Helmholtz and the Modern Listener

Steege explores Helmholtz's significance within a historical shift in the theory and practice of listening in nineteenth-century European culture.

Benjamin Steege (Author)

9781107015173, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 July 2012

296 pages, 16 b/w illus. 4 music examples
25.4 x 18 x 1.8 cm, 0.75 kg

'[Steege's] text moves … with an interpretive delight and a virtuosity, drawing in a wide range of subjects and interlocutors.' Leslie David Blasius, Journal of the American Musicological Society

The musical writings of scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) have long been considered epoch-making in the histories of both science and aesthetics. Widely regarded as having promised an authoritative scientific foundation for harmonic practice, Helmholtz can also be read as posing a series of persistent challenges to our understanding of the musical listener. Helmholtz was at the forefront of sweeping changes in discourse about human perception. His interrogation of the physiology of hearing threw notions of the self-possessed listener into doubt and conjured a sense of vulnerability to mechanistic forces and fragmentary experience. Yet this new image of the listener was simultaneously caught up in wider projects of discipline, education and liberal reform. Reading Helmholtz in conjunction with a range of his intellectual sources and heirs, from Goethe to Max Weber to George Bernard Shaw, Steege explores the significance of Helmholtz's listener as an emblem of a broader cultural modernity.

Chronology
Introduction
1. Popular sensations
2. Refunctioning the ear
3. The problem of attention
4. Tonal theory as liberal progressive history
5. Voices of reform
Epilogue: Helmholtz and modernism
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], Romantic music [c 1830 to c 1900 AVGC5], Music [AV]