An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought

music theory, as Benjamin Steege's excellent new book reminds us, often engages in a distinctive "leap." Having set out from knowledge secured by some other discipline—say, mathematics, physics, physiology, or psychology—the theorist then pivots to music, "about which we are meant to believe we as yet know nothing, since the knowledge could only have come along with us from that other, initial position" (Steege 2021: 40). In An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought, Steege reconstructs how a range of Weimar-era thinkers on music, among them not only theorists but also music historians, critics, composers, and philosophers, sought to establish an alternative, nonnaturalistic grounding for musical knowledge, one that drew on themes from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger. As in Michael Gubser's (2014) recent survey of phenomenological approaches in Central European social and ethical thought, which proposes a definition of phenomenology that "avoids restricting its meaning too narrowly along philosophical lines" (14), Steege does not circumscribe his subject matter primarily on the basis of his subjects' "fidelity to their intellectual models" (2021: 29). Rather, in line with his aim of reconstructing interwar music phenomenology as a sustained conversation, Steege delimits his book's scope largely on the basis of participation in this shared effort to develop "a new attitude, disposition, or posture (Einstellung or Haltung) with regard to music" (19) that responded to the Weimar-era social, political, intellectual, and musical situation.Following a substantial introduction that sets out the essential features of Steege's definition of Weimar music phenomenology, chapter 1 reconstructs a range of attempts by philosophers, music scholars, critics, and pedagogues, including Gustav Güldenstein, Hans Mersmann, Moritz Geiger, Paul Bekker, Herbert Eimert, and Arthur Wolfgang Cohn, to take up a new, nonnaturalistic stance toward the received objects and concerns of European music theory. Chapter 2 examines how José Ortega y Gasset and Günther Stern-Anders independently used aspects of Claude Debussy's music as a point of departure for two contrasting alternatives to an aesthetics "predicated on values associated with psychologizing introspection" (72). Drawing on themes from the work of Moritz Geiger, Ortega proposed that the transformed social situation of the 1920s demanded a rejection of interiority in favor of "outward concentration" (concentración hacia afuera), in which music shows up as "essentially distinct from the self-feeling person" (68). By contrast, Stern-Anders argued that the "non-tendential" (Stern-Anders 1927 2021: 201) aspects of Debussy's music required a more nuanced approach to understanding listening, one that would reveal, as Steege puts it, "the essential co-involvement of person and world" (Steege 2021: 68).1 In chapter 3, Steege turns to Heinrich Besseler's phenomenologically inflected style history of the early Baroque dance suite and the medieval motet. Drawing on themes from the early thinking of Martin Heidegger, Besseler proposed an approach to listening and its history that valorized participatory, nonaesthetic forms of engagement with music. Finally, chapter 4 picks up the thread of this Weimar-era discourse in the context of the Cold War by examining Stern-Anders's response to the disastrous Castle Bravo thermonuclear test. Here, Steege identifies continuities between Stern-Anders's Weimar-era phenomenology of musical listening and his postwar philosophical anthropology through an analysis of Eimert's Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama (1962), a tape piece that used Stern-Anders's poem by the same name as its source material.For many of the figures discussed in Steege's book, phenomenology's appeal was tightly linked to Husserl's critique of psychologism: the assumption, as Steege puts it, that "what we know about things could be grounded in what we know about the mind that thinks those things" (14). In the opening scene of his book, Steege places this theme in a musical context by juxtaposing the methods and aims of the Berlin School of comparative musicology with phenomenologist Max Scheler's polemical defense of Austro-German "Europeanism" and "worldhood" over and against the values he attributed to the Western Allies in his 1915 The Genius of War. A second key term, the natural attitude (natürliche Einstellung)—Husserl's label for "our implicit belief in the existence of a mind-, experience-, and theory-independent reality" (Zahavi 2003: 44), which he viewed as characteristic of both everyday life and the methods of the natural sciences—is also flagged in this context but receives a considerably more sustained treatment as part of Steege's extended discussion of music theorist and Dalcroze instructor Gustav Güldenstein's "strategies for revising the disposition of anyone who sought to engage with music at whatever level of familiarity" (Steege 2021: 30). Here, Steege emphasizes that Güldenstein's publications represented only the starting point of a more sustained pedagogy. I think Güldenstein's approach, with its prioritization of "what we have each ourselves come to experience, know, and feel when we are doing anything musical" (41), might be interesting to develop further in the context of the present-day music theory classroom.Steege's introductory exposition has been directed toward clarifying the basic orientation of interwar music phenomenology, and so it is only in the next portion of chapter 1, which considers a cluster of texts broadly associated with the proceedings of the Zweiter Kongress für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, that