Abstract
The standard narrative of the capital cities of the fin de siècle presents a cultural and political anxiety rapidly nearing a flash point. The art and the music, cultural historians say, reflect crises of identity that resulted in either a retreat to the past, into the mind or an all-out attack on tradition.4 Politics similarly struggled with an identity crisis of sorts as the expanding franchise of liberal democracy gave voice to radical groups on both the right and the left. We are told, perhaps a bit whiggishly, that this pervasive political anxiety and impotence of the European powers set the stage for the eventual explosions of violence in the first half of the twentieth century.
Art does not surpass nature, but it makes the best of nature a part of daily life.
Wallaschek, ‘On the Origins of Music’2
Was macht Moses?
Ernst Mach to Eduard Kulke3
I have previously examined portions of the material in this chapter of my book, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), and recent article, ‘Changeable Ears: Ernst Mach’s and Max Planck’s Studies of Accommodation in Hearing’, in Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell and Myles Jackson, eds., ‘Music, Sound, and the Laboratory during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Osiris 28 (2013).
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Notes
Richard Wallaschek, ‘On the Origin of Music’, Mind 16 (July 1891), 63, 388.
Ernst Mach, Letter to Eduard Kulke (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 22 October 1872).
Michael Roth, Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994),
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981),
Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy Science, and the Geography of Knowledge (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008),
Deborah Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007),
Suman Seth, Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890–1926 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010).
Myles Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006),
Doug Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999),
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),
Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002).
Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1860) is considered to be the first articulation of psychophysical monism. He argued that the distinction between the corporeal world and the geistige was only a matter of perspective and linguistic convention. The same event, depending on one’s perspective could be either objective (physical) or subjective (psychical) but it was the same event.
This is a contrasting, though I would argue complementary, argument to that advanced by Alexander Rehding in ‘The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000), 345–385.
See David C. Large and William Weber, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984),
Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Richard Wagner, Ueber das Dirigiren (Leipzig: C.F. Kahnt, 1870).
See Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Finde-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York: Continuum, 1993), Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.
See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) for a general but thorough discussion of the West’s constmction of ‘the Orient’ as ‘other’.
See also Philip Bohlman, ‘The Remembrance of Things Past: Music, Race, and the End of History in Modern Europe’, Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 644–676,
Julie Brown, ‘Bartók, the Gypsies, and Hybridity in Music’, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh eds., Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 119–142.
Ernst Mach, Forward to Eduard Kulke’s Kritik der Philosophie des Schönen (Leipzig: Deutsche Verlagactiengesellschaft, 1906), x–xi.
Jonathan Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (Redwood City, CA: Stanford, 2010).
N.G. Ein Wort, ‘Sowohl im Interesse des Judenthums, als der jüdischen Literatur-Gesellschaft’, Jüdisches Volksblatt 2.40 (1855), 157–158, 157 quoted in Hess, 114.
Béla Bartók, ‘Why and How Do We Collect Folk Music? And Some Problems of Folk Music Research in East Europe’, Reprinted in Benjamin Suchoff, ed., Béla Bartók Essays (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997),
Claude Debussy, Debussy on Music, trans. Richard Langham Smith (New York: Knopf, 1977).
See Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, David Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,
Marsha Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Bayreuth, with the completion of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876, hosted an annual performance of Wagner’s monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and opera Parsifal. Attending the Bayreuth Festival quickly became, and continues to be to this day, a pilgrimage of sorts for Wagner admirers. It was the Bayreuth Festival, especially the inclusion of Parsifal, which prompted Nietzsche’s disillusionment and very public break with Wagner. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner (Leipzig: Verlag von C.G. Neumann, 1888).
The exercise consisted of listening to the two chords. Then, Mach would ask the listener (or reader) to focus their attention on the top notes of the chords as they were played again. The listener would find that the chords sounded different from the previous time. Mach would then ask the listener to focus their attention on the bottom notes of the chords as they were played one last time. Again, the individual’s aural experience would have been changed by their altered attention. Ernst Mach, ‘Bemerkungen über die Accommodation des Ohres’, Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 51 (1865), 343–346. This same chord example was used in Mach’s 1865 lecture ‘Die Erklärung der Harmonie’.
Ernst Mach, ‘Zur Theorie des Gehörorgans’, Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 48 (1863), 289.
Mach later revisited this experiment and concluded that it was more likely that the pinching created reflected waves in the tube and that the interference of these waves with the original ones was what in fact led the weakening of the volume of the sung tone in his ears. Ernst Mach, ‘Über einige der physiologischen Akustik angehörige Erscheinungen’, Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 50 (1864), 345.
Ernst Mach, ‘Die Erklärung der Harmonie’, reprinted in Populär-Wissenschaftliche Vorlesungen (Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1896).
