Romantic Ears and Phonographic Objectivity: Epistemic Articulations and the Study of Music at the Age of Empire

This article examines the transformations in the study of music between the 1860s and the 1910s, tracing the relationship between Enlightenment and Romantic ideals with objectivity through early phonography. The advent of evolutionism and positivism engendered a paradigm shift in nineteenth-century thought, thereby establishing the foundations for new modes of engaging with the world. This intellectual transformation resulted in the emergence of academic disciplines such as acoustics, otology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, and musicology, a process that took place simultaneously with the intensification of colonialism, through which a heterogeneous set of people interacted across the world. The advent of devices associated with a new perspective on mechanical objectivity, such as the phonograph and the gramophone, contributed to the efficient establishment of comparative methodologies shared by many approaches. My article examines the connection between the establishment of academic musicology and early phonography, an intersection that is especially audible in ethnographic cylinders. The fundamental argument of this study highlights the tensions that haunted this process, striving to reexamine fundamental aspects in the historiography of musicology, a discipline that has articulated multiple types of knowledge from its inception.