. 40. Stern, “Über Gegenstandstypen,” 363. 41. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 611; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 199. “Man höre irgend etwas von Debussy— ganz gleich ob die wenigen Takte der ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’-Ouverture, ob eine der ‘Études’ oder ob etwas drittes. Daß diese Musik in etwas, Aktionen höchstens Vorbereitendem und Bedingendem, nicht selbst Aktiven besteht (ganz gleich, ob man ihre oft fast stationäre Zeit, ihren Harmoniesinn oder etwas anders besonders im Auge hat), darin sind sich Verehrer,

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Feinde und Forscher einig. Und diese ‘Zuständlichkeit’ verschaffte ihr ja auch den Namen ‘Impressionismus’, der von der Malerei übernommen, auch dort soviel bedeutet hatte, wie die Darstellung der Gegenstände (nicht qua Gegenstände), sondern in ihrer die Grenzen oft verwischenden Zuständlichkeit. Indes kommt es uns hier gar nicht auf eine vollständige Charakterisierung des Impressionismus an; es genügt aufzuzeigen, und an das allen Geläufige zu appellieren. Was uns interessiert, ist nicht Bestimmung des Gegenstandes, sondern sein Zugang.” (Pelléas et Mélisande has no overture.) 42. This unspecified attribution may refer to Husserl’s discussion of what he called “regional ontologies” in Ideas 1, 20– 32; Ideen 1, 19– 32. 43. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 617; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 206. “[W]ie sieht die Attention aus, die sich auf Zuständliches richtet?  . . . [W]ie ist innerhalb eines passiven Zustandes, insofern dieser den einer Sache angemessenen Zugang darstellt, attentionale Zuwendung möglich?” 44. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 613; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 201-202. “[D]ieses Nicht-Gefaßtsein auf ein bestimmtes Ende, auf bestimmte Weiterführung, die ausgesprochene Leere des Erwartungshorizontes auf der Seite des Hörers [ist] nicht nur ein akzidentielles Hemmnis für Aufmerksamkeit (so wie Müdigkeit das Durchdenken eines mathematischen Beweisganges hemmt), sondern ein wesensmäßiges: Attention geht ja seiner Natur nach nicht nur auf das jeweils ‘jetzt’ Gegebene, sondern ist ‘gespannt’ auf das Kommende. Und auf dieses Kommende ist man beim Hören der impressionistischen Musik eben bezeichnenderweise nicht so gespannt (dies im nur intentionalen wie im affektiven Sinne), da das jeweils Jetzige der Musik eben nicht dramatisch ist, das heißt die Einheit einer Handlung hat. / Wie löst sich nun dies Problem, daß impressionistische Musik einmal ihrem Wesen nach eine nicht-gespannte, eine passive Haltung fordert, daß sie anderseits aber doch angehört werden soll?” 45. It is worth noting that Stern-Anders specifically cites the piano reduction here (page 127 of the vocal score published by Durand in 1907), not the full orchestral score. What he is describing, then, correlates best with the auditory acts of the amateur playing or imagining at home. 46. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 616– 17; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 205. “Es handelt sich dort um ein Absinken eines DominantSeptimenakkordes: nicht um eine Auflösung in den üblichen in Dur- oder Molldreiklang, von dem aus die Dominante nicht als ein Provisorisches, ein Unselbständiges . . . wäre. Das früher Unselbständige ist hier als selbständige Ausdruckseinheit gestiftet; daher darf auch angesichts des auf den ersten Akkord: d g h d f h folgende e f a c es a nicht als Übergang zu Bdur angesehen werden; auch er sinkt ja wieder hinab um einen Ton in den scheinbaren Septimenakkord von Asdur: es handelt sich gar nicht um mehrere Akkorde, sondern um einen einzigen wandernden, nicht anders als bei einer echten Melodie, die auch nicht die Verbindung mehrerer Töne darstellt, sondern die Bewegung eines einzigen.” 47. The distinction between “perception” and “apperception” is a venerable one, enduring at least from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Wilhelm Wundt, yet while SternAnders notes the legacy, its interpretation here does not depend on historical precedent. 48. Phrase and phrase-unit duplication is a distinctive aspect of Debussy’s mature compositional poetics that has attracted frequent comment, including by Hans Mersmann, who associated it with “passivity of formal design” in Die moderne Musik seit der Romantik (Potsdam: Academische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1931), 111; but most explicitly and thoroughly by Nicolas Ruwet, “Note sur les duplications dans l’oeuvre de

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Claude Debussy,” in Langage, musique, poésie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 70– 99, where the device is evaluated in less pejorative terms. 49. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 614; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 202. 50. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 617; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 206. “In welchem Sinne kann ich, wenn ich etwa in einem stark nach irgend etwas riechendem Raume bin, mich attentional auf diesen Geruch einstellen? Was bleibt, abgesehen von einer sozusagen privativen Aufmerksamkeit: der Abstellung anderer Intentionen (z. B. durch Augenschließen) an attentionalen Möglichkeiten? Es bleibt etwas, das jener (oft mit dem Ausdruck des Abzielens charakterisierten) Hinwendung geradezu entgegengesetzt ist: ein die Passivität sozusagen erst völlig ermöglichendes Aufgeschlossensein.” 51. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 612, 617– 18; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 200, 207. 52. Relevant background is discussed in Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840– 1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 89– 121; and Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, 80– 122. 53. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 617; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 206. 54. The experience of Trällern fascinated Stern-Anders enough that he returned to it the following year in his first monograph, Über das Haben: Sieben Kapitel zur Ontologie der Erkenntnis (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1928), where he clarifies the phenomenon in these terms (39– 40), also fleshing out his more general analysis of non-tendential temporal experience around the key terms “protention” and “potentiality” (107– 29). And he would return to it once again in his habilitation in 1930– 1931, where it emerges that he is thinking of Trällern as a translation of the Greek teretízein, and hence as an Aristotelian example of the peculiar human action of “free” vocalization. See Anders, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen,” 105. 55. Clearly, there are numerous other salient points to be made here, most obviously those concerning rhythm, but for the broader line of thought I am pursuing here, these can be aside. In fact, the rhythmic subtlety of this passage, as in so much of late Debussy, would entail analytical overkill in this context. 56. A continuous tradition of this sort of theorizing would presumably include at least Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Eugene Narmour, The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Narmour, The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity: The ImplicationRealization Model (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 57. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 619; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 208. “. . . einen Status, der eigentlich derjenige des gewöhnlichen Lebens ist, das weder stets etwas als etwas fixiert noch stets schläft.” 58. For a pertinent usage from 1925, see Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 158– 59. The canonical discussion appeared two years later in Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 53– 56; Being and Time, 79– 82. Rendering bei in English, meanwhile, has long vexed Heidegger’s translators. Theodore Kisiel (for History of the Concept of Time) alternates

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between “involved with” and “intimately involved in,” while Macquarrie and Robinson (for Being and Time) generally opt for “alongside.” 59. Stern, “Aktualität,” Das Dreieck 2 (1924): 33– 37, at 36. 60. At this point, I hardly need to spell out how heavily Stern-Anders’s concern with the theme of the “already” depends on his study with Heidegger from 1921 onward. Nevertheless, one can get a particularly good sense of the model for these latter comments in the Summer 1923 Freiburg lecture course, published as Heidegger, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 61. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 618; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 208. 62. Stern, “Aktualität,” 36. “Das Heute ist kein Gegenstand, kein ‘Gegenüberstand,’ sondern ein ‘Umstand.’ Nicht etwas, das uns gegenübersteht, sondern das uns umsteht.” 63. Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” 612; “On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 200. “[U]nsere Frage gehört dem Gesamtproblemkomplex an, wie dem Hören Welt überhaupt da ist. Dies nun wiederum nicht so, als ob es etwa die Welt des Blinden zu untersuchen gälte— dessen also, der lediglich hört. Denn das eigentliche Hören ist das Hören dessen, der eben auch die andere Welt hat; das Hören dessen, der eben auch selbstverständlich jenen— nicht nur musikalischen, nicht nur akustischen Möglichkeiten personalen Lebens unterworfen ist, deren eine die Aufmerksamkeit, die Attention ist.” 64. Stern, “Une interprétation de l’a posteriori,” Recherches philosophiques 4 (1934– 1935): 65– 80; “Pathologie de la liberté. Essai sur la non-identification,” Recherches philosophiques 6 (1936– 1937): 22– 54; the latter in English as “The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification,” trans. Katharine Wolfe, in Günter Bischof, Jason Dawsey, and Bernhard Fetz, ed., The Life and Work of Günther Anders: Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2014), 145– 70. 65. Ortega, The Revolt of the Masses, 41. Complicating the chronology a bit, Ortega had famously thematized the “circumstance” (foreshadowing Stern-Anders’s Umstand) as early as 1914 in his Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 41– 45. 66. Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” 133. It would almost go without saying that the assessment of early phenomenology’s impact entertained here is distinctly at odds with the one developed by Adorno, across so many of his writings, beginning shortly after this period. Given the latter’s considerably greater familiarity to music scholars, it has seemed preferable to introduce Ortega’s and Stern-Anders’s approaches without the distortion of a critical-theoretical lens. Yet it is certainly relevant to note that Adorno had been in part responsible for eliminating Stern-Anders’s chances of a successful habilitation at the University of Frankfurt and hence the possibility of his launching a career as a philosopher of music. 67. Anders, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen,” accordingly signals the possibility of a kind of musical thinking that would prioritize neither subject nor object but would instead pursue an analysis of “situation” as ongoing transformation in the listening person. 68. A wholesale argument for Ortega as anti-humanist would be difficult to clinch, but at least one recent suggestion along these lines has been made. See Graham Har-

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man, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 101– 24.

Chapter 3 1. Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation) Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die Göttinger Philosophische Fakultät (Herbst 1922),” in Gesamtausgabe 62, Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), 343– 99, at 370. “Die Hymnologie und Musik des Mittelalters . . . sind geistesgeschichtlich nur zugänglich auf dem Boden einer ursprünglichen phänomenologischen Interpretation der philosophisch-theologischen Anthropologie dieses Zeitalters.” 2. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, “Die Totenklagen der deutschen Minnesänger: Herkunft und Wesen ihrer Form” (PhD diss., University of Freiburg, 1921); Heinz Edelstein, “Die Musikanschauung Augustins nach seiner Schrift ‘De musica’” (PhD diss., University of Freiburg, 1929). Bizarrely enough, Clauss had at first hoped Husserl, a Protestant convert from a Jewish family, would advise an explicitly anti-Semitic study he later published anyway as Die nordische Seele: Artung, Prägung, Ausdruck (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1923), thereby launching a scholarly career promoting a style of racism Clauss delusionally saw as continuing the spirit of Husserlian phenomenology. 3. Rainer Bayreuther, “Musikwissenschaft: ‘Phänomenologische Grundlegung’ einer Disziplin,” in Heidegger-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung, 2nd ed., ed. Dieter Thomä (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2013), 509– 12; Markus Zepf, “Musikwissenschaft,” in Eckhard Wirbelauer, ed., Die Freiburger philosophische Fakultät 1920– 1960: Mitglieder— Strukturen—Vernetzungen (Munich: Karl Alber, 2006), 411– 39; Reinhard Ellensohn, “Nachwort: Günther Anders und die Musik,” in Stern-Anders, Musikphilosophische Schriften, 336– 80, at 346. 4. Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (University of Illinois Press, 1994), 62 and 107. Cf. a similar, semi-fictionalized anecdote concerning Besseler’s and Löwith’s friendship in Löwith, “Fiala: The Story of a Temptation,” excerpted as “Appendix C: Karl Löwith’s Impressions of Husserl and Heidegger,” in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of the Early Occasional Writings, 1910– 1927, ed. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 421– 27, at 423– 24. 5. For live questioning along these lines today, though in very different milieus, see Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); and Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), with its typology of “joint,” “collective,” and “individuated attention.” 6. See, for example, Nikolaus Bacht, “Introduction,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, no. 1, special issue, “Listening: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (2009): 1– 3. When the historiography of listening was revived in the mid-1990s after being essentially dormant for some time, Besseler’s name naturally resurfaced, featuring centrally in many of the essays in the watershed collection edited by Wolfgang Gratzer, Perspektiven einer Geschichte abendländischen Musikhörens (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1997). Somewhat isolated in between the two historical moments is the often forgotten work of the Polish musicologist Zofia Lissa, who studied with Roman Ingarden and shared some of his preoccupation with Husserlian themes. See, for example, Lissa, “On the

