Steege, Benjamin Adam (Author)
This dissertation explores work on sound and music by the German physiologist, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), with a view toward theorizing the modernity of aural practices characteristic of this work. In writings and lectures for popular audiences, Helmholtz used his increasingly public scientific persona to promote the modernization of national education and the liberalization of academic, industrial, and commercial culture. Although not often overtly political, the function of his public speech was carefully coordinated with various reformist projects that became especially pronounced around 1860. His musical work in this period exemplified the potential such modernization offered to re-imagine the human--in all its physiological and psychological density--as a productive assemblage. In experimental practices typical of the "organic physics" of his generation and subculture, the listening person was configured as the site of sensation-producing energy conversions. Yet this listener was more than the receptor and translator of physical movement. Helmholtzian aurality tenuously balanced the mechanical and habitual functions of perception with the reformist impulse to submit listening to a rigorous and virtuoso discipline of attentiveness to the radical particularity of sensation. Attention--figured at once as a naturalized perceptual disposition, a moral imperative, and a mode of critique with regard to the utilitarian rationality of everyday hearing--became a central problem: it was deemed both necessary in order to maintain sovereignty over perceptual experience, but also impossible to sustain against the uncontrollable circulation of forces in which the subject was immersed. This paradox carried over into Helmholtz's sweeping music historiography. On the one hand, his model of historical progress was driven by a theoretical principle of tonal "affinity," whose semi-mechanical influence on harmonic practice aimed at a unitary vision of musical rationality. On the other hand, hoping to maintain a robust ideal of aesthetic freedom and to preserve some form of cultural choice, Helmholtz guarded a complex conceptual space for musical agency. If this paradox went unresolved in the historiographical context, a no less provisional liberatory potential emerged in the vocal practices and pedagogies Helmholtz valorized as instancing salutary cultural reform through the attentive re-training of the senses and the body.
...MoreDescription “This dissertation explores work on sound and music by the German physiologist, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), with a view toward theorizing the modernity of aural practices characteristic of this work.” (from the abstract) Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/05 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3265207.
Article
Hui, A. E.;
(2011)
Instruments of Music, Instruments of Science: Hermann von Helmholtz's Musical Practices, His Classicism, and His Beethoven Sonata
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Article
Kursell, Julia;
(2008)
Hermann von Helmholtz und Carl Stumpf über Konsonanz und Dissonanz
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Article
Pesic, Peter;
(2013)
Helmholtz, Riemann, and the Sirens: Sound, Color, and the “Problem of Space”
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Chapter
Zanarini, Gianni;
(2001)
Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Mach on Musical Consonance
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Chapter
Flora Willson;
(2017)
Hearing Things: Musical Objects at the 1851 Great Exhibition
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Article
Hui, Alexandra;
(2013)
Changeable Ears: Ernst Mach's and Max Planck's Studies of Accommodation in Hearing
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Article
Klotz, Sebastian;
(2008)
Tonpsychologie und Musikforschung als Katalysatoren wissenschaftlich-experimenteller Praxis und der Methodenlehre im Kreis von Carl Stumpf
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Article
Anna Kvicalova;
(2022)
Purkyně’s Opistophone: the hearing ‘Deaf’, auditory attention and organic subjectivity in Prague psychophysical experiments, ca 1850s
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Thesis
Hui, Alexandra;
(2008)
Hearing Sound as Music: Psychophysical Studies of Sound Sensation and the Music Culture of Germany, 1860--1910
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Article
Julia Kursell;
(2018)
Alexander Ellis’s Translation of Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone
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Book
Rieger, Matthias;
(2006)
Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durchHelmholtz' Lehre von den Tonempfindungen
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Article
Kursell, Julia;
(2015)
A Third Note: Helmholtz, Palestrina, and the Early History of Musicology
(/isis/citation/CBB001551435/)
Chapter
Fowler, David;
(2003)
Helmholtz: Combinational Tones and Consonance
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Thesis
Pantalony, David Alexander;
(2002)
Rudolph Koenig (1