Helmholtz musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz' Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen (review)

The name of Hermann von Helmholtz—physiologist, physicist, polymath—has always been a staple of music-theoretical thought. But his position as a scientist, working at a time when musicology struggled to stand on its own feet and gain disciplinary independence, has typically accorded him an outsider's position in the history of music. Matthias Rieger argues in his provocative German dissertation, Helmholtz musicus, that musicologists ignore Helmholtz's impact on musical thought at their own peril.

Music scholars in the English-speaking world have recently begun to pick up his monumental study Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (On the Sensation of Tones) (1863) again, largely in the context of the growing interest in auditory culture. Helmholtz musicus therefore comes at an auspicious time. Rieger's book usefully complements recent works in the English-speaking world on the topic, including Myles W. Jackson's recent Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), as well as recent dissertations by Youn Kim (Columbia University, 2003) and Benjamin Steege (Harvard University, 2007). I say 'complement' because Rieger's book is in many ways different from the history of music theory (and history of science, for that matter) that is practised in Anglo-American world. For whereas the Anglo-American branch of the history of music theory has, generally speaking, found its niche in a contextual historical approach, of which Steege's dissertation is an excellent example, Rieger's research is driven by the epistemological earthquake that Helmholtz's scientific, or indeed scientistic, approach introduced to thinking about music.

To a certain extent the book follows the conventional triple jump of Leben-Werk-und-Wirkung, or life-works-reception, in compliance with the exigencies of the German dissertation format. What is found between the bookend chapters of the short biography and the somewhat perfunctory survey on the later reception of the Tonempfindungen is always provocative, sometimes irritating, and often enlightening. In a sense, Rieger's study of Helmholtz is best understood, as he expresses it in the final pages of his book, as an 'exemplar' (p. 154) of a much wider question: the 'decline of proportionality' (p. xii) in Western thought. In tackling this question he adopts an approach, clearly and admittedly influenced by the intellectual maverick Ivan Illich, that is difficult to pigeonhole but that can perhaps best described as a mixture of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts) and the sociology of scientific knowledge.

The question of proportionality in general can be understood as the switch from individual measurements (bushels, fathoms, chains) coined for and tied to specific materials, to the abstract and hence transferable measurements (meters, kilograms) that characterize large parts of the modern world. We are so used to these transferable measurements that we easily forget the profound epistemological impact that this fundamental shift initiated. A comparable shift occurred in the musical realm, and Rieger locates it in Helmholtz's work, which transferred musical thought to a scientific basis that aspired to the status of objectivity and that was grounded in acoustics. In a series of five chapters (chs. 5-9) Rieger explains step by step the forever widening epistemological ripples of this shift in thinking, which effected the objectification of sound and hearing, the redefinition of the concepts of tone and timbre, of consonance and dissonance, the instruction of listeners to pursue new scientific listening strategies, and finally a complete recasting of music history.

As is the case in all successful paradigm shifts, we are not even aware (most of the time) that things could be any different. And Rieger's repeated exhortations to acknowledge the watershed significance of Helmholtz's work on musical thought are well taken. He describes the flipside of Helmholtz's insistent move towards scientific objectivity as the decline of a sense of the specificity, the materiality, the...