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Evolution of Musical Perception,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 273– 86 (originally published in Polish in 1959). 7. Relatedly, there is an important and ultimately linked claim along the lines of Hannah Arendt’s late reading of Socrates, in which “I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness.” Arendt, The Life of the Mind, book 1, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 183. 8. Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1896); and Staudinger, Individuum und Gemeinschaft in der Kulturorganisation des Vereins ( Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1913), whose first half deals with “forms and levels” of community as “shown through the historical development of the organization of musical fellowship.” 9. Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit, 12. 10. Classic accounts of auditory “alone-togetherness” are William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890– 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 3– 23; and, developing key points from Kenney, Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), esp. 137– 77. Without deploying the phrase, James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), presents a thematically similar narrative, though for the apparatus of the opera house as opposed to recorded sound. In each case, the basic trajectory involves sound media (opera house, phonograph, radio, etc.) arranging bodies in space such that the thing to be heard is stabilized as a common reference point enabling the possibility of mediating a sense of togetherness that had been either absent or simply weaker prior to the emergence of these media, though without any corollary implication that actual judgments made about what is heard would necessarily be univocal. 11. There are also indications that his disdainful attention to them is motivated at least in part by a somewhat separate concern about the effects of newer sound media. Surprisingly, he did not at any point pursue a sustained technology critique. 12. Besseler, “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1925 32 (1926): 35– 52, at 35; “Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening,” trans. Matthew Pritchard, with Irene Auerbach, Twentieth-Century Music 8, no. 1 (2012): 49– 70, at 50. Cf. Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit, 5– 15. 13. For the term itself, see Besseler, “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens,” 38 and 40; “Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening,” 53 and 54 (though the published translation gives “overhearing,” for interpretive reasons that make sense in context while nonetheless somewhat obscuring its conceptual centrality). 14. Besseler, “Beiträge zur Stilgeschichte der deutschen Suite im 17. Jahrhundert” (PhD diss., University of Freiburg, 1923). 15. The jargon of “accessibility,” which has already surfaced relatively unmarked in my discussion in earlier chapters, is a characteristic feature of phenomenological discussion in the era. In chapter one, see Güldenstein’s quadripartite typology of levels on which music is variously “accessible” (zugänglich); and in chapter two, Stern-Anders’s more methodologically developed suggestion that various kinds of music have various correlate modes of access (Zugangsweise), as here. 16. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 28. “War die Zugangsweise zur Musik dort ein Mitmachen oder Gebrauchen, so verwandelt sie sich . . . in ein Hören. In diesem Phänomen des Hinhörens auf das Werk sind hier mitgegeben ein Heraustreten aus dem Zusammen-

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hang des faktischen Lebens als Uebergang in eine besondere ästhetische ‘Einstellung’; und als Korrelat dazu die isolierende Abhebung des Werkes selbst; diese Sinnmomente seien kurz bezeichnet als Lebensdistanz und Gehaltsakzentuierung.” 17. Besseler, “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens,” 46; “Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening,” 61. 18. To be sure, Besseler’s actual historiography, and his especially characterization of the dispositions available to eighteenth-century listeners, is more nuanced, on which see Wolfgang Lessing, “Musik und Gesellschaft: Das Problem der ‘Gebrauchsmusik,’” in Wolfgang Rathert and Giselher Schubert, eds., Musikkultur in der Weimarer Republik (Mainz: Schott, 2001), 180– 88, at 184. 19. For related discussion, see Steege, “Joining In or Letting Go?,” in “Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories,” colloquy convened by Francesca Brittan and Carmel Raz, Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 2 (August 2019): 569– 74. 20. See, for example, Dorothea Kolland, Die Jugendmusikbewegung: Gemeinschaftsmusik, Theorie und Praxis (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979); and Stephen Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik: A Study of Musical Aesthetics in the Weimar Republic (1919– 1933), with Particular Reference to the Works of Paul Hindemith (New York: Garland, 1989). 21. Eimert, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” 241, for example, approves the shift afoot from a “history of heroes” to a “history of problems” (see appendix D, 194). A few years earlier, Mersmann, “Zur Stilgeschichte der Musik,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1921 28 (1922): 67– 78, at 67, had denigrated any heroengeschichtlich emphasis on composerly figures as “primitive,” to be superseded by a more critically sophisticated Epochengeschichte or “history of epochs.” 22. Johann Hermann Schein, Banchetto musicale, ed. Dieter Krickeberg (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1967), xii, facsimile of dedication. “Sonstiger lieber Musicant, allhier hastu abermals ein Wercklein, Banchetto Musicale, intituliert, darin wirstu finden Padouanen, Gagliarden, Courenten, und Allemanden, welche in der Ordnung allwege also gesetzet, daß sie beydes in Tono und Inventione einander fein respondiren.” 23. Hugo Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte 2, part 2, Das Generalbasszeitalter. Die Monodie des 17. Jahrhunderts und die Weltherrschaft der Italiener, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1922), 168– 87, esp. 182– 83; and cf. Riemann, “Die Variationenform in der alten deutschen Tanzsuite,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 26, no. 31 (25 July 1895): 393– 94. 24. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 20n2. “‘[F]unktionsharmonisch’ hier im Sinne einer noch nicht näher determinierten, blossen Aufeinanderbeziehung von Klängen; ‘tonale’ Harmonik ist demgegenüber schon ein Spezifizierung.” 25. A germane exploration of the theoretical problems presented by the sequence is Sprick, Die Sequenz in der deutschen Musiktheorie um 1900. 26. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 19. “Die erwähnte Sequenzstelle ist, obwohl eine gewisse Uebersteigerung der Vokaltechnik, ebenso wenig als spezifisch instrumental anzusprechen, wie die gleichfalls nicht mehr vokale Pausenlosigkeit der Stimmen nicht etwa positiv auf ein neues instrumentales Hören hinweist.” 27. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 34. “Die auf echtem Zusammenwirken verschiedener Individuen beruhende Motettenpolyphonie ist verdrängt durch die zentralisierende Kraft des Klanglich-Harmonischen; man könnten von einer perspektivischen Zuspitzung auf den Hörer und korrelativ auf den Komponisten sprechen.” 28. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 38. “[D]as Werk wird zu Anfang und zu Ende besonders nachdrücklich aus dem Lebenszusammenhang herausgehoben.”

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29. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 39. “Der Vokalstil konnte eines solchen Mittels entraten, da hier die lebendige Stimme durch die stetige Erneuerung des Tones den Fluss der Bewegung erzeugt. Blas- und Streichinstrumente kommen ihr darin— trotz eines prinzipiellen Abstandes— einigermassen nahe, während die Klanggebung von Instrumenten wie Laute und Cembalo eine tiefgreifende Umbildung der Melodiestruktur hervorrufen musste.” 30. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 42. “Alle erwähnte Züge sind Ausdruck der Entindividualisierung der Einzelstimme, die im Klaviersatz naturgemäss besonders scharf hervortritt, aber auch in Kompositionen für Melodieinstrumente eine neue Art des Hörens verrät.” 31. Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), esp. 224– 31, describes how the events of 1618– 1648 had come to be seen as a defining catastrophe for the German nation, one whose specter haunted it even, or especially, entering its tricentennial. 32. For historiography along these lines, see Hans Joachim Moser, Geschichte der deutschen Musik 2, part 1, Vom Beginn des dreißig jährigen Krieges bis zum Tode Joseph Haydns (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta, 1922), 103. 33. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 4. “‘Leben’ ist hier weder in einem naturalistischen Sinn gemeint, etwa als Gegenstand biologischer oder psychologischer Untersuchungen, noch in einem metaphysischen, als Objekt geschichtsphilosophischer Spekulation, es ist überhaupt nicht dinghaft, auch nicht als ‘Verlauf ’ in einem objektivierten Sinn zu verstehen. Die verdeutlichende Rede vom ‘faktischen’ Leben weise vielmehr hin auf den fortwährend in den verschiedensten Weisen gehabten, erlebten Zusammenhang von Tendenzen, Begegnungen, Selbst- und Umweltserfahrungen und dergl[eichen]. . . . Wie es nun als spezielle Aufgabe der Musikwissenschaft erscheint, die Stellung des Musikalischen im Zusammenhang des faktischen Lebens zu erfassen und durch Untersuchung seiner verschiedenen Ausformsrichtungen verlässliche Grundlagen der historischen Interpretation zu gewinnen, so soll im folgenden durch die Art der Fragestellungen versucht werden, in unsystematischer Form wenigstens einzelne Momente abzuheben, die vielleicht dazu einen Beitrag liefern könnten.” 34. Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3. 35. Bayreuther, “Musikwissenschaft: ‘Phänomenologische Grundlegung’ einer Disziplin,” 510. For the broader context at Freiburg, see Zepf, “Musikwissenschaft.” 36. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985); Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 37. Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, 1– 41; Richard Taruskin, “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 286– 302; Lawrence F. Bernstein, “Ockeghem the Mystic: A German Interpretation of the 1920s,” in Johannes Ockeghem: Actes du XLe Colloque international d’études humanistes, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Paris: Klincksieck, 1998), 811– 41; Arne Blum, “Gebrauchsmusik als unmoralische Kunst,” in Kurt Weill und das Musiktheater in den 20er Jahren, ed. Michael Heineman (Dresden: Sandstein, 2003), 92– 102; Martin Scherzinger, “Heideggerian Thought in the Early Music of Paul Hindemith (With a Foreword to Benjamin Boretz),” Perspectives of New Music 43, no. 2– 44, no. 1 (Summer 2005– Winter 2006): 80– 125; and Matthew Pritchard, “Who Killed the Concert? Heinrich Besseler and the

