"Das musikalische hören" in the middle ages and renaissance: Perspectives from pre-war Germany

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 3-4, 1998, Pages 434-454

  Wegman, Rob C ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61449226134     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/82.3-4.434     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. World of Music 39 (1997)
2. For the next sentence, see Early Music 25 (1997)
3. James Obelkevich, "In Search of the Listener," Journal of the Royal Musical Association 114 (1989): 108: "What this implies is a kind of Copernican revolution in our approach to the history of music - a shift from a supply-centred account, with the listeners revolving in distant orbit around the professionals, to a consumption-centred account, with listeners not just left in but at the heart of things."
4. For the next sentence, see Leo Treitler, "Postmodern Signs in Musical Studies," Journal of Musicology 13 (1995): 3-17, esp. 11-17
5. Leon Botstein, "Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience," Nineteenth-Century Music 16 (1992): 129-45
6. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: California University Press, 1995)
7. and Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (New York: Norton, 1995), 11-35
8. Ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk (London: The Warburg Institute, 1991)
9. Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
10. Margaret Bent, "Reflections on Christopher Page's Reflections," Early Music 21 (1993): 625-33
11. Rob C. Wegman, "Reviewing Images," Music and Letters 76 (1995): 265-73
12. and Philip Weller, "Frames and Images: Locating Music in Cultural Histories of the Middle Ages," Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 7-54
13. See also Christopher Page, "A Reply to Margaret Bent," Early Music 22 (1994): 127-32
14. and Reinhard Strohm, "How to Make Medieval Music Our Own: A Response to Christopher Page and Margaret Bent," Early Music 22 (1994): 715-19
15. Rob C. Wegman, "Sense and Sensibility in Late-Medieval Music: Thoughts on Aesthetics and 'Authenticity'," Early Music 23 (1995): 1-11
16. and Christopher Page, "Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of Music," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 (1996): 1-31
17. Arnold Schering, "Über Musikhören und Musikempfinden im Mittelalter" Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters (hereafter JP) 28 (1922): 41-56
18. Heinrich Besseler, "Grundfragendes musikalischen Hörens," JP 31 (1925): 35-52
19. Besseler, "Grundfragen der Musikästhetik," JP 33 (1927): 63-80
20. and Schering, "Historische und nationale Klangstile," JP 34 (1928): 31-43
21. See also Hermann Zenck, "Zarlino's 'Istitutioni harmoniche' als Quelle zur Musikanschauung der italienischen Renaissance," Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 12 (1930): 540-78, esp. 573-78
22. Moreover, in its most extreme form, the aesthetic of musical autonomy, which prevailed during these same decades, may end up denying the relevance of listeners and listening altogether. This was the upshot of, for instance, August Halm's essay "Program-musik und absolute Musik" of 1928, according to which music need not be specifically aimed at any listener at all but can exist "just as the sun and stars, which radiate in accordance with their nature, irrespective of whether they shine upon humans, animals or plants, or on desert sand and into empty space" (my trans.); see August Halm, Von Form und Sinn der Musik: Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Siegfried Schmalzriedt (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1978), 68
23. On this, see also the opening chapter, "Alte Musik und Gegenwart," of Heinrich Besseler, Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1931, reprint 1979), 1-24
24. For the general climate in German musicology after World War I, see Pamela Potter, "Musicology Under Hitler: New Sources in Context," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 (1996): 73-80