The term ‘neo-Lamarckism’ was in fact popularised in the 1890s by George John Romanes’ description of an increasingly polarised difference of opinions between the neo-Darwinists and neo-Lamarckians. Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989/2003), 236–238.
Ewald Hering, ‘On Memory as a General Function of Organised Matter’, translated and reprinted in Samuel Butler’s, Unconscious Memory, 2nd ed. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1911), 80–83.
Eduard Kulke, Über die Umbildung der Melodie: Ein Beitrag zur Entwickelungslehre (Prague: J.G. Calve’sche K.K. Hof- und Univ.-Buchhandlung, 1884).
Ernst Mach, ‘Why Man has Two Eyes?’ Thomas McCormack trans., Popular Scientific Lectures (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1898), 82.
Ernst Mach, ‘Die Ökonomische Natur der physikalischen Forschung’, Almanach der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaft 32 (1882), 298.
Ernst Mach, ‘Ueber die physikalische Bedeutung der Gesetze der Symmetrie’, Lotos. Zeitschrift für Naturwissenschaften 21 (1871), 144. I have argued in my book that tracing Mach’s discussions of the origins of sound sensation reveals that he was thinking in a historicist manner about the formation of knowledge as early as 1863, much earlier than credited by historians and philosophers of science.
Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, trans. C.M. Williams from the 5th (1897) German edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1886/1959), 309.
Ästhetik der Tonkunst drew extensively on Eduard Hanslick’s formalism, employing the belief that beauty in music was abstraction to measure music itself and composer. On this basis, Wallaschek attacked Wagnerian opera as too sectarian and full of content to be beautiful. Wagner’s music was, according to Wallaschek, the culmination but also the regression of the genre. See Sandra McColl, ‘Positivism in Late Nineteenth-Century Thought About Music: The Case of Richard Wallaschek’, Studies in Music 26 (1992), 34–47,
Sandra McColl, ‘Richard Wallaschek: Vienna’s Most Uncomfortable Music Critic’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 29.1 (1998), 41–73.
Richard Wallaschek, Primitive Music: An Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instruments, Dances, and Pantomimes of Savage Races (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893), v. Primitive Music was published in German in 1903 under the title Anfänge der Tonkunst and is often cited by that title and date.
Wallaschek and Spencer actually got into a small spat over their respective theories of the origins of music. Spencer locates the origins of music in language, citing song (human song, not animal song like Darwin, from whom Spencer distinguishes himself) as the first outgrowth of music. Wallascheck noted that song and spoken word came from different parts of the brain (citing studies of persons with aphasia). Spencer countered that Wallascheck misunderstood him. Wallaschek said, no he didn’t. See Herbert Spencer, ‘The Origin of Music’, Mind 15.60 (1890), 449–468,
Richard Wallaschek and James Cattell, ‘On the Origin of Music’, Mind 16.63 (1891), 375–388,
Spencer, ‘On the Origin of Music’, Mind 16.64 (1891), 535–547, Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 253–356.
Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of its Applications (London: Macmillan, 1889).
Wagner, for one, described his genius as follows: ‘When I am alone, and the musical fibres within me vibrate, and heterogeneous sounds form themselves into chords when at last springs the melody which reveals to me my inner self: if then the heart in loud beats marks the impetuous rhythms, and rapture finds vent in divine tears through the mortal, no-longer-seeing eyes — then do I often say to myself, what a fool you are not to remain always by yourself.’ Richard Wagner, quoted in M. Brown, A Day with Wagner (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 24–25. Quoted in Bennet Zon, ‘From Great Man to Fittest Survivor: Reputation, Recapitulation and Survival in Victorian Concepts of Wagner’s Genius’, Musicae Scientiae Special Issue (2009–2010), 420.
See Michael Howe, Genius Explained (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
Large and Weber, Wagnerism, Dean Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
Andrew Steptoe, Genius and the Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament in the Historical Record (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
Marc Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995),
Bennet Zon, Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Farnham, Surreyt: Ashgate, 2000).
See Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Fürst Bismarck und der Antisemitismus (Vienna: H. Engel, 1886).
Likely this was the reason Hanslick accepted the dedication. Kulke wrote to him: ‘The fact that you have accepted the dedication of this book is an honour for me but also an honour for you, because the returns on the one as on the other side a testimony of spiritual freedom. You are an enemy of Wagner’s art work, I am a supporter of the same. And yet I may boast myself to please me your sympathy. Why is that? I’m perhaps not daring premise when I deduce this from a negative characteristic that we have both in common, namely, the lack of fanaticism.’ Eduard Kulke, Richard Wagner und Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig: Verlag von Carl Reissner, 1890), v–vi.
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Hui, A. (2014). Origin Stories of Listening, Melody and Survival at the End of the Nineteenth Century. In: Kennaway, J. (eds) Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339515_8
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