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Inter-War Politics of Gebrauchsmusik,” Twentieth-Century Music 8, no. 1 (March 2011): 29– 48. 38. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 1; Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 3. Here, for the sake of concision, “historical” imperfectly stands in for Heidegger’s more specific notion of the “historiological,” which suggests a mooting of the problem of “history” as a theme without yet committing to its existing commonplace styles of writing, narration, and conceptual apparatus. 39. A clear interpretation of these themes is Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). “Facticity,” of course, remained a crucial term for Heidegger. For the classic definition (albeit a provisional one that refers ahead to a fuller reading of its text as whole), see Sein und Zeit, 75; Being and Time, 82. 40. See John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), esp. 39– 59; Hans Ruin, “Thinking in Ruins: Life, Death, and Destruction in Heidegger’s Early Writings,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 4, no. 1 (2012): 15– 33; and James D. Reid, Heidegger’s Moral Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), esp. 26– 62. 41. To some extent, albeit somewhat indirectly, this formulation rebuts SternAnders’s later complaint that Heidegger “did not call a spade a spade; neither did he call the motor of ‘Sorge,’ ‘hunger,’ by its name, nor the man-made ‘Sorge-tools’ of today, the economic systems, industry, machines. The province of Heidegger’s concreteness begins behind hunger and ends before economy and machine: in the middle ‘Dasein’ is sitting around, hammering its ‘Zeug’ and thereby demonstrating ‘Sorge’ and the renaissance of ontology.” Stern-Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” International Phenomenological Society 8, no. 3 (March 1948): 337– 70, at 347. 42. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 90; Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 68; translation modified. 43. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 91; Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 69; translation modified. 44. Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1918), 13, 52 and 57. Original emphasis. “Er komponiert also nicht nur das, was in der Partitur deutlich zu lesen steht, er komponiert auch gleichzeitig ein ideals Bild des Raumes und der Hörerschaft.” Bekker seems to overlook the commonplace (and often polemical) distinction between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft), as articulated in Ferdinand Tönnies’s classic distinction. Nanette Nielsen, Paul Bekker’s Musical Ethics, 22, suggests this does not substantively affect his claims, and that we may effectively read him as privileging the connotation of “community” in both terms. 45. Besseler, “Beiträge,” 59. “In einer derartigen Erzeugung eines musikalischen Geschehens durch Aufeinanderbeziehen selbständig ausgestalteter Einheiten drückt sich wohl eine Tendenz auf Ablösung der musikalischen Sphäre und ihre Äußerung zu einer eigenen Welt aus.” 46. Thomas Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler: Musikwissenschaft und Wissenschaftspolitik in Deutschland 1924 bis 1949 (Munich: Strube, 2005), 23– 26. 47. Besseler, “Musik des Mittelalters in der Hamburger Musikhalle, 1.– 8. April 1924,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 7, no. 1 (October 1924): 42– 54, at 44. At least some of the Benedictines came from the Beuron and Maria Laach Abbeys, with which Max Scheler was associated.

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48. Besseler, “Musik des Mittelalters in der Hamburger Musikhalle,” 46. “Wie hier über dem andächtig-langsam feinen Choralausschnitt im 5. Modus singenden Tenor der außerordentlich schön gebaute Motetus im 1. und das ebenso selbständig Triplum im 6. Modus zusammengefügt sind, das läßt beim Ausführen keinen Zweifel an der grundsätzlichen und eigenartigen Zugangsweise zu diesen Werken. Sie sind nicht zum Zuhören, sondern zum Singen oder inneren Mitmachen bestimmt. Das heißt: sie wollen nicht als einheitliches Klanggebilde von einem Zuhörer hingenommen werden, sondern ihr musikalischer Sinne erfüllt sich in der lebendigen Beziehung zwischen den Ausführenden.” 49. The inaugural treatment of fulfillment appears in Husserl, Logical Investigations 2, 198– 99, but it is elaborated throughout the first section of the Sixth Logical Investigation, 191– 267. See Dermot Moran, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts of Intentionality,” Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy 1, Phenomenology: Central Tendencies and Concepts, ed. Dermot Moran and Lester E. Embree (London: Routledge, 2004), 157– 83, esp. 166– 69. 50. Among the many reflections by contemporary scholars on this and related questions, see Bonnie J. Blackburn, “For Whom Do the Singers Sing?,” Early Music 25, no. 4 (November 1997): 593– 609; and, especially germane, Rob C. Wegman, “‘Das musikalische Hören’ in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Perspectives from Pre-War Germany,” Musical Quarterly 82, nos. 3– 4 (Fall– Winter 1998): 434– 54. Related to these but with an expert and overt phenomenological emphasis, see Jessica Wiskus, “On Memory, Nostalgia, and the Temporal Expression of Josquin’s Ave Maria . . . virgo serena,” Continental Philosophy Review 52 (2019): 397– 413. 51. Besseler, “Musik des Mittelalters in der Hamburger Musikhalle,” 46. “Macht auch bei der heutigen Auflösung des Tonalitätsgefühls das rein zuhörende Auffassen . . . keine Schwierigkeiten mehr, so muß nachdrücklich auf das Mißverständnis hingewiesen werden, hier nach gewohnter Art ein äußeres Hörzentrum vorauszusetzen. Dieses liegt vielmehr in jeder der gleichberechtigten Stimmen, die zunächst selbst ausgeführt und nur nebenher auf die anderen bezogen wird. Ein derartig mitgehendes Hören richtet sich vor allem auf ein regelmäßig empfundenes klares Abstandsverhältnis zur benachbarten Stimme: so nämlich sind die im 13. Jahrhundert herrschenden Abstandskonsonanzen Einklang, Quart, Quint, Oktav aufzufassen, wie das wirkliche Ausführen sofort zeigt. Damit wird auch verständlich, weshalb nur je zwei benachbarte, nicht notwendig alle Stimmen . . . konsonieren müssen.” 52. This is according to Besseler’s immediate source: Johannes Müller-Blattau’s just-published transcription from the Montpellier Codex, which was included in the appendix to Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Fuge (Königsberg: Jüterbock, 1923). Later editions “correct” the manuscript source by transposing the tenor’s F– E to G– F, which would restore perfect consonance to the simultaneity in this rhythmic perfection as a whole. In any case, the basic point about the loose observance of perfect consonance in all three voices stands. 53. Besseler, “Musik des Mittelalters in der Hamburger Musikhalle,” 46. Emphasis added. “Bemerkenswert ist hier, daß die Periodenschlüße aller drei oder auch nur der beiden oberen Stimmen nie zusammenfallen. Da keine Stimme vorherrscht, erscheint das Stück, als Ganzes gehört, ebenso formlos wie klanglos, während die einzelnen Linien ausgezeichnet gegliedert sind: Tenor ununterbrochen im . . . 1. Modus, Motetus in zwölf Verszeilen (die vier letzten zusammengezogen), Triplum in vier langgestreckte, auf e, d, d, g [sic] schließende Perioden aufgeteilt.” Besseler seems to make a basic clef-

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reading mistake. If the four cadence points he asserts in the triplum are articulated by rests, the actual notes there are D, C, C, and G. Besseler could have momentarily misread the triplum in fourth-line C clef, hence erroneously rendering the first three cadence notes E, D, and D. 54. Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters, I. Neue Quellen des 14. und beginnenden 15. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 7, no. 2 ( June 1925): 167– 252; “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters, II. Die Motette von Franko von Köln bis Philipp von Vitry,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 8, no. 2 ( January 1927): 137– 258, though see the germane discussion of consonance in relation to performance practice in the latter, at 145– 46, as discussed below. Also note that he doubles down in this passage on the question of Erfüllung: in not “taking part” (teilnehmen and mitmachen), either outwardly or inwardly, in the “general comportment” (gemeinsame Haltung), one can never “fulfill the proper meaning of the event” (den eigentlichen Sinne des Vorgangs . . . erfüllen). 55. Arnold Schering, “Über Musikhören und Musikempfinden im Mittelalter,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters 28 (1922): 39– 56, which is nonetheless a fascinating work of scholarship, and one that opened the door for Besseler’s own deep historical questioning of the variable status of listening. 56. Schering, “Über Musikhören und Musikempfinden im Mittelalter,” 54– 55. “Dem Mittelalter war egozentrische Weltbetrachtung fremd. Es lag nicht in seiner Denkrichtung, das Ich von der Welt abzusondern und zum Maßstab alles Seins und Handelns zu machen, noch viel weniger, es in den Dingen widergespiegelt zu sehen.” 57. Schering, “Über Musikhören und Musikempfinden im Mittelalter,” 43– 44. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Neuwied: Heuser, 1907); translated by Michael Bullock as Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). 58. Indeed, denying that the artwork is an original category has the added benefit of relativizing associated ideas concerning the primacy of any concept of “empathetic” listening for “expressive” musical content. Besseler’s skepticism about Schering’s aesthetic and historiographical assumptions motivates much of the argumentation of his lesser-known companion essay to the more often cited “Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening”: Besseler, “Grundfragen der Musikästhetik,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibiothek Peters für 1926 33 (1927): 65– 80. 59. Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters, II,” 146. “So ist also auch die französische Motette zunächst ein Werk, das die innere Beziehung auf den Zuhörer nicht kennt. Die gemeinsame Blickrichtung aller Stimmen auf ein religiöse Ziel hat sich zwar zu einem rein diesseitigen, gesellschaftlichen Spiel gewandelt, doch muß nach wie vor der Nicht-Ausführende sinngemäß zu einer der Stimmen treten und von dort aus das polyphone Musizieren mitmachen.” 60. Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters, II,” 161. 61. Unlike Abstandskonsonanz, however, Klangkonsonanz is not entirely original with Besseler. In a psychologistic mood that is not shared by the younger scholar, Kurth uses it at one point to describe the effect of a cadential arrival that remains in some way less than fully resolved, such that the acoustic consonance of the goal chord is disturbed, non-acoustically, by the presence of residual, unsounded “energies.” See Kurth, Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts: Bachs melodische Polyphonie, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1922), 87.

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62. Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters, II,” 146. The term Umgangsmusik first appeared in 1959 in Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit, 14. 63. Besseler, “Grundfragen der Musikästhetik,” 72. “‘1., 2., 3. Modus’ ist im selben Sinne zu verstehen, wie wir vom ‘Walzer-, Foxtrot-, Tangorhythmus’ reden.” Cf. “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters, II,” 152 and 199. 64. Besseler, “Musik des Mittelalters in der Hamburger Musikhalle,” 54. “Musikwissenschaftlich kommt der Vorführung jedenfalls (neben ihrer speziellen Bedeutung für das Mittelalter) das Verdienst zu, nachdrücklich darauf hingewiesen zu haben, daß die Musikgeschichte auch eine Geschichte des Klanges und des Hörens umfaßt, und daß sie nicht zuletzt ein Stück Geistesgeschichte ist.” 65. Besseler, “Grundfragen der Musikästhetik,” 72. “Es handelt sich hier um Unterschiede des Leiblichkeitsgefühls, der Art und Weise, wie der Körper überhaupt da ist, sich bewegt und in stilisierter Bewegung ausschwingt. . . . So bezöge sich also die musikalische Rhythmik ganz allgemein auf die Art und Weise, in der wir ‘überhaupt da sind’ und uns ‘bewegen,’ auf einen bestimmten ‘zeitlichen’ Grundcharakter unserer Existenz.” 66. Besseler, “Grundfragen der Musikästhetik,” 71. “[D]as Miteinander [ist] durchaus [konstitutiv] für unsere Musik. Nicht um soziologische Tatsachen handelt es sich hierbei, sondern um das geformte, stilisierte Miteinander, wie es in jedem Werk als unentbehrliches Moment vorliegt.” 67. As clear as Heidegger’s anti-biologistic influence is here, it is nevertheless odd that Besseler misses the opportunity even to hint at pertinent conceptual resources in Scheler’s earlier and highly influential (though today often overlooked) discussion of the crucial distinction between “physical body” (Körper) and “lived body” (Leib) in Formalism in Ethics, 398– 424. Scheler’s 1913 discussion is a classic instance of a phenomenologist attempting to carry out a non-physicalistic, non-biologistic description of precisely those aspects of human experience that had come to be seen as the exclusive domain of physiologists and biologists. 68. And yet neither Besseler nor his interlocutors saw any hard-and-fast distinction between the concern with early music and that with immediate contemporary concerns, as was noted in Hinton, “Alte Musik als Hebamme einer neuen Musikästhetik der zwanziger Jahre,” Alte Musik als ästhetische Gegenwart: Bach, Händel, Schütz. Bericht übre den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongreß Stuttgart 1985 2, ed. Dietrich Berke and Dorothee Hanemann (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987), 325– 30. 69. The commonplace view of “mass listening” as an inherently galvanizing force has begun to give way to more nuanced narratives, however, as can be seen in contributions to Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Even Johnson, Listening in Paris, which is otherwise perhaps the most influential account of the coalescence of unified audience behavior and sentiment, argues for a certain atomization of affective response in the 1830s and 1840s, when the prior view that “all sensitive listeners could be united in common experience” gave way to one in which “every man was an island” (275), though the stark duality of this historiographical presentation is a little disconcerting. 70. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 93– 99; Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 70– 75; and Sein und Zeit, 153– 73; Being and Time, 149– 68 (secs. 25– 27).