25. "Wobei nicht übersehen sei, daß Historie heute etwas anderes bedeutet als noch vor 20 Jahren, daß sie ganz allgemein zu einer problematischen Angelegenheit ersten Ranges geworden ist. Wenn unsere Grundanschauung an Stelle der früher vorausgesetzten eindimensionalen Entwicklung der Musik nunmehr eine Vielheit gleichberechtigter, auf ihren Wert hin gai nicht sinnvoll vergleichbarer Epochen sieht und die Idee eines zeitlosen, ewig gleichen Musikalisch-Schönen abgetan hat, so erwächst der Musikästhetik die Pflicht, daraus die Folgerungen zu ziehen. Die Zeit der Systeme ist votüber." Besseler, "Grundfragen der Musikästhetik," 64
26. "Die Zeit jener ästhetischen Systeme ist vorüber, welche das Schöne nur in Bezug auf die dadurch wachgerufene 'Empfindungen' betrachtet haben." Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1854; reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), 1
27. "Nowadays we can scarcely understand how our grandparents could regard some particular musical sequence as a precisely corresponding impression of a particular state of feeling. Evidence for this is the extraordinary difference between the reactions of Mozart's, Beethoven's, and Weber's contemporaries to their compositions and our own reaction today . . . Nevertheless, throughout this variation in the impression of feeling, the musical value of many works remains in itself for us unaltered, their originality and beauty remaining as fresh as ever despite the excitement they might at one time have caused." Quoted after Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 6-7; see also 38-40, 62-63
28. "Als Hugo Riemann seine Doktordissertation von 1873 'Über das musikalische Hören' schrieb, stand er inmitten der glücklichen Selbstverständlichkeit einer geschlossenen musikalischen Tradition. Ein so allgemeines Thema konnte damals ohne weiteres auf Grundfragen der klassisch-romantischen Harmonik führen . . . Zu tief hat sich die musikalische Lage inzwischen gewandelt. Eine irgendwie geschlossene Tradition ist nicht mehr vorhanden . . . Insofern unterscheidet sich freilich das gegenwärtige Aufgreifen fremder Musikkulturen von der romantischen Palestrina- und Bachbewegung, als uns die naive Sicherheit fehlt, das Vergangene mit gutem Gewissen den heutigen Gewohnheiten anzugleichen." Besseler, "Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens," 35
29. "[Daß] wir alle Ursache haben, uns den Unterschied zwischen den Art zu hören vor Jahrtausenden und der heutigen möglichst klein vorzustellen und allem mit ernstem Mißtrauen zu begegnen, was geignet scheint, dieses Fundament zu erschüttern"; quoted after Bernhard Dopheide, "Einleitung," in Musikhören, ed. Bernhard Dopheide (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 5-6
30. Cf. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "On Grounding Chopin," in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 105-31, esp. 105-6
31. reprinted in Heinrich Besseler, Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte (Leipzig: Reclam, 1978), 104-73: "How one listens to music: that is what became a problem in the nineteenth century. Hugo Riemann was the first to perceive it" (my trans.)
32. On the debates following the publication of Helmholtz's work, see Leon Botstein, "Time and Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms's Vienna," in Brahms and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3-22, esp. 9-20
33. See, for instance, Edmund A. Bowles, Musikleben im 15. Jahrhundert, Musikgeschichte in Bildern 3, Lfg. 8 (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1977)
34. The only illustration in this book in which an individual appears to be listening attentively is an Italian etching from around 1480, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (94-95). See, however, Christopher Page, "Listening to the Trouvères," Early Music 25 (1997): 640, for an illustration of ca. 1350 showing King Arthur and his court listening to a singer accompanying himself on a gittern: "Every gaze is directed to the performer, separated from his listeners by a small and (to the modern eye) instantly recognizable space."
