Being Musically Attuned

The Act of Listening to Music

Erik Wallrup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317175384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Listening according to mood is likely to be what most people do when they listen to music. We want to take part in, or even be part of, the emerging world of the musical work. Using the sources of musical history and philosophy, Erik Wallrup explores this extremely vague and elusive phenomenon, which is held to be fundamental to musical hearing. Wallrup unfolds the untold musical history of the German word for 'mood', Stimmung, which in the 19th century was abundant in the musical aesthetics of the German-Austrian sphere. Martin Heidegger's much-discussed philosophy of Stimmung is introduced into the field of music, allowing Wallrup to realise fully the potential of the concept. Mood in music, or, to be more precise, musical attunement, should not be seen as a peculiar kind of emotionality, but that which constitutes fundamentally the relationship between listener and music. Exploring mood, or attunement, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of the act of listening to music.

PART I
The Concept

Chapter 1
Stimmung in Music: Vicissitudes of a Concept 1770–1930

The Resonating Concept: On the Sources of Stimmung

There are many ways to translate Stimmung. The technical term in music is ‘tuning’: the adjustment of an instrument – the tension of the strings, the length of tubing – in order for it to produce the correct pitches. Closely related to tuning is ‘temperament’, used in musical terminology for the ‘temperation’ of scales but in everyday language as a synonym of character; but this latter meaning is musically not really suitable (unless, of course, a musician’s performance is extraordinarily expressive).¹ Since the term is not only technical but also affective, there are other possibilities: first of all the common translation, ‘mood’; yet, when the mood of the music is evasive, ‘atmosphere’ can be preferable. Mood is something personal and subjective; it is related to human beings, but it also has an object-related side, making it possible to ascribe a mood to a landscape or a painting. The absence of a musical element in mood should, however, be pointed out. There are also more specific alternatives in English for the term. The circumstances of how the words used to render the term Stimmung vary in translations of Heidegger are crucial for this study: ‘attunement’ has often been chosen for his later works, whereas ‘mood’ is used for the earlier phases.

‘Tuning’, ‘temperament’, ‘mood’, ‘character’, ‘atmosphere’ and ‘attunement; these are only a few of the possible translations. Behind that single word Stimmung can be found a manifold of meanings, with each sense interconnected. If the etymological root stimm- is included, the range is even greater: ‘voice’ (Stimme), ‘part’ (Stimme), ‘dispose’ (stimmen), ‘correspond’ (übereinstimmen), ‘agree’ (einstimmen), ‘dejection’ (Verstimmung). At times Stimmung is treated almost as a mystical concept, relating to the most brooding parts of German thinking and literature. More apparent nowadays is the trivialization of the word: in music, where it is used for easy-listening sentimentality; in daily life, where almost everything concerning ups and downs in humour can be included.

Leo Spitzer has suggested that Stimmung is a loan translation from Latin words such as consonantia and concordia or temperamentum and temperatura,² but if that is the case, it is translated into German with a root much older than the abstract verbal noun. Grimms’ famous Deutsches Wörterbuch derives the noun from the verb stimmen, which in its turn is derived from Stimme, so even if Stimmung has nothing directly to do with voices, the linkage is indicated by its etymology. There are three different principal meanings of stimmen in Grimm: first of all it means ‘to do something with the voice’; secondly, ‘to harmonize with’ or ‘to correspond to’; thirdly, ‘to give something a musical or verbal expression’.³ Stimmung is derived from any of these three different meanings in all its usages: the act of giving voice to somebody, the determination (Bestimmung) of something, voting, the tuning of an instrument and the disposition of a human being. The breadth of this web of meanings is impressive for, as we have seen, it reaches from basic human expression to politics; but in this context it is worth reflecting on the fact that the musical significance is secondary to the other meanings of voice and correspondence. Stimmung – that hackneyed expression in the context of ‘classical music’ – at first had nothing to do with music at all.

German is not the only language with such a word. It is found in many other Germanic languages: stemming in Dutch, stämning in Swedish and stemning in Danish and Norwegian. Turning to the Slavic languages, there are also examples of polysemantic words that relate to the tuning of the string, the mood of a person and the atmosphere of a landscape. With no etymological connection to Stimmung, Russian has nastroenie (with a rich variety of words having the root stroy-, however, not including any connection to voice and pitch), Polish nastrój and Czech nálada.⁴ But the root system of etymology is wider and richer in the case of the German word. As we saw, the Latin word temperamentum has found its way into the modern European languages, but its various meanings are limited. More historically significant is harmonía in ancient Greek, with the interrelated verb harmozein having the basic meaning ‘to adjust’ – harmonía is in fact part of the history of Stimmung.⁵