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71. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1943), 285; Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 332; translation modified. Barnes mistranslates sourd as “mute.” By depicting his Heideggerian rowers as “deaf,” however, Sartre presumably means to invoke Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus’s oarsmen plug their ears with wax in order to evade seduction by the song of the Sirens. 72. In an early instance of ambivalence toward the misleading character of Heidegger’s tool analysis, with its apparent feint toward a seductive “naturalism,” this aspect of Heideggerian thought is singled out for critique in Stern-Anders, “On the PseudoConcreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” 344. 73. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 140– 47; Being and Time, 138– 44 (sec. 23). This paradox in effect tropes the one Heidegger had uncovered in the earlier lectures, discussed above, in the futile situation of trying to reach for objects while disavowing their factical background. It is also what happens in, for example, the attentional practices characteristic of the empirical sciences with which Heidegger and Besseler would have been familiar. 74. Plessner, Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002); The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. Andrew Wallace (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999). 75. It is worth noting, however, that Plessner did see it as a continuation of the larger epistemological project he had initiated the previous year with his complex and far-reaching yet largely ignored work on the “aesthesiology of the senses.” His neologism “aesthesiology”— which he presented as the study of the Sinn der Sinne, the “meaning” or “sense of the senses”— investigated the way the separate sense modalities, both despite and by virtue of their apparent autonomy, were coordinated at a higher level in order to indicate registers of worldly significance that were ignored or overlooked by naturalistic specialization in just one mode of sensory input or another at a time. See Plessner, Die Einheit der Sinne. Grundlinien einer Aesthesiologie des Geistes (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1923); and compare the synopsis of this intellectual program as it pertains to music in Plessner, “Mitbericht,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1925): 392– 95; translated as “Response [to Mersmann]” in appendix B below. As Plessner notes in the foreword to Limits of Community, the common aim in the two consecutive books was to restore the central importance of the organic body to phenomenological analysis, without thereby reverting to naive naturalistic premises about how the body, or the self it houses, might in fact be structured. Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, 12– 13; Limits of Community, 43– 44. 76. This aspect of Plessner’s argument concerning the necessity for an anticommunitarian counterweight was heavily thematized in Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), a book that is largely responsible for the recent revival of interest in Plessner, albeit not without debate over the interpretation of Plessner’s central concepts. See Wolfgang Essbach, Joachim Fischer, and Helmut Lethen, eds., Plessners “Grenzen der Gemeinschaft”: Eine Debatte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). 77. Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, 63; Limits of Community, 109. “Der doppeldeutige Charakter des Psychischen drängt zur Fixierung hin und zugleich von der Fixierung fort. Wir wollen uns sehen und gesehen werden, wie wir sind, und wir wollen ebenso uns verhüllen und ungekannt bleiben, denn hinter jeder Bestimmtheit unseres

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Seins schlummern die unsagbaren Möglichkeiten des Andersseins. Aus dieser ontologischen Zweideutigkeit resultieren mit eherner Notwendigkeit die beiden Grundkräfte seelischen Lebens: der Drang nach Offenbarung, die Geltungsbedürftigkeit, und der Drang nach Verhaltung, die Schamhaftigkeit.” This formulation forms a conceptual bridge between Plessner’s early interest in “aesthesiology” and his better-known formulation of what he took to be the defining characteristic of human being in “excentricity,” as he proposed in his 1928 magnum opus: “If the life of the animal is centric, the life of the human, although unable to break out of this centrality, is at the same time out of it and thus excentric. Excentricity is the form of frontal positioning against the surrounding field that is characteristic of the human.” Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Millay Hyatt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 271. 78. I am thinking here of the surprisingly sympathetic treatment he gets in Taruskin, “Back to Whom?” (especially compared with Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Webern), as well as of the various generally approving comparisons made between his theoretical program and those of scholars like Christopher Small, Gary Tomlinson, and Thomas Turino: see, for example, Wegman, “Historical Musicology: Is It Still Possible?,” in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, eds., The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), 136– 45; and Marcello Sorce Keller, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Why Musicologists Do Not Always Wish to Know All They Could Know,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 366– 77, at 369. 79. Besseler, “Musik des Mittelalters in der Hamburger Musikhalle,” 43. “Alles Leben, Schaffen, Empfangen geschieht in der Gemeinschaft, die sich dem Einzelnen darbietet als abgestuftes Reich von Körperschaften und Ständen, vom unfassendsten Kreis der Kirche angefangen. Die auf Überlieferung und Autorität gegründete, letztlich stets auf die religiöse Mitte bezogene Umwelt umfaßt alle Elemente als Glieder eines Organismus; damit ist eine selbstherrliche Kunst, die dem Leben von sich aus Sinne zu geben beansprucht, im Mittelalter unmöglich.” 80. Hans Joachim Moser, “Zwischen Kultur und Zivilisation der Musik,” Deutsches Musikjahrbuch 4 (1926): 29– 33. Besseler, “Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening,” 49; “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens,” 35. 81. The text of the speech is printed as “Wortlaut der Marburger Rede,” in Edgar J. Jung. Ein konservativer Revolutionär 30. Juni 1934, ed. Edmund Forschbach (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1984), 154– 74; translated excerpts published as “Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen’s Marburg Speech: A Call for More Freedom,” trans. Louis L. Snyder, in Hitler’s Third Reich: A Documentary History, ed. Snyder (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981), 173– 77. While Papen, following a period of house arrest, was able to maintain an active if lower profile within the government, his actual speechwriter, Edgar Julius Jung, was shot by the Gestapo at the Oranienburg concentration camp outside Berlin during the putsch. 82. Relevant here is that some historians have begun to revise a long-standing view according to which the SA’s political capital and cultural significance were neutralized after the June 1934 purge. Though they were no longer at the front lines of the Nazi “revolution,” as they had seen themselves up until that point, they nonetheless constituted a highly visible domestic corps of enforcers of the new order— the original and still exemplary Nazi community— while the SS, who had meanwhile acquired nomi-

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nally greater political power, were often dispersed across increasingly far-flung occupied territories from 1939 onward. See Daniel Siemens, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 183– 216. 83. Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler, 251– 80 and 416– 17. For a critique of the tendency to explain away musicologists’ cooperation with Nazi authorities as mere professional opportunism as opposed to ideological sympathy, see Anselm Gerhard, “Musicology in the ‘Third Reich’: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of Musicology 18, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 517– 43, esp. 521– 25. That Besseler’s Nazism and his music historiography were mutually supporting aspects of his philosophical outlook is unambiguously demonstrated in Laurenz Lütteken, “Das Musikwerk im Spannungsfeld von ‘Ausdruck’ und ‘Erleben’: Heinrich Besselers musikhistoriographischer Ansatz,” in Musikwissenschaft— eine verspätete Disziplin? Die akademische Musikforschung zwischen Fortschrittsglauben und Modernitätsverweigerung, ed. Anselm Gerhard (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 213– 32. 84. See, for example, Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). For commentary on his place within a notoriously treacherous intellectual-historical scene, see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 70– 100.

Chapter 4 1. Max Horkheimer, “[Diskussionen aus einem Seminar über die Theorie der Bedürfnisse],” in Gesammelte Schriften 12, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1931– 1949, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985), 559– 86, at 579– 86. 2. Anders, diary entry, March 7, 1941, in Tagebücher und Gedichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985), 2. “[L]ernen kann man hier manches, sogar die Grundwahrheit aller Klamottenphilosophie: nämlich daß wir Menschen unsere Blöße nicht deshalb zugedeckt haben, weil wir ohne Kleider zu Tode erfroren wären, sondern deshalb, weil wir ohne sie unfähig gewesen wären, uns als Personen von Rang aufzuspielen, Hierarchien zu statuieren, Mitmenschen anzulocken und andere einzuschüchtern. Gewiß, Bedürfnisse hatten hinter der phantastischen Erfindung, die ‘Kleidung’ heißt, gestanden, aber physiologische zu allerletzt. Unter den Stücken, die hier herumhängen, ist kaum eines ein Erwärmungsgerät und nur das; fast durchweg sind sie Würde-, Schreck- und Schmeichel-, also Sozialinstrumente. Diese Wahrheit wird mir hier nun in täglichem Achtstunden-Kursus eingebläut, nämlich während ich die Stücke einschmiere, bürste oder aussauge.” 3. Anders, Philosophische Stenogramme (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1965), 70. “Die meisten Züge, die die Experimentalpsychologie an Versuchspersonen feststellt, entstehen als Produkte der Experimente selbst; sie sind gewissermaßen die roten Druckspuren, die die experimentellen Apparaturen erzeugt, unter Umständen dann auch endgültig hinterlassen, haben. Was die Experimente sichtbar machen, ist nicht, wie der Mensch ist, sondern, was man aus ihm machen kann.— Daß man vielerlei aus ihm machen kann, ist natürlich unbestreitbar. Aber man glaube nicht, dadurch etwas über ihn zu wissen.” 4. On “human engineering,” see Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1, Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1956), 35– 50. Only a portion of Stern-Anders’s magnum opus has been published in English translation: “On Promethean Shame,” trans. Christopher John Müller, in Müller, Pro-