his approach to defining the movement as a conversation receives its first substantial test. Here, he reconstructs how a range of critics, philosophers, and musicologists, including Hans Mersmann, Moritz Geiger, Paul Bekker, and Herbert Eimert, struggled to articulate the appropriate contours of a phenomenology of music through a series of often-vitriolic exchanges. Steege's flexible approach to the boundaries of phenomenology has the benefit of capturing how a range of thinkers with different agendas and varying levels of philosophical sophistication actually understood phenomenology during this period. At the same time, I found it difficult to resist searching for connections between some of the philosophical commitments of these texts and phenomenology in a more orthodox sense. If anything, this temptation was only compounded by Steege's success in sensitively and generously drawing out resonances between some of the less satisfying proposals—in particular, those of Mersmann and Bekker—and the broader set of concerns that attracted Weimar-era thinkers to phenomenology.Still, other aspects of Steege's approach to defining phenomenology are less capacious, a point which comes through most clearly in the opening scene of his book. Here, Steege uses Max Scheler's reading of early publications by Carl Stumpf, Erich M. von Hornbostel, and Otto Abraham as the basis for offering a preliminary definition of interwar music phenomenology.2 In Scheler's view, the work of the Berlin School comparative musicologists bolstered his own phenomenological, nonbiologistic vision of "Europeanness" because it demonstrated the existence of cross-cultural differences in musical hearing that were neither physiological nor psychological, but rather must be accounted for in nonnaturalistic terms (8).3 For Steege, however, this juxtaposition also highlights aspects of comparative musicology that stood in stark contrast to the new phenomenological outlook, a point he illustrates by means of a discussion of Stumpf and Hornbostel's (1911) jointly authored "On the Significance of Ethnological Studies for the Psychology and Aesthetics of Musical Art." In Steege's view, Stumpf's portion of this paper is distinctly "psychological" insofar as it foregrounds "the individual auditory sense as an autonomous field of research" while neglecting an "analysis of how one might dispose oneself toward perceptual facts or comport oneself within the cultural sphere marked out by them" (11–12). It is difficult to fault Steege for flagging Stumpf's reference to problems that "can only be solved by psychology" (Stumpf and Hornbostel 1911 2015: 8) as standing in stark contrast with the concerns and outlook of phenomenology as practiced by Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger. At the same time, recent scholarship on Stumpf's philosophical work has emphasized continuities between his thinking and Husserl's phenomenology, especially in the form pursued in the Logical Investigations (1900–1901).4 Insofar as many of the subjects of Steege's book were drawn to phenomenology because of a broadly construed "antipathy toward psychology" (Steege 2021: 51), I think his self-conscious decision to avoid taking up the conceptual and terminological complications that would have been raised by these aspects of Stumpf's work was likely a prudent one.5 Even so, it is somewhat jarring to see Stumpf portrayed here solely as a representative of "psychology," but as the primary musical thinker of the phenomenological movement in Margret Kaiser-el-Safti's foreword to the recent English translation of the first volume of Stumpf's Tonpsychologie (Kaiser-el-Safti 2020: xiii).Still, I think Stumpf's substantial involvement with both philosophical and musical questions does raise an opportunity to challenge a familiar historiographical bottleneck. While the substantial recent literature on Franz Brentano and his students (including both Stumpf and Husserl, as well as Anton Marty, Kazimierz Twardowski, and Alexius Meinong) addresses relationships between Husserl's thinking and the Brentanian project of "descriptive psychology," less attention has been paid to how the work of Brentano's other students might relate to the approaches pursued by thinkers downstream of Husserl. Indeed, at least one of the participants in Steege's network of Weimar music phenomenologists, Helmuth Plessner, seemed open to integrating insights from Stumpf's work with the approach to phenomenology he had learned from Husserl and Scheler as part of his proposal for an "Aesthesiologie des Geistes" (Plessner 1923, xv).6 (While a translation of Plessner's "Response" to Hans Mersmann's rather off-target proposal for a phenomenology of music appears as appendix B of Steege's book, this contribution to the Zweiter Kongress für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, in which Plessner briefly summarizes the approach to music phenomenology pursued in his 1923 Die Einheit der Sinne, is not discussed in the main body of Steege's text.)But the comparative musicologist whose concerns were closest to those of Steege's interwar phenomenologists was likely Hornbostel, the coauthor of Stumpf's 1911 conference paper, even if explicit references to phenomenology in his publications are sparse.7 As an example of an attempt to theorize musical engagement in other-than-acoustical terms, one might point to Hornbostel's infamous binary opposition between "European" and "African" rhythm: "we proceed from hearing, they from motion" (Hornbostel 1928: 53).8 Indeed, little more than a sentence later in this same essay, Hornbostel exhorts us to engage in something that eerily resembles the "basic gesture of realizing an attitudinal modulation" that Steege sets out as characteristic of interwar music phenomenology (Steege 2021: 29): "In order to understand African rhythms as they really are, therefore, we must thoroughly change our attitude" (Hornbostel 1928: 53). (While this essay was originally published in English, Hornbostel's use of the word attitude in this passage is presumably a gloss of the German Einstellung, which, in addition to its role in Husserl's phenomenology, was a key term for the Berlin School of Gestalt theory most prominently associated with Hornbostel's colleagues Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler, and to which Hornbostel was an important early contributor.9)Of Steege's music phenomenologists, one figure for whom such resonances might have been particularly salient was Günther Stern-Anders, the son of psychologists William and Clara Stern. In addition to his better-known early role as a subject in his parents' research on child development (Steege 2021: 144), Stern-Anders also collaborated with psychologist Heinz Werner in his experiments on "micro-melody" and "micro-harmony" (Ellensohn 2017: 349), which Hornbostel cited in his own work on the perception of melodic structure (Hornbostel 1927: 429). Moreover, Stern-Anders's habilitation thesis was supervised by Wertheimer in addition to the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich (Ellensohn 2017: 355). Here, I think Steege's approach to Weimar music phenomenology as responding to a "common set of problems" (Steege 2021: 22) provides a valuable means of rethinking the relationship between phenomenology and the broader circle of thinkers around Carl Stumpf, whether in the context of music or of the Gestalt theorists' critique of what they called "traditional psychology" (Koffka 1922: 533).10Perhaps the most daunting figure discussed in Steege's book is the historical musicologist Heinrich Besseler, whose work was highly influential in establishing the historiography of early music, and whose approach was deeply bound up with his far-right political commitments. For readers of Steege's book whose interests primarily concern the history of listening, Besseler will likely be most familiar for his proposal that music scholars should prioritize participatory, nonaesthetic forms of engagement with music, as well as his claim that the rise of the "aesthetic attitude," which he associated with the listening practices of the concert hall, had deprived music of its "power to form and sustain communal bonds" (Steege 2021: 102). Besseler's most straightforward examples of music's community-building potential fall under the rubric of Gebrauchsmusik, a category that in his view included not only social dance music and work songs, but also "songs of allegiance," and liturgical music (Besseler 1926 2012: 56). Steege's chapter focuses on two repertories that draw out more complex aspects of Besseler's approach to listening and its history, the early Baroque dance suite and the thirteenth-century motet. What the histories of these genres reveal, Besseler argues, is that under the appropriate social and historical circumstances, "even the leading art music" (63) of a period can be umgangsmäßig—that is, its appropriate "mode of access" (Zugangsweise) may be participation in a shared endeavor alongside others rather than detached aesthetic listening.Steege's primary interest in this chapter is in reconstructing Besseler's account of how we might identify details of a composition that invite—or, indeed, require—this sort of nonaesthetic engagement, and his commendably lucid treatment of this daunting and jargon-laden material will be extremely valuable for readers with interests in early music as well as the history of music phenomenology. But while Steege (2021: 140) aptly foregrounds the "quasi-fascist tendency of Besseler's medievalism," I think a slightly more detailed view of Besseler's historiographical and analytical approach would have been useful in clarifying some of the less obvious risks of his assertion that certain forms of listening might be either excluded or required by a style's technical features.One aspect of Besseler's approach that is not foregrounded in Steege's chapter is that his typology of the thirteenth-century motet includes three distinct categories: the sacred Latin motet, the earliest forms of the French motet, and the new range of French motet styles that emerged in the second half of the thirteenth century. While the first of these is an essentially sacred idiom (and therefore an easier fit for Besseler's category of Gebrauchsmusik), the upper-voice texts of both forms of thirteenth-century French motets typically address secular themes.11 Since one of Besseler's goals in his treatment of motets is to demonstrate the possibility of a form of art music for which the appropriate mode of access is "participation" rather than aesthetic "hearing," the status of the second and third categories takes on special significance. Indeed, this second category—the earliest forms of the vernacular motet—offers the crucial test of this possibility, since Besseler asserts that the participatory "mode of access" no longer applied to the new motet styles that emerged in the second half of the century (Besseler 1926 2012: 64–65).The emphasis Besseler places on this distinction between forms of the vernacular motet is in no small part intended to head off a potential objection to his account of participatory motet listening. In one of the few contemporaneous discursive sources on the musical life of thirteenth-century Paris, Johannes de Grocheio (2011: 85) asserts that the motet "ought not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking out subtleties in the arts." Besseler reads Grocheio's account of motet listening as a none-too-subtle prefiguration of modern listening practices: he draws an analogy between Grocheio's