An Unnatural Attitude

Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought

Benjamin Steege

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226763033
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic—a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the influence of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics, proponents of this new style argued for the description of music as something accessible neither through introspection nor through experimental research, but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation toward the world. With this approach, music acquires meaning in particular when the act of listening is understood to be shared with others.Benjamin Steege interprets this discourse as the response of a young, post–World War I generation amid a virtually uninterrupted experience of war, actual or imminent—a cohort for whom disenchantment with scientific achievement was to be answered by reasserting the value of imaginative thought. Steege draws on a wide range of published and unpublished texts from music theory, pedagogy, criticism, and philosophy of music, some of which appear for the first time in English translation in the book's appendixes. An Unnatural Attitude considers the question: What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?

[ Chapter 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 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 non-acoustic 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 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 organization 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 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 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 sophisticate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Examples
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Unnatural Attitude
• Chapter 2. Debussy, Outward and Open
• Chapter 3. Hearing-With
• Chapter 4. Techniques of Feeling
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index