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metheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 29– 95, which contains the relevant passage at 40– 47. Stern-Anders’s critique finds a recent echo in Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. 17– 20, which sees the testing practices developed during and just after World War I as heralding the onset of an increasingly psychologized form of governmentality. 5. Stern, “Angewandte Psychologie,” 28– 33. For “mental quotient,” Stern, The Psychological Methods of Testing Intelligence, trans. Guy Montrose Whipple (Baltimore, MD: Warwick & York, 1914), 36– 42. Günther, along with his two sisters, is intimately discussed throughout Stern, Psychologie der frühen Kindheit bis zum sechsten Lebensjahre (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1914). 6. Two key figures displacing Stern’s early formative role were Hugo Münsterberg and Fritz Giese. Giese, Grundzüge der praktischen Psychologie 1, Theorie der Psychotechnik (Wiesbaden: Vieweg & Teubner, 1925), 3– 10, offers a firsthand account of the history of the field. Viktoria Tkaczyk, “Archival Traces of Applied Research: Language Planning and Psychotechnics in Interwar Germany,” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2, Supplement: Listening to the Archive: Sound Data in the Humanities and Sciences (April 2019): S64– S95, discusses pertinent work by Giese. Also see Jeremy Blatter, “The Psychotechnics of Everyday Life: Hugo Münsterberg and the Politics of Applied Psychology, 1887– 1917” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014). 7. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 260. “Daß man sie ‘insel-artig’ auf Korallenriffen oder irgendwo sonst im Weltmeer durchführt; daß man also zuguterletzt, um das Prinzip der Isolierung zu retten, auf ‘Insularität’ im geographischen Ur-Sinne zurückgreift, ist zwar sehr charakteristisch. Aber diese letzten Isolierungsversuche, das heißt: die verzweifelten Bemühungen, noch ‘Versuche’ zu machen, bleiben vergebens. Wie großartig die Versuche auch glücken mögen— das Versuchen mißlingt, weil jedes Versuchen sofort umschlägt, sofort mehr wird als Versuchen. Die Effekte sind so ungeheuer, daß im Moment des Experiments das ‘Laboratorium’ ko-extensiv mit dem Globus wird. Das aber bedeutet nichts anderes, als daß zwischen ‘Probe’ und ‘Durchführung’ zu unterscheiden, seinen Sinn verloren hat; daß jedes ‘Experiment’ zu einem ‘Ernstfall’ geworden ist.” 8. On Marshallese responses to the legacy of nuclear colonialism, see Jessica A. Schwartz, “A ‘Voice to Sing’: Rongelapese Musical Activism and the Production of Nuclear Knowledge,” Music & Politics 6, no. 1 (2012); Schwartz, “Matters of Empathy and Nuclear Colonialism: Marshallese Voices Marked in Story, Song, and Illustration,” Music & Politics 10, no. 2 (2016). See also Aya Homei, “The Contentious Death of Mr. Kuboyama: Science as Politics in the 1954 Lucky Dragon Incident,” Japan Forum 25, no. 2 (2013): 212– 32; and the contemporaneous account, Ralph E. Lapp, Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958). 9. Anders, Ketzereien, 98. “Unser gesamtes Tun ist nämlich . . . pseudoexperimentell. . . . Was immer wir unternehmen, immer werden unsere Unternehmungen Experimente darstellen, die unumkehrbar sein werden und deren Folgen wir nicht werden absehen können.” 10. A more recent perspective, contrasting with Stern-Anders’s thesis of the uncontainable nature of weapons testing, is Donald MacKenzie, “From Kwajalein to Armageddon? Testing and the Social Construction of Missile Accuracy,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 409– 36.

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11. On the latter, see Margarete Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frühen Sowjetunion (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007). 12. Brigid Doherty, “Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin,” MLN 115, no. 3 (2000): 442– 81. 13. Walter Benjamin, “Bert Brecht” (1930), Gesammelte Schriften 2, part 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 660– 67, at 662; “Bert Brecht,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings 2, part 1, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 365– 71, at 366; translation modified. 14. Bertolt Brecht, “The Literarization of the Theatre,” and more generally in “On Experimental Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 43– 47, at 46; and 133– 45. 15. Benjamin, “Der Autor als Produzent” (1934), Gesammelte Schriften 2, part 2, 683– 701, at 698– 99; “The Author as Producer: Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, April 27, 1934,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings 2, part 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 768– 82, at 779. Hannah Arendt, still married to Stern-Anders at this point, attended this lecture, so one reasonably imagines that Stern-Anders was also there. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 116. 16. Benjamin, “Karussell der Berufe” (1930); Gesammelte Schriften 2, part 2, 667– 76, at 670; “Carousel of Jobs,” trans. Jonathan Lutes, in Radio Benjamin, ed. Lecia Rosenthal (London: Verso, 2014), 283– 91, at 285; translation modified. 17. On this period in Stern-Anders’s life generally, see the informative discussion in Kerstin Putz, “Improvised Lives: Günther Anders’s American Exile,” in Günther Bischof, ed., Quiet Invaders Revisited: Biographies of Twentieth Century Immigrants to the United States (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017), 231– 41. 18. Anders, Bert Brecht: Gespräche und Erinnerungen (Zurich: Verlag der Arche, 1962), 14– 16. “Weil das im Praktikum durchgeführte Experiment nicht nur dasjenige zeigt, was sich nun physikalisch oder chemisch abspielt, sondern immer zugleich, was man, soll das Experiment gelingen, zu tun oder zu lassen hat.” 19. Anders, Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 310. “Die Geschichte der Stile und Moralen ist eine niemals abgerissene Kette von Unternehmungen, in denen die Menschheit versucht hat, diese ihre Unfestgelegtheit durch sich selbst auferlegte Verbindlichkeiten zu kompensieren; sich sozial und psychologisch immer aufs neue festzulegen; immer Neues aus sich zu machen; immer etwas, was sie ‘von Natur aus’ nicht gewesen war; was sie aber, sofern sie überhaupt sein wollte, so oder anders sein mußte, weil sie immer nur als bestimmte Gesellschaft, wie verkünstelt diese auch ein mochte, funktionieren konnte.” A more developed statement of these ideas appears in Stern-Anders, “The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification.” 20. Irmingard Staeuble, “‘Psychological Man’ and Human Subjectivity in Historical Perspective,” History of the Human Sciences 4, no. 3 (1991): 417– 32, contextualizes Stern-Anders’s contribution on these points within mid-century social theory. 21. Anders, Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 274. “Erst einmal aber kommt es ausschließlich darauf an, daß er mit dem Experiment beginne, also ‘moralische Streckübungen’ versuche, Überdehnungen seiner gewohnten Phantasie- und Gefühlsleistungen. . . . Die Waffen des Angreifers bestimmen die des Verteidigers. Wenn es unser Schicksal ist, in einer (von uns selbst hergestellten) Welt zu leben, die sich durch ihr

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Übermaß unserer Vorstellung und unserem Fühlen entzieht und uns dadurch tödlich gefährdet, dann haben wir zu versuchen, dieses Übermaß einzuholen.” 22. Anders, Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 313. “. . . ein von uns selbst gemachtes Gerät, mit dessen Hilfe wir die Kapazität unserer Seele ausdehnen.” 23. In this regard, Stern-Anders shares something with the exploration of negative affect by Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), with the difference that he is less concerned with interpreting feeling as a sign of something else (say, social problems) than with wondering how it might change or be changed. 24. Anders, Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 265. 25. See the extended discussion in Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 313– 16, whose poignant inadequacy is all the keener since it attempts to revive ideas first elaborated in his 1930– 1931 habilitation thesis, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen.” For a treatment of the link between Stern-Anders’s early philosophy of music and his better-known technology critique, see Ellensohn, “Von der Musikphänomenologie zur Technikkritik: Zur frühen Musikphilosophie von Günther Anders.” 26. The first live presentation took place at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für neue Musik on July 9, 1962, and the first radio broadcast was on September 4, 1962, via West German Radio Cologne. For further details of Stern-Anders’s attitude toward Eimert in comparison with other contemporary composers, see Jason Dawsey, “The Limits of the Human in the Age of the Technological Revolution: Günther Anders, PostMarxism, and the Emergence of Technology Critique” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2013), 433– 35; as well as Franz Haas, “‘Sul ponte di Hiroshima’: Günther Anders und die Ästhetik in italienischer Sicht,” in Günther Anders kontrovers, ed. Konrad Paul Liessmann (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992), 103– 13. 27. No consensus about the cause of death was reached, and the question was intensely politicized. See Homei, “The Contentious Death of Mr. Kuboyama.” 28. Stern-Anders and Eimert corresponded about Kuboyama in 1957 and 1958, and it was in one of these letters that Stern-Anders revealed himself to be the author of the poem, leaving it up to Eimert to decide whether or not to disclose the authorship or maintain its apparent anonymity; Eimert decided in favor of the latter. It is also worth noting that Anders admitted to Eimert in 1958 that he had initially mischaracterized Kuboyama as a “simple fisherman” in contrast to the skilled technician Anders later learned he was. The published attribute is “little,” whose racializing connotation calls out for a more developed interpretation in terms of the text’s broader rhetorical and ethical strategies. See Michael Custodis, Die soziale Isolation der neuen Musik: Zum Kölner Musikleben nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 131– 32. 29. Anders, Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 346– 47. A recitation of this text appears on Eimert, Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama, Wergo 6773 6, CD (2012; remastered version of WERGO LP, WER 600014, 1966), track 1, at 1:03– 2:41, followed immediately in the same track by Eimert’s composition at 2:43. Subsequent track timings refer to this source. 30. This contrasts with other procedures in the Cologne studio, where compositions had typically contained a preponderance of synthetically produced sound as opposed to manipulating preexistent recordings. Eimert’s correspondence with Stern-Anders suggests that he had initially considered incorporating recorded sounds of a harmonica. Custodis, Die soziale Isolation der neuen Musik, 131– 32. 31. Eimert, “Notes on Epitaph and Sechs Studien,” trans. John Patrick Thomas and W. Richard Rieves, 26– 28, liner notes, Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama,

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32. See Oliver Kautny, “Pionierzeit der elektronischen Musik: Werner MeyerEpplers Einfluß auf Herbert Eimert,” in Musik im Spektrum von Kultur und Gesellschaft, ed. Bernhard Müssgens, Oliver Kautny, and Martin Gieseking (Osnabrück: epOsVerlag, 2001), 315– 37; Elena Ungeheuer, “Producing, Representing, Constructing: Towards a Media-Aesthetic Theory of Action Related to Categories of Experimental Methods,” in Sounds of Science— Sound im Labor (1800– 1930), ed. Julia Kursell (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Preprint 346, 2008), 99– 112; and Jennifer Iverson, “Statistical Form amongst the Darmstadt School,” Music Analysis 33, no. 3 (2014): 341– 87. For a complete historical account of Eimert’s role at the studio, see Iverson, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. 23– 48. 33. Examples of such interpretations are Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (Salzburg: O. Müller, 1948); and Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik. For a recent corrective, see Marcelle Pierson, “The Voice under Erasure: Singing, Melody and Expression in Late Modernist Music” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015). 34. Eimert, “Die sieben Stücke,” Die Reihe 1 (1955): 8– 13, at 10. “Und nochmal das ‘Menschliche’: die heute so gern von der ‘Humanitas’ reden, man könnte wetten, die meisten von ihnen meinen nichts anderes als die vibratogeschwängerte Violinkantilene sul G bei Tschaikowsky. / Vom gesteigerten Espressivo aus gesehen erscheint die ältere, vorexpressive Musik als subjektiv unterentwickelt. Sie hat noch andere Züge mit der elektronischen Musik gemeinsam, als wichtigsten den eines ausgeprägten Materialcharakters. Dabei ist die Materie zum ‘Reden’ gekommen, nicht weil sie selbst sprachbegabt gewesen wäre, sondern weil sie vom Menschen geordnet wurde, gewiß mit Hilfe der Theologie, aber ganz gewiß ohne das triebhaft oder leidend zu sich selbst entschlossene Subjekt im modernen Sinne.” 35. For one early critic, Eimert’s piece was affectively unambiguous in conveying “an immediately moving music of mourning, rich in images.” “Herbert Eimert. Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama. Sechs Studien (1962),” record review in Der Spiegel 25 (13 June 1966), 137, sec. Schallplattenspiegel. Yet the question of “immediacy” was demonstrably less straightforward than the Spiegel reviewer imagined. In a fascinating pair of studies first published in 1966 and 1968 by the music sociologist Vladimír Karbusický, excerpts from Eimert’s Epitaph were played for hundreds of Czech test subjects who, asked to articulate the associations or indeed Vorstellungen the music called to mind, generated an enormous disparity of responses, ranging from fairy tales, to space travel, to nuclear attack (and this without the benefit of any of the intelligible textual prompts present at the beginning of the composition), to the explicitly hopeful vision of a future society of greater humanity and reason. Karbusický, Empirische Musiksoziologie: Erscheinungsformen, Theorie und Philosophie des Bezugs “Musik– Gesellschaft” (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1975), 101– 2. 36. To this point, note the way Eimert co-opts Stern-Anders’s critique of Nazi nature ideology in relation to music aesthetics in Eimert, “Von der Entscheidungsfreiheit des Komponisten,” Die Reihe 3 (1957): 5– 12, at 12n2: “‘That little word “nature” is the darling of terror’” (“‘Das Wortchen “Natur” ist der Liebling des Terrors’”), which quotes directly from Stern-Anders’s analysis of the historical transformation of feelings in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 351n311. 37. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 315. “Vollends töricht ist jene Variante der subjektivistischen Ästhetik, die im Kunstwerk nichts als die Spiegelung oder den