When the origin of the affective word Stimmung is discussed, it is usually said to be musical, meaning the tuning of an instrument. This usage of the word is to be found in the early sixteenth century; in the mid-eighteenth century it was introduced to the sphere of the human mind, still with a close connection to the musical source; and the modern signification, with the musical source either implicit or even neglected, comes from the 1770s.⁶ Still, the poetical figure of the string instrument as something emotional can be found from antiquity onwards: the soul is likened to an instrument, sometimes tuned, sometimes out of tune. That is common ground for poets, as a simile or a metaphor. The starting point for the development of the word concerned the mind, the soul or the psyche, but later it was also used to describe the character of landscapes, gardens and buildings. In David Wellbery’s account, the aesthetic concept Stimmung has a clearly metaphorical function with three different but related musical sources: the act of tuning an instrument; the result of this act, that is, the instrument being in tune; and the instrument being ready to be played. Here we are dealing with something objective – an instrument is or has been tuned – and there is no subjectivity to be found. It is when this significance begins to be dissolved metaphorically that the ego quality can emerge.⁷

However, even though the common view is that Stimmung comes from music, it is a remarkably unclear concept in that field. Modern encyclopedic dictionaries of music in German only have entries concerning tuning, leaving the other sense – in fact equally conventional – without attention, probably because it is taken as a mere metaphor. This is not coincidence. With the exception of a short entry in Hermann Mendel’s 12-volume Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon,⁸ the affective term Stimmung has no entry of its own in the more important lexica or encyclopedias of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There seems to be no need to define what is only a figure of speech, or something overtly subjective. No questions are asked about the origin of Stimmung, before it was used as a term for the tuning of an instrument. The word is, as we have seen already, much older than that sixteenth-century usage, and it could very well be argued that stimmen as the act of tuning was a metaphor or metonym, taken from the meaning ‘to adjust’ or ‘to accord’.⁹ In language it is almost impossible to find an undisputable origin.

Spitzer never tries to locate the specific passage from Stimmung in music to Stimmung of the mind in his celebrated investigation of the prehistory of the word, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’. Instead, he pursues a practice that he calls ‘historical semantics’, a combination of lexicography and the history of ideas. If the affective term Stimmung has its origin in the eighteenth century, its semantic forerunners came much earlier. In the very title of the treatise, Spitzer makes the reader aware that the term must be understood in the light of the initially Pythagorean idea of a world harmony. Indeed, he says that it is possible to sum up his book with the claim that Stimmung is the fruit of the different occasions Platonism was revived in the modern period and, together with these revivals, the return of the concept of world harmony.

According to Spitzer, Pythagoras himself had assumed a fourfold harmony: of the strings of instruments, of the body and soul, of the political state and of the sky. The idea was taken over by Plato when, in mythological language, he described the harmony of the spheres in The Republic and when he wrote Timaeus; later on it was transformed to the medieval correspondence between musica mundana, musica humana and musica instrumentalis. With the Enlightenment the nucleus idea of world harmony vanished, dechristianization started and from then on music was no longer at the centre of Western culture. Or, in Spitzer’s own words:

In ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, which were centered about music, musical terms expanded, attracting other words; from the period of Enlightenment on, European mankind came to lose the feeling of a central ‘musicality’; it is other Affektkomplexe which dominate our times.¹⁰

One can doubt if music had a more central position in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages than in the Romantic era, but even more problematic is the circumstance that the concept to be investigated by Spitzer is said to emerge at the same time as it evaporates. Spitzer was perhaps aware of the paradox in his thesis: ‘At the end of the eighteenth century Stimmung was crystallized, that is, it was robbed of its blossoming life.’¹¹ As we will see, the concept did anything but wither and die. Furthermore, Spitzer ignores the rise of autonomous music around 1800, and also the gaining of music as a paradigmatic art to have an impact on the understanding of language.

Another flaw concerns the prehistory of the concept, despite the encyclopedic urge in Spitzer’s search for signs of the tradition of world harmony, moving from ancient times to its recent traces in the twentieth century, trying to capture even the faintest echo of that harmony. One of the most important predecessors is not noted, namely Leibniz’s concept of harmonia. Through some philosophical elaboration, it is possible to detect the parallels between Stimmung and the structure of the pre-established harmony which puts the monad in tune with the world. Leibniz also tends to explain his complex notion through musical metaphors: the harmony works without any external connection, like two choirs singing together without knowledge of one another; and the relation between monad and world is described as that between two attuned strings.¹²

But Spitzer’s ‘crystallization’ thesis can also be cast in doubt. When the Germanist Caroline Welsh tracks the term in contexts such as philosophy, literature, the natural sciences, psychiatry and psychology, she suggests that Stimmung was characterized by a vagueness that gave it a resistance to the different scientific models following on from one another. The present chapter is an attempt to give an account of the vicissitudes of the concept of Stimmung, now focused on the aesthetics of music, yet related to the discourses in aesthetics in general, in philosophy and in the sciences. There are many smaller and greater shifts to be registered. This conceptual historiography is, however, not only written with the objective of understanding only the history, but also with the aim of better understanding the phenomenon of Stimmung in music. Later on I will deal with the philosophical understanding of Stimmung, a phenomenon with its own changes and displacements, but which I also assume to be a constitutive part of human existence. This means, too, that the study of the sometimes more, sometimes less marginal concept is followed by a discussion in which it turns into a key concept. However, my history begins on the fringes of the aesthet...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Concept
• Part II Elucidation
• Bibliography
• Keywords Index
• Name Index