“The Atmospheres of Tones”: Notions of Atmosphere in Music Scholarship Between 1840 and 1930

Abstract

This chapter is an enquiry into the use of the term “atmosphere” in germanophone music scholarship between 1840 and 1930. I argue that the semantic scope of the term, which was later developed into an aesthetic concept in its own right, can only be understood by taking into account the full panoply of conceptual source domains. I suggest that not only is the proto-meteorological notion of atmosphere identified as formative but also the medical connotations of the term, with concomitant anthropological overtones, were crucial to subsequent usage. Surveying a large body of writings on music, I argue that by using the term “atmosphere”, scholars of music have sought to bring the resonant, timbral, sonorous and voluminous dimensions of music into focus; have attended to performance contexts and places of listening; and have ascribed it to particular tonal structures and styles such as impressionism. Furthermore, the term becomes particularly prevalent in musicological enquiries into opera as Gesamtkunstwerk. Here, “atmospheric” musical emanations are made virtual through the architectural setting or stagecraft devices that afford acousmatic listening: the hidden orchestra is thus said to endow a protagonist on stage with “atmosphere”. Finally, I introduce a key, but curiously neglected, theorist of atmosphere: the celebrated literary figure Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who more explicitly a holistically embedding and penetrating feeling, a structure that I propose to term mereological. As an overarching feeling, atmosphere not only became increasingly coextensive with notions of Stimmung, as in the work of sociologist Georg Simmel, but the mereological structure also remained the most dominant aspect in the extensive atmospherological project of neo-phenomenological philosopher Hermann Schmitz.