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‘Ausdruck’ eines ohnehin gefühlten Gefühles sieht. . . . Was der Komponist beim Komponieren seines Stückes fühlt, kann er nur vermittels dieses Stückes fühlen. Das heißt: die Kunstwerke erzeugen die Gefühle, und zwar solche sui generis; solche, die ohne die hergestellten Gegenstände sich gar nicht verwirklichen könnten; die unabhängig von der Struktur der Gegenstände, also als bloßes Zumutesein, bestandlos blieben. Auch die Zustände, in die uns Kunstwerke versetzen, sind eben künstlich; wenn man will: ‘Kunstwerke.’” 38. Benjamin, for one, was intimately familiar with phenomenological thinking by way of studies with Moritz Geiger. See Peter D. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 44– 78. 39. Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 555– 56; On the Eternal in Man, 265. 40. For a contemporary exploration of this point, see Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 29– 51. 41. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 275. “Wie der Ausdruck ‘vorsagen’ anzeigt, handelt es sich also um einen Anruf; aber nicht, wie beim Gewissensrufe, um einen primär gehörten, sondern um einen, den man selbst ruft: denn man ruft ja über die Gefälle-Kluft hinüber, so als wären die jenseits der Kluft zurückgebliebenen Vermögen Personen; und sie: die Phantasie und das Gefühl, sind es, die hören sollen, oder denen man überhaupt erst einmal ‘Ohren machen’ will.” 42. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 385– 89, at 386; Being and Time, 336– 40, at 337; translation modified. 43. The key discussion of Gerichtetsein-auf as the disposition of intentional experience is Husserl, “Ideen,” 65– 67; Ideas, 64– 66. 44. Babette Babich, “Angels, the Space of Time, and Apocalyptic Blindness: On Günther Anders’ Endzeit– Endtime,” Ethics & Politics 15 (2013): 144– 74, offers germane reflections on temporality in Stern-Anders’s thinking. 45. Or, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy formulates it in his reading of Stern-Anders, if we stand too close to the fire we get burned, but if we move too far away we forget its existence, just as much at our peril. Dupuy, The Mark of the Sacred, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 175– 94. 46. Anders, Hiroshima ist überall (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982). This is a point noted by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 18– 19, who maintain that the implications Stern-Anders saw in the general state of ongoing imminent war in 1956 have persisted into the present and constitute a form of “biopower in this most negative and horrible sense of the term, a power that rules directly over death. . . . When genocide and atomic weapons put life itself on center stage, then war becomes properly ontological.”

Appendix A 1. [Mersmann, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1925): 372– 88. Proceedings of the Second Conference on Aesthetics and General Art Studies, Berlin, October 16– 18, 1924. Mersmann read his paper at 3:00 p.m. on Day Three, October 18, 1924. Throughout the appendices, notes in brackets are mine. Notes without brackets are the original authors’, though some references have been completed and reformatted for consistency and accessibility.] 2. [Paul Moos, “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Musikästhetik,” Kongress für

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Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft: Bericht (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1914), 416– 29, in which Moos (1863– 1952) categorizes contemporary trends into “biologicalsensualistic aesthetics,” “aesthetics of association,” “aesthetics of empathy” (Einfühlung), “abstract psychologism,” “aesthetics of illusion or aesthetics of conscious selfdeception,” “aesthetic skepticism,” and “the return to concrete idealism.”] 3. [Riemann, “Ideas for a Study ‘On the Imagination of Tone’”; “Ideen zu einer ‘Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen’” (1916). Linking Riemann with the aesthetics of empathy is tendentious on Mersmann’s part. Riemann does not thematize an empathetic identification with musical sound, nor does he tend to draw upon its major exponents, such as Theodor Lipps or Johannes Volkelt. However, as discussed in chapter one, Riemann would certainly have been seen as a typical proponent of a more general psychologistic attitude toward music aesthetics.] 4. [Mersmann is presumably referring to Hermann Kretzschmar, “Anregungen zur musikalischen Hermeneutik,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1902 9 (1903): 47– 66.] 5. [Kretzschmar’s Führer durch den Konzertsaal was an extensive series of popular handbooks on instrumental and vocal music published in several editions from the late 1880s until his death in 1924. Mersmann also refers here to Riemann, L. van Beethovens sämtliche Klavier-Solosonaten. Ästhetische und formal-technische Analyse mit historischen Notizen, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1919).] 6. Harburger, Die Metalogik. Die musikalische Logik. Geometrie der Empfindungen. 7. Kurth, Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts; and Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners “Tristan.” 8. [From this point until the end of his text, Mersmann refers to the terms presented synoptically in his figure A.1. I include the original terms in German in order to facilitate interpretation of that diagram.] 9. Purely linear formal processes [were present] only at the beginning and end of the development of art music, purely motivic music not at all, for, practically speaking, the motive is only conceivable as the point of departure of a development; what is called “motive” in, for example, Wagner has hardly anything in common with this concept of form. 10. For the following discussion, cf. the graphic scheme included as figure A.1. 11. A good example of the absolute contrast of parts is the slow movement of Brahms’s Violin Sonata in A Major, op. 100, in the contrast of the F-major and D-minor period groups.

Appendix B 1. [Plessner, “Mitbericht,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1925): 392– 95. Proceedings of the Second Conference on Aesthetics and General Art Studies, Berlin, October 16– 18, 1924. Following an initial response by Gustav Becking, Plessner read his own response in the session headed by Mersmann’s paper, “On the Phenomenology of Music” (see appendix A).] 2. [See the respective prefaces to the first and second editions of Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99– 124.] 3. [Der Sturm was the premiere Expressionist literary and art periodical, published from 1910 to 1932.]

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4. [Plessner likely refers to Carl Stumpf, Erscheinungen und psychische Funktionen (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1907); and Ewald Hering, Grundzüge der Lehre vom Lichtsinn (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1920), 12.] 5. [David Katz, “Ueber die Natur des Vibrationssinns,” Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift 70, no. 22 (1 June 1923): 706– 8.]

Appendix C 1. [Bekker, “Was Ist Phänomenologie der Musik?” Die Musik 17, no. 4 ( January 1925): 241– 49.] 2. [Bekker is referring to the conference at which Mersmann read the remarks, “On the Phenomenology of Music” (appendix A), to which Plessner among others responded (appendix B), and where Geiger read the text Bekker cites, which seems to have been received as a kind of keynote on the topic (see chapter one). The specific remarks Bekker refers to here appear in “Phänomenologische Ästhetik,” 38– 39; “Phenomenological Aesthetics,” 12– 14.] 3. Bekker, Von den Naturreichen des Klanges. 4. “We must make the fact conceivable that the diversity and number of philosophies not only does not prejudice philosophy itself, that is to say the possibility of a philosophy, but that such diversity is, and has been, absolutely necessary to the existence of the science of philosophy and that it is essential to it.[”] . . . [“]As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts.” [The first quote is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1, Greek Philosophy to Plato (1833), trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 19; the second quote is from Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. Hugh B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21.]

Appendix D 1. [Eimert, “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik,” Melos 5, no. 7 (April 1926): 238– 45.] 2. [ Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s notion of the “originary” or “archetypal phenomenon” (Urphänomenon) is most familiar from his work on anatomy, color theory, and especially plant morphology, in which he supposed that through close attention to many examples of leaves, one could intuit a single underlying basic form that constituted the originary model from which all individual instances sprang. For a distillation of these ideas, see the excerpts collected in Goethe on Science: A Selection of Goethe’s Writings, ed. Jeremy Naydler (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1996), 103– 9.] 3. [The term “immediate given” refers to Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889); Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 3rd ed., trans. F. L. Pogson (London: G. Allen, 1913). The notion of “the self-evident” (Selbstverständlichkeit) appears to be a reference to the opening of Geiger’s extended study, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses,” at 567– 68, where Geiger cautions that phenomenology, unlike the explanatory psychological aesthetics it critiques, is unlikely to produce stunning results or any special libidinal thrill, but instead more prosaic, if more philosophically defensible, styles of argument.] 4. [As becomes explicit in Eimert’s further discussion below, he has Bekker (appendix C) in mind here.]

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5. [Husserl does not seem to have used precisely the phrase “ideational intending” (ideeierendes Meinen) in writing, though the “eidetic” and “intentionality” (both Intentionalität and Meinen) are hallmarks of his lexicon.] 6. [As discussed in chapter two, the terminology of Außenkonzentration and Innenkonzentration derives from Geiger, as in, for example, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses,” 636– 42.] 7. [Mersmann, “Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik,” 262– 63; and Mersmann, “Zur Stilgeschichte der Musik,” 67.] 8. [A substantial section of Goethe’s 1810 treatise, Farbenlehre, is titled “Sinnlichsittliche Wirkungen der Farbe” (rendered “Effect of Color with Reference to Moral Associations” in the standard translation), and contains a systematic account of affective and ethical associations with various colors. Goethe, Theory of Colors, trans. Charles Locke Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840), 304.] 9. [Eimert may have in mind a text such as Arnold Schering, “Zur Grundlegung der musikalischen Hermeneutik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 9 (1914): 168– 75, in which compositional narrative is described as a matter of Kräfteschauspiel, a “drama of forces” and hence of contrasting or conflicting tendencies that must be resolved over the unfolding of some form. Kurth, meanwhile, deploys notions of force and energy throughout his work.] 10. [Representative examples of the first category include Guido Adler, Der Stil in der Musik 1, Prinzipien und Arten des musikalischen Stils (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911); Gustav Becking, “‘Hören’ und ‘Analysieren.’ Zu Hugo Riemanns Analyse von Beethovens Klaviersonaten,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1, no. 10 ( July 1919): 587– 603; and Ernst Bücken and Paul Mies, “Grundlagen, Methoden und Aufgaben der musikalischen Stilkunde,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 5, nos. 4– 5 ( January– February 1923): 219– 25. Eimert’s inclusion of the much older scholarship of FrançoisJoseph Fétis (1784– 1871), August Wilhelm Ambros (1816– 1876), and Philipp Spitta (1841– 94) suggests a generalized admiration for the emergence of professionalized music history as an enterprise distinct from criticism.] 11. Bekker, Von den Naturreichen des Klangs. 12. [Bekker introduces the term “sound monad” (with no evident Leibnizian connotation) in Von den Naturreichen des Klangs, 13, in the context of distinguishing between a mode of acoustic sensation that takes sonority to be a bounded unity (Klangmonad) and one that takes sonority to be a synthesis (Klangsynthese) that is nonetheless analytically divisible. Bekker thinks the former is fundamentally a temporal phenomenon and one that more strongly characterizes vocal sonority, whereas the latter he takes to be a spatializing phenomenon and one that more strongly characterizes instrumental sonority.] 13. Bekker, “Was Ist Phänomenologie der Musik?,” 243; “What Is the Phenomenology of Music?,” 184. 14. [Bekker, Von den Naturreichen des Klangs, 69. Bekker’s basic point (somewhat obscured in Eimert’s rendering) is that musical sound in medieval Europe would appear to have been produced primarily by the voice and hence directly “felt” as a “physiological” fact on any particular occasion of music-making. Whether or not it is true that voices outweighed instruments in actual medieval practice (a premise Bekker among many others takes as given on the basis of archival notated evidence), the logic of this line of thought leads him to suppose that, at later historical moments, a greater role for “mechanically produced sound” implies the operation of a “physical” world-

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view from the onset of modernity onward. The actual passage from Bekker reads “The living sonority as a unit of sensation is a constituent phenomenon of a primarily physiologically felt image of the world. It is based on the feeling of the human as the midpoint and measure of everything that appears. It elevates the human to the structuring object of all the arts.” (“Der lebendige Klang als Empfindungseinheit ist Teilerscheinung eines primär physiologisch empfundenen Weltbildes. Es beruht auf der Empfindung des Menschen als des Mittelpunktes und Maßes alles Erscheinungshaften. Es erhebt den Menschen zum Gegenstand der Gestaltung aller Künste.”)] 15. [This refers to an excerpt from an 1884 letter of Friedrich Nietzsche, which includes a note headed “Zur Auseinanderhaltung der antiken Rhythmik (‘ZeitRhythmik’) von der barbarischen (‘Affekt-Rhythmik’).” See Nietzsche, Werke 18, ed. Otto Crusius (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1912), 337– 38.] 16. [Hegel, Aesthetics 2, 927– 28; translation modified (“die eigentliche Tiefe des Tönens”). In the cited passage, Hegel is describing the way a key-defining pitch collection, though it forms an “inherent unity,” nonetheless constitutively admits genuine and even “sharp” and “discordant” conflict among its individual members. This internal difference and contradiction is what lends a key its sense of “actual depth,” as opposed to differences of mere acoustical pitch height.] 17. [Bekker, “Wagner-Studien,” Die Musik 17, no. 2 ( January 1924): 81– 93.]

