An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought

By Benjamin Steege

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 Steege draws on a wide range of published and unpublished texts from music theory, pedagogy, criticism, and philosophy of music, some of which appear for the first time in English translation in the book’s appendixes.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?

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226763033

Book preview

An Unnatural Attitude

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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

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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

Introduction

Worldhood and World War

Max Scheler, Genius of War

Musicology in the World

From Psychology to Phenomenology

Music in Phenomenological Study

Chapter 1

The Unnatural Attitude

The Acoustical Attitude and the Harmonic Attitude

Beyond Psychologism

What Is the Phenomenology of Music?

Chapter 2

Debussy, Outward and Open

An Outward Turn

Dehumanization

Being-There-With Music

Letting Oneself Go

Actuality

Chapter 3

Hearing-With

CASE ONE Aesthetic Hearing (Seventeenth-Century Suite)

Joining In

Vocal Hearing and Instrumental Hearing

CASE TWO Participatory Hearing (Thirteenth-Century Motet)

Factical Life

Spacing

The Limits of Community

Chapter 4

Techniques of Feeling

This Is Not a Test

Techniques of Feeling

A Call

Appendix A

Hans Mersmann, On the Phenomenology of Music (1925)

Appendix B

Helmuth Plessner, Response [to Mersmann] (1925)

Appendix C

Paul Bekker, What Is the Phenomenology of Music? (1925)

Appendix D

Herbert Eimert, On the Phenomenology of Music (1926)

Appendix E

Günther Stern-Anders, On the Phenomenology of Listening (Elucidated through the Hearing of Impressionist Music) (1927)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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. From Gustav Güldenstein, Theorie der Tonart

EXAMPLE 1.2. From Georg Capellen, Fortschrittliche Melodie- und Harmonielehre

EXAMPLE 1.3. From Hans Mersmann, Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik

EXAMPLE 1.4. From Mersmann, Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik

EXAMPLE 1.5. From Mersmann, Versuch einer Phänomenologie der Musik

EXAMPLE 2.1. Claude Debussy, Pour les sixtes, mm. 1–8

EXAMPLE 2.2. Frédéric Chopin, Nocturne, op. 27, no. 2, mm. 32–37

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

EXAMPLE 2.4. Chopin, Etude, op. 25, no. 8, mm. 1–4

EXAMPLE 2.5. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, act 3, mm. 90–93

EXAMPLE 3.1. Johann Hermann Schein, Allemande no. 10, from Banchetto musicale

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

EXAMPLE 3.3. Johann Rosenmüller, Studenten-Music, no. 50, Paduan, mm. 19–28

EXAMPLE 3.4. Johann Jacob Froberger, Keyboard Suite no. 16 in G Major, Gigue

EXAMPLE 3.5. Froberger, Keyboard Suite no. 16, Sarabande

EXAMPLE 3.6. Anonymous, O Maria, Virgo Davitica / O Maria, Maris Stella, beginning

EXAMPLE 3.7. Anonymous, Riens ne puet / Riens ne puet, beginning

EXAMPLE A.1. Duality of motive and line, according to Mersmann

EXAMPLE A.2. 1. Periodic succession; 2. Thematic development; 3. Theme and its functions

EXAMPLE A.3. Graphic representations of four abstract formal types, according to Mersmann

[ 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 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 reflectiveness, 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 world-historical 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 Austro-German 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 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 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 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 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 organization 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 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 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-itself-ness 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 self-clarifications, 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 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 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 ever-expanding 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 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