35. Gay, The Naked Heart, 11-35
36. Howard Mayer Brown, "Songs After Supper: How the Atistocracy Entertained Themselves in the Fifteenth Century," in Musica Privata: Die Rolle der Musik im privaten Leben, Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Walter Salmen, ed. Monika Fink, Rainer Gstrein, and Güntet Mössmer (Innsbruck: Helbling, 1991), 40
37. See also Besseler, "Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens," 41
38. For an interesting cross-cultural perspective on the issue of attentiveness in listening to music, see Wim van Zanten, "Inner and Outer Voices: Listening and Hearing in West Java," World of Music 39 (1997): 41-49
39. "Gebrauchsmusik kennt keinen Ewigkeitsmaßstab, wird von vornherein nicht in der Absicht auf Dauer geschaffen. Am lebendigsten ist sie dort, wo sie aus dem Augenblick für den Augenblick entsteht. Improvisation oder Auflösung und Veränderung allzu ausgefahrener Gleise sind hier angemessene Verfahren, die auch im Jazz eine Erneuerung gefunden haben. Der Komponist tritt völlig zurück, Name und Person sind belanglos. Er betreibt seine Sache als Handwerk oder Geschäft, ohne auf Originalität Wert zu legen." Besseler, "Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens," 39
40. Hans Joachim Moser, "Zwischen Kultur und Zivilisation," Deutsches Musikjahrbuch 4 (1926): 29
41. See Alfred Einstein, "Bücherschau," Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 9 (1926-27): 113
42. Heinrich Besseler, "Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters: II. Die Motette von Franko von Köln bis Philipp von Vitry," Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 8 (1927): 145 n2, and the communications by Moser and Besseler in the same volume, 380-81
43. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 140-42
44. Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit; Fellerer's article was published in Der Wandel des musikalischen Hörens, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für neue Musik und Musikerziehung Darmstadt 3 (Berlin: Merseburger, 1962), 7-13
45. See, for example, Margaret Bent's historical postulate of "informed and prepared listening, whether by creators or performers or by those who listen with attention but without participation," which is both the a priori premise and the outcome of her analysis of a Vitry motet in "Polyphony of Texts and Music in the Fourteenth-Century Motet: Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta latronum/Merito hec patimur and Its 'Quotations'," in Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Dolores Pesce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 100 n1, 82
46. Besides this, the possibility exists that the "implicit listener" as uncovered through analysis was in fact a projection made by the composer and may tell us less about actual listeners in history than about authorial intentions. See Helga de la Motte-Haber, "Der einkomponierte Hörer," in Der Hörer als Interpret, ed. Helga de la Motte-Haber and Reinhard Kopiez (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), 35-41
47. for the same issue in literature, see Walter J. Ong, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," Publications of the Modem Language Association of America 90 (1975): 9-21
48. "Man durchdenke die Schwierigkeit des allereinfachsten Falles: daß ein Sänger des Jahres 950 gezwungen gewesen wäre, ohne Noten, lediglich auf sein Gehör gestützt, zu einer erklingenden Hauptstimme eine den Regeln entsprechende Gegenstimme zu improvisieren." Schering, "Über Musikhören und Musikempfinden im Mittelalter," 50
49. See Walter Wiora, "Zwischen Einstimmigkeit und Mehrstimmigkeit, " in Festschrift Max Schneider zum achtzigsten Geburtstage, ed. Walther Vetter (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1955), 319-34
50. Arno Forchert has cited evidence from this very period that suggests that works, conversely, "reacted to the expectations aroused by the mode of reception"; see his "'Ästhetischer' Eindruck und kompositionstechnische Analyse: Zwei Ebenen musikalischer Rezeption in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Rezeptionsästhetik und Rezeptionsgeschichte in der Musikwissenschaft, ed. Hermann Danuser and Friedhelm Krummacher, Publikationen der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover (Laaber: Laaber, 1991), 200-201
51. Rob C. Wegman, "From Maker to Composer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 1450-1500," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 (1996): 409-79
52. For an example, see Zofia Lissa, "On the Evolution of Musical Perception," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 (1965): 273-86
53. a translation of her article "Zur historischen Veränderlichkeit der musikalischen Apperzeption," in Festschrift Heinrich Besseler zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Karl-Marx-Universität, Leipzig (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1961), 475-88. Lissa's wide-ranging study speculates about modes of listening throughout Western history but assumes for all style periods that the central aim or problem was to guarantee "musical integration" of one sort or another and takes it as accepted that listening always involved a preoccupation with this typically analytic concern