motet audience and the "Kenner und Liebhaber" of the eighteenth century (Besseler 1926 2012) and suggests that appreciating such "subtleties in the arts" requires taking up a "particular aesthetic receptivity" (Besseler 1927: 182; my translation). This flagrantly presentist reading would seem to point to precisely the opposite of what Besseler wants to claim, which is that participatory—explicitly nonaesthetic—"joining-in" (Mitmachen), not reflective, interior Nachvollziehen, represents the appropriate "mode of access" to the motet (Besseler 1926 2012: 64–65).Here, however, Besseler enacts a stunning reversal. If Grocheio's claims cannot be reconciled with the conclusions Besseler himself has drawn with respect to the earliest forms of the motet based on his combination of style history and Heidegger-inspired "primordial phenomenological interpretation of the philosophical-theological anthropology" of the Middle Ages (Steege 2021: 99), then—or so his argument goes—Grocheio's roughly contemporaneous testimony must pertain only to a later form of the genre.12 (In this context, it will therefore not come as a surprise that Besseler sought to portray both Grocheio's intellectual project and the new motet styles of the second half of the thirteenth century as participating in a broader rupture with his image of the social and intellectual life of the Middle Ages, and to propose a late date for Grocheio's treatise.13)In light of Besseler's claims concerning the status of religious music as Gebrauchsmusik, the most favorable starting point for him to begin circumscribing the validity of Grocheio's account is the Latin motet.14 Besseler asserts that this genre, with its multiple parallel texts directed toward "worship of the godhead or contemplation of dogma" must have a mode of access that corresponds to the "transcendental goal" of "prayer and contemplation," and therefore necessarily excludes "aesthetic pleasure" or "the 'listener' in the usual sense" (Besseler 1927: 144; my translation). Unlike its Latin counterpart, however, the vernacular motet has no obvious collective goal that stands outside the music, which in this context would seem to make it particularly difficult to resist applying the quasi-aesthetic account of motet listening that Besseler has gleaned from Grocheio's testimony. Besseler's claim that the earliest forms of the French motet, like their Latin counterparts, are umgangsmäßig (and hence not suited to the "aesthetic attitude") thus relies heavily on his ability to identify technical features that have been transferred "without any technical modification" from the religious context of the Latin motet to this new "vernacular, secular" milieu (146). Crucial, too, is Besseler's assertion that these features do not merely afford but instead actually enforce such an orientation, a strategy that allows him to present an image of medieval art and society as "grounded in tradition and authority and ultimately always upon the religious center" (Steege 2021: 140, quoting Besseler 1924: 43) while simultaneously distancing even the early vernacular motet from the form of listening he has read into Grocheio's account. It is in this sense that Besseler asserts that "the French motet, too, is initially a work that does not know an inner relationship to the listener" (Besseler 1927: 146; translation modified from Steege 2021: 132–33): "The shared direction of the gaze of all the voices (die gemeinsame Blickrichtung aller Stimmen) toward a religious goal has of course been transformed into a purely this-worldly, societal play, yet the non-performer, now as then, must nonetheless correspondingly step into one of the voices and from that point co-perform the act of polyphonic music-making." (133, quoting Besseler 1927: 146)One contemporaneous thinker who seems to have been attuned to the risks of such an approach was Stern-Anders, who, in the scene that opens Steege's chapter on Besseler, appears as a participant in the Freiburg Collegium Musicum alongside Heidegger, Besseler, and Wilibald Gurlitt. The one drawback of Steege's otherwise compelling juxtaposition between Stern-Anders's 1927 "On the Phenomenology of Listening (Elucidated through the Hearing of Impressionist Music)" and Ortega's discussion of "outward concentration" and "dehumanization" is that it shifts the focus away from how Stern-Anders's Debussy essay directly responded to the approach to music history he had observed as a student in the circles around Gurlitt and Heidegger.15 (A translation of Stern-Anders's essay appears as the final appendix of Steege's book, and I was particularly impressed by how well Steege's rendering captures the tone of Stern-Anders's prose.) "First, it is (historico-ontologically) questionable whether for a given historical object one (and only one) mode of access is appropriate. Doesn't the double fact that the historical abides—and indeed, via the most diverse modes of access—and that this abiding constitutes the historicity of the historical object, prove the inappropriateness of seeking only a single privileged access?" (Stern-Anders 1927 2021: 198).Among Steege's music phenomenologists, I found Stern-Anders to be an especially compelling figure. In this respect, one frustrating aspect of Steege's approach to interwar music phenomenology as a conversation was that it excluded texts that, like Stern-Anders's habilitation thesis, "did not actively participate in an unfolding public discourse" during the Weimar period (2021: 220fn68). As such, I very much hope that Steege's (220fn68) reference to the habilitation thesis as "a magisterial document that fully deserves a thoughtful reading—as well as an English translation" indicates that we can look forward to one or both of these possibilities from him in the near future.