Appendix E 1. [Günther Stern, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens (Erläutert am Hören impressionistischer Musik),” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 9, nos. 11– 12 (1927): 610– 19.] 2. [Representative here is Wilibald Gurlitt, “Die Wandlungen des Klangideals der Orgel im Lichte der Musikgeschichte,” in Gurlitt, ed., Bericht uber die Freiburger Tagung für deutsche Orgelkunst vom 27. bis 30. Juli 1926 (Augsburg: Bärenreiter, 1926), 11– 42.] 3. [The idea that forms of intuition differ with differences among the areas of knowledge that correspond to them runs throughout Husserl’s work. Right away on the first page of the first chapter of the Ideas of 1913, he writes, “To each science there corresponds a region of objects as the domain of the science’s research, and to all the knowledge gained in them . . . certain intuitions correspond as original sources of the justification that demonstrates their correctness, intuitions in which objects of the region are themselves given and are given, at least partially, in an originary way.” Husserl, Ideen 1, 7; Ideas 1, 9.] 4. [Strictly speaking, Pelléas et Mélisande has no “overture,” just a couple dozen untitled measures prior to the first scene.] 5. For now, we will ignore the songs and all vocal works. The inherently active element that always adheres to singing as an immediately human activity was not lost in art song even during the bloom of the Debussy-Ravel phase (to a minimal degree even for the kind of singing that barely approaches “cantus,” merely “res quae canitur.” So, we will limit ourselves to instrumental music: a quartet movement can be heard as pure happening to a completely different extent than can a sung melody. [SternAnders’s distinction, drawn from a famous passage in Augustine’s Confessions, between cantus and res quae canitur— that is, between the “song” and the “thing sung about”— is an idiosyncratic gesture in this context. Its significance will only become clear further in the discussion.]

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6. That Impressionist music must be reckoned under the type “state” (‘Zustand’) is evident when we compare it with, say, the decidedly object-like (gegenständlich) type, whistling. Whistling, although also of an acoustical nature, is decidedly an object (Gegenüberstand). It is “there,” while I am “here.” It “allows space around itself ”; “it does not fill it.” In contrast, we are “in” Impressionist music: it is “here” in that multiple sense in which the weather, a situation, and so on is also “here.” Certainly, Impressionist music is not the only music that is not present as an object. Even in a march, we are “in it.” But this being motorically identical with the march is something completely different from being passively identical with Impressionist music. We are in it, as we are in the air, in water, in the woods, and so on. (No wonder the titles of Impressionist works so often appeal to this sort of association.) 7. It shouldn’t be denied that, for casual hearing, the consciously engaged attention plays a small role, since every music already becomes monarchical on its own and does not allow anything to manage without it. On the contrary, we are only interested in hearing that does not, so to speak, swim in music, in order to be impressed by it, but rather in that kind of hearing that must be realized by conductors, critics, and the like. 8. [Isolde’s dying words in the last bars of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1859) are “ertrinken, versinken, unbewußt, höchste Lust!” (“to drown, to sink unconscious— supreme bliss!”).] 9. [Lebensphilosophie (“philosophy of life”) was associated with the vitalist biology of Hans Driesch (1867– 1941) and the mystical psychology of Ludwig Klages (1872– 1956), and more generally with the desire for an alternative to the supposed mechanistic tendencies of contemporaneous sciences of life and mind. Stern-Anders’s point is that, just as the intellectual failure of Lebensphilosophie stems from its assumption of a false dichotomy between mechanistic and vitalistic processes, the phenomenological description of music (as of everyday life) will fail if it is unable to identify alternatives beyond an assumed choice between active and passive musical qualities and their apparently corresponding modes of attention.] 10. It makes no difference for the significance of Augustine’s distinction that, in our case, we are dealing with the res quae auditur [“the thing that is heard”— SternAnders’s phrase, not Augustine’s], as it is precisely the meaning of “res” to have its being independently of possible acts. [In the distinction between cantus and res quae canitur, Stern-Anders refers to a celebrated passage in book 10 of the Confessions, where Augustine recalls himself as a young man agonizing over the pleasure he took in the sheer sound of liturgical song (the cantus as a sounding aspect of temporal experience, regardless of its textual or ideational dimensions), when he was meant instead to be attending primarily or solely to the spiritual significance of “that of which is to be sung” (the res quae canitur). “When I remember the tears I poured out in the early days after recovering my faith, and when even now I’m moved not by the song itself but by its content (quod moveor non cantu, sed rebus quae cantantur), which is sung with a clear voice and a highly appropriate modulation, I again recognize the great usefulness of this tradition. . . . Yet when in my own case it happens that the song moves me more than the subject (ut me amplius cantus quam res, quae canitur, moveat), I confess I’ve committed a punishable sin, and then I’d rather not hear someone singing.” Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: The Modern Library, 2017), 324. Though seemingly distant from the matter at hand, Augustine was a common reference point for Heidegger’s students in these years. See Heinz Edelstein, “Die Musikanschauung Augustins nach seiner Schrift ‘De musica’” (a dissertation advised by Gurlitt, with

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Husserl as second reader); and Wilhelm Hoffmann, “Philosophische Interpretation der Augustinusschrift de arte musica” (PhD diss., University of Freiburg, 1931) (advised by Heidegger, with Gurlitt as second reader). Most proximately, compare Besseler’s 1925 discussion of the same cantus/res dichotomy, where he claims that many Christian musical practices, from early liturgical chant to Protestant hymnody, were characterized by a “basic attitude” (Grundeinstellung) in which the believer listens “past” the acoustical presence of song toward a non-acoustical intentional object, some matter of belief, lying “behind” it. Besseler, “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens,” 42; “Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening,” 57.] 11. [Ferruccio Busoni, Von der Einheit der Musik (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1922), 150– 53. Busoni argues there that “every notation is already a transcription of an abstract idea” (“Jede Notation ist schon Transkription eines abstrakten Einfalls” [150].)] 12. [“Anacoluthon” is a rhetorical figure in which one grammatical construction is left incomplete or interrupted by another (as in Hamlet’s “To sleep— perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub”).] 13. [The “status ex quo canitur,” the “state in which one sings,” is of course not Augustine’s but Stern-Anders’s phrase.] 14. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding (book 2, chapter 9), trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 134. It is evident that the familiar application of the theory of perception/apperception to music, which Leibniz himself made, is not identical to ours. Leibniz, “The Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on Reason” (1714), in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker (D. Reidel: Dordrecht, 1969), 636– 42, at 641 (chapter 17). [In the New Essays, Leibniz had written, “I would prefer to distinguish between perception and being aware (s’appercevoir). For instance, a perception of light or color of which we are aware is made up of many minute perceptions of which we are unaware; and a noise which we perceive but do not attend to is brought within reach of our awareness by a tiny increase or addition.”] 15. [Here, Stern-Anders specifically cites the 1907 Durand edition of the vocal score, page 127.] 16. [A “proclitic” is a word so deemphasized as to become virtually part of the succeeding word: you in y’all, or it in ’tis.]

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Index

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 122, 140, 165, 169, 175, 177, 189 Bekker, Paul, 22, 24, 26, 51, 55, 58–59, 66, 122, 182–90, 195–97, 254n12, 254n14 Benjamin, Walter, 147–49, 158, 251n38 Bergson, Henri, 192, 253n3 (appendix D) Besseler, Heinrich, 22, 25, 99–142, 224n41, 231n17, 236n6, 256–57n10 Binswanger, Ludwig, 224n37 body, 44–45, 135, 243n67 Brahms, Johannes, 252n11 Brecht, Bertolt, 143, 147–49, 150, 158 Brentano, Franz, 218n60 Bruckner, Anton, 151 Bücher, Karl, 100 Bücken, Ernst, 195 Busoni, Ferruccio, 202, 257n11

Abraham, Otto, 6, 10 access, modes of (Zugangsweise), 48, 103, 105, 112, 119, 132, 141, 198–99, 237n15 acoustics, 24, 27–41, 43, 45–49, 51, 60, 101, 126, 178, 180, 192–93, 196–97. See also sonority Adler, Guido, 195 Adorno, Theodor W., 69, 143, 216–17n51, 218n57, 235n66 aesthesiology, 181, 244n75 Ambros, August Wilhelm, 195 Anders, Günther. See Stern-Anders, Günther Ansermet, Ernest: 20 anti-Semitism, 96, 236n2 apperception, 88–91, 93–94, 192, 233n47, 257n14. See also attention Arendt, Hannah, 16, 23, 237n7, 248n15 attention, attentiveness, 25, 81–95, 103, 131, 140, 199–208, 236n5. See also apperception attitude (Einstellung, Haltung), 19, 24, 28–31, 52, 57, 67, 70, 147, 164; acoustical, 29, 36–41, 45; aesthetic, 103, 116; dynamic, 41, 45, 51; harmonic, 36–37, 40, 45; natural, 5, 24, 28, 37–38; static, 41, 45, 51 Augustine, Saint, 99, 202, 255n5, 256– 57n10

Capellen, Georg, 30, 33–36 care (Sorge), 119–21 Catholicism, 1, 5 Chopin, Frédéric, 75–79, 231n28 Clauss, Ludwig Ferdinand, 99, 236n2 Cohn, Arthur Wolfgang, 22, 24, 27, 51, 61–66 Cold War, 25–26, 145–61, 251n46 colonialism, 6–7, 10, 212n9 community (Gemeinschaft), 100, 113, 116– 17, 122, 123, 126, 138–40, 141; distinguished from society (Gesellschaft), 4, 240n44 comparative musicology, 6–12, 19 concentration, inward vs. outward, 24– 25, 67, 70–72, 80–83, 193

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 35, 72, 103, 166, 169, 174; Brandenburg Concertos, 207 Becking, Gustav, 195, 252n1

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Conrad, Waldemar, 219–20n68 consciousness, 8, 36, 42–43, 136, 178, 181; individual psychological, 48, 90, 192; intentional, 62–63, 95, 158 consonance, 7, 12, 32–35, 124, 221– 22n16, 241n52, 242n54; “spacingconsonance” (Abstandskonsonanz), 127–29, 130, 132–33, 137, 242n61. See also sonority Dalcroze. See Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile Dalcroze eurythmics, 44–45, 65, 222n23 dance, 67, 105, 201; suite, 102–15, 117, 121, 122–23, 134–35 Debussy, Claude, 24–25, 67–98, 199– 208, 230n12; Pelléas et Mélisande, 84, 86–89, 91, 93, 205–6, 255n4; “Pour les sixtes,” 75–80, 91–94 dehumanization, 24, 71, 73–80, 97, 155, 229n3 de Man, Hendrik, 13, 17 dissonance, 33–35 Driesch, Hans, 256n9 Edelstein, Heinz, 99, 256n10 Eimert, Herbert, 22, 24, 26, 51, 59–61, 191–97, 230n12, 249n28; Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama, 152–61, 250n35 Einfühlung. See empathy, projective Einstellung. See attitude Eisler, Hanns, 143 empathy, projective (Einfühlung), 15, 52, 164, 131–32, 183, 192, 225n45, 225n51, 231n20, 242n58 essence (Wesen), 44, 49–50, 56, 59, 62, 122, 167, 170, 172, 183–84, 190, 191–97 Europe, 3–12 Expressionism, 69, 179–80 feeling, 25, 60–61, 65, 74, 82, 150–61, 191, 193, 249n23 Fétis, François-Joseph, 195 Freud, Sigmund, 13–14, 214–15n35 Froberger, Johann Jacob, 112–15 fulfillment (Erfüllung), of intentional meaning, 1, 60, 63–64, 125–26, 138, 241n49, 242n54 Furtwängler, Märit (and Wilhelm), 1

index

Geiger, Moritz, 24, 51, 56–58, 68, 70, 80– 83, 165, 182, 192, 226n65, 232n35 Geisler, Johanna, 1 Gemeinschaft. See community genocide, 160, 212n9, 251n46 German Democratic Republic (East Germany), 23, 142 Giese, Fritz, 247n6 givenness, 8–9, 36, 43, 49–50, 57, 60, 62–65, 89, 120, 178, 180, 192, 194, 196, 202, 255n3 Goebbels, Joseph, 141 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 192, 194, 253n2 (appendix D) Güldenstein, Gustav, 22, 24, 29–45, 48–51, 52, 55, 65, 221n12, 222n21, 222nn23–24, 223n30, 224n37, 237n15 Gurlitt, Wilibald, 99, 118, 124, 198, 256n10 Haeckel, Ernst, 212n10 Halm, August, 64, 187 Hanslick, Eduard, 80 Harburger, Walter, 218n57 Hauptmann, Moritz, 30 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 53–54, 169, 171, 175, 176 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 19, 197, 253n4 (appendix C), 255n16 Heidegger, Martin, 15–16, 17, 19, 68, 83, 96, 99, 100, 101, 118–21, 123, 129, 135, 136–38, 145, 213n24, 216n50, 232n37, 235n60, 240n41, 243n67, 244n73, 256n10; Being and Time, 83, 119, 136, 159 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 30, 31–32, 41, 90, 221–22n16 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 225n51 Hering, Ewald, 180 hermeneutics, 52, 55, 59, 164–65, 187–88, 224n41 Hindemith, Paul, 104 Hiroshima, 145, 160 Hitler, Adolf, 141 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 163 Horkheimer, Max, 16, 143 Hornbostel, Erich Moritz von, 6, 10, 11 Husserl, Edmund, 1, 5, 14, 17, 18–19, 24,

index

29, 37–38, 40, 48, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 99, 145, 165, 192, 198, 208, 222n21, 224n41, 227n72, 236n2, 256n10; Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 43–44, 50, 62–64, 255n3; Logical Investigations, 14, 18 idealism, 44, 60, 193; German (Kantian), 1, 218n59; transcendental, 18 Impressionism, 84, 95, 168, 199–208 inflation, monetary, 62, 120. See also value Ingarden, Roman, 20, 48, 219–20n68, 220n71, 224n44, 236n6 intention, intentionality, 1, 49, 60, 64–65, 125–26, 160, 192, 208, 251n43 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, 29 jazz, 136, 141 Jewish ethnicity, 1, 5, 23, 51, 96, 99, 145, 236n2 Jonas, Hans, 216n50 Kandinsky, Wassily, 179 Kant, Immanuel, 32, 178, 182, 199 Karbusický, Vladimír, 250n35 Katz, David, 180 key. See tonality Klages, Ludwig, 256n9 Klang. See sonority Klemperer, Otto, 1, 18, 211n2 Kretzschmar, Hermann, 164–65, 188 Kuboyama Aikichi, 143, 152–56, 249nn27–28 Kurth, Ernst, 46–47, 49, 55, 64, 114, 166, 194, 198, 242n61, 254n9 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 205, 233n47, 257n14 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 182–83 liberalism, 16, 69, 139, 141, 144, 227n72, 229n6 life, 103; factical, 117–20; philosophy of (Lebensphilosophie), 201, 256n9 Lipps, Theodor, 14, 231n20, 252n3 (appendix A) Lissa, Zofia, 220n71, 236n6 Löwith, Karl, 99–100, 141–42

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279

Mach, Ernst, 90 Machaut, Guillaume de, 140 Mahler, Gustav, 177 Marcuse, Herbert, 16, 143 Marshall Islands, 143, 145–46 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 218n61 Mersmann, Hans, 24, 26, 27, 51, 52–56, 57, 58, 59, 163–77, 181, 187–88, 194, 195, 233n48 Minkowski, Eugène, 224n37 Mises, Ludwig von, 227n72 Mitmachen. See participation Mitsein. See withness money. See value: monetary Moos, Paul, 164, 251–52n2 Moser, Hans Joachim, 140–41 motet (medieval), 124–36 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 140, 171, 175, 177 Müller-Blattau, Johannes, 241n52 Münsterberg, Hugo, 247n6 National Socialism, 23, 72, 99–100, 141– 42, 245n82, 250n36 natural attitude. See attitude: natural naturalism, 5–6, 8, 15, 18–19, 21, 24, 28– 29, 31, 39–40, 43, 51, 56, 57, 59, 63, 77, 81–82, 101, 117–18, 135, 227n72, 230n12, 244n72, 244n75 Nazism. See National Socialism Neoclassicism, 231n17 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 197 noema, 224n41 Novalis, 225n51 nuclear violence, 143–44, 160, 251n46 Oettingen, Arthur von, 30, 221n12 Ono, Yoko, 20 Ortega y Gasset, José, 16, 24, 67, 69– 83, 86, 89, 90, 91, 95–98, 138, 229n6, 230n12, 231n17, 235n66, 235n68 pandemic, influenza, 66 Papen, Franz von, 141–42, 245n81 participation (Mitmachen), 115, 126, 207 participatory hearing, 115–36 Pfitzner, Hans, 64, 187 phenomenology: defined, 1–2, 15, 18–20,

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phenomenology (continued) 47–49, 117–18, 158, 165, 178, 183, 192; as a historical movement, 13, 15–17, 21; of music, 17–18, 29–30, 36–37, 41, 42, 45, 51–66, 77, 118, 163–208; vs. psychology, 12, 19, 48, 81–82, 101, 164, 169 physiology, psychophysiology, 8, 41, 46, 76–77, 90, 101, 166 Plessner, Helmuth, 1, 22, 26, 102, 138–40, 178–81, 211n2, 244nn75–77 psychoanalysis, 214–15n35 psychologism, 6, 14, 15, 18–19, 21, 24, 44, 45, 81–82, 93, 100–101, 104 psychology, 6–8, 10–15, 18–19, 24, 25, 35, 46–49, 51–52, 55, 56–57, 68, 89, 95, 97, 163–64, 224n41; anti-, 19, 69– 72; behaviorist, 148; descriptive, 18, 218n60; experimental, 19, 90, 101, 144, 117, 200; explanatory, 15, 18, 39, 81–82; racial, 99; tone, 41; in the university, 8, 13, 14, 81, 21 psychotechnics, 13, 144, 146, 148 race, biological theory of, 5–6 racism, 141, 236n2. See also psychology: racial Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 223n30 realism, 18, 218n58 reduction, eidetic, 62 rhythm: phrase, 108–9; rhythmic modes, 124, 127, 129, 134–35 Riegl, Alois, 8–9, 213n23 Riemann, Hugo, 30, 45–46, 49, 52, 64, 101, 106, 164–65, 170, 221n12, 224n41, 252n3 (appendix A) Rivera, Miguel Primo de, 229n6 Romanticism, 57, 69, 75, 79, 163, 189, 201 Rosenmüller, Johann, 111–12, 117 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 16, 136–37, 244n71 scale, musical, 7, 30, 42 Schaeffer, Pierre, 20 Schäfke, Rudolf, 224n41 Schein, Johann Hermann, 105–11 Scheler, Max, 1, 2–13, 15–16, 17, 59, 63, 65, 68, 99, 135, 145, 158, 165, 211n7, 212n9,

index

212n15, 213n24; Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, 63, 232n38, 243n67 Schenker, Heinrich, 30, 187, 224n41 Schering, Arnold, 64, 112, 131–32, 194, 242n55, 254n9 Schiller, Friedrich, 182–83 Schoenberg, Arnold, 30, 140 Schubert, Franz, 57–58 sonority (Klang), 76–77, 111, 123, 127, 129– 30, 133, 178, 185–86, 192–97, 254n14 Spitta, Philipp, 195 state, statefulness (Zustand, Zuständlichkeit): for Geiger, 81–83; for SternAnders, 83–85, 87, 94–95, 199–208 Staudinger, Hans, 100 Stein, Edith, 220n71 Stern, Günther. See Stern-Anders, Günther Stern, William, 13, 144 Stern-Anders, Günther, 16, 22, 24–25, 26, 67, 72, 83–98, 99, 138, 143–61, 198– 208, 220n72, 232n35, 235n66, 237n15, 240n41, 249n28; “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen,” 219–20n68, 232n35, 234n54, 235n67, 249n25 Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung, SA), 99, 141–42, 245n82 Stravinsky, Igor, 229n3 Stumpf, Carl, 6–12, 41, 180, 253n4 (appendix B) style, stylization, 78, 102–3, 105–8, 109, 193–95 suite. See dance: suite Thirty Years’ War, 116–17, 121, 239n31 Titchener, Edward B., 13, 225n51 tonality, 7, 30–31, 41–42, 45, 48, 121–22, 127 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 240n44 value: monetary, 9, 27, 62–63; musical, 27, 57, 62–66, 120, 190, 227n76. See also inflation, monetary Vitry, Philippe de, 140 Volkelt, Johannes, 252n3 (appendix A)

index

Wagner, Richard, 166, 189, 197, 201, 252n9, 256n8 Weill, Kurt, 104 Weimar Republic, 18, 19, 37, 62, 97, 102, 104, 116, 147, 217n53, 220n73 West German Radio, 22, 61, 152, 249n26 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 194 withness, 234n58; in relation to art, 82– 83, 94–95, 207–8; in relation to others (Mitsein), 100–101, 135, 136–38, 208

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281

World War I, 1–7, 13, 16–17, 28, 62, 116, 147, 212n10 World War II, 27, 61, 149 world, worldhood, 3–12, 68–69, 96–98, 208, 212n15 Worringer, Wilhelm, 131 Wundt, Wilhelm, 11, 90, 233n47 youth music movement ( Jugendmusikbewegung), 104