54. "Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening: A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky," in Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1988), 104
55. See, for example, Margaret Bent, "The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis," in Tonal Structures in Early Music, ed. Cristle Collins Judd (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 15-59, esp. 39-54
56. One problem with this article is that its various pronouncements as to what constitutes valid or appropriate analysis are tautologically dependent on the author's a priori understanding of analysis, which is itself kept out of the discussion. That understanding is not without its problems. For example, just to presuppose, as Bent does, that analysis must aspire to objective validity is unlikely in itself to secure a firm basis of consensus with her readers, given that this very ideal has been questioned by a wide range of authors. See, for example, Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 215-33
57. Similarly, it is unclear why the reader should accept her premise that analysis depends for its "validity" on the avoidance of anachronism, given that it is itself an anachronistic procedure to begin with. Bent's further contention that her "preconditions" can be met by recourse to contemporary theory raises other issues. For example, although she mentions in passing Peter Schubert's essay "Authentic Analysis," Journal of Musicology 12 (1994): 3-18, Bent fails to engage with its central argument, which is that attempts to ground analysis in contemporary music theory usually amount simply to pushing die "problem" of anachronistic interpretation to another place, from the composition to a treatise. It is in that other place where the problem tends to return with a vengeance - which is why Schubert called attention to Bernhard Meier's reading of sixteenth-century modal theory, and why Bent's argument is vulnerable with regard to its analysis of medieval counterpoint teachings. Briefly stated, that analysis involves the very kinds of anachronisms of which she seeks to rid the analysis of music. For example, the elaborate use of grammar (in a modern rather than the medieval sense) as a metaphor for counterpoint constitutes an act of interpretation which is as invalid as anachronistic analysis (by Bent's standards) so long as the usage remains unsupported by theoretical evidence. Similarly, Bent's repeated insistence on "historically-informed technical validity" (22) involves a criterion that lacks historically informed validity, as her decisions as to what is "purely technical" in music are not so much based on medieval theory (which had no counterpart for this criterion) as they are determined by the anachronistic requirements of modern analysis. The problem in the latter case becomes especially worrisome later on, when Bent advances a number of claims about "appropriate" and "inappropriate" ways of hearing polyphony: these claims turn out to be based almost exclusively on the kinds of evidence she has chosen to identify as "technical" in medieval music theory, so that her argument oddly begins to sound like Adorno on listening to dodecaphony. (There is little in this discussion to suggest, for example, that medieval theorists frequently referred to the sensuous qualities or the psychophysical effects of music.)
58. As it happens, it is fat from certain that the "technical" precepts for making counterpoint earned any necessary implications for listening, as Bent appears to assume: Richard Crocker, in his article "Discant, Counterpoint, and Harmony," Journal of the American Musicological Society 15 (1962): 9, warns against making just that assumption
59. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 9 (1927): 610-19
60. Stern, "Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens," 610-11
61. On the general issue of transmission, adaptation, and corruption, see Rob C. Wegman, "Miserere supplicanti Dufay: The Creation and Transmission of Guillaume Dufay's Missa Ave regina celorum," Journal of Musicology 13 (1995): 18-54, esp. 50-54
62. On this issue in general, see Peter Gülke, "Interpretation und die Wandlungen des musikalischen Hörens," in Carl Dahlhaus, et al., Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Leipzig 1966 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, and Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1970), 487-89
63. Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
64. This theory is admittedly based on a reading of medieval treatises, though it involves such severe problems of interpretation as to make it untenable in this form. See Gilbert Reaney, "Fourteenth-Century Harmony and the Ballades, Rondeaux, and Virelais of Guillaume de Machaut," Musica Disciplina 7 (1953): 129-46, for its classic formulation
65. Cf. Lawrence Kramer, "The Politics and Poetics of Listening," Current Musicology 50 (1992): 62-67
66. Peter J. Rabinowitz, "Chord and Discourse: Listening Through the Written Word," in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 38-56
67. Christopher Page, "Listening to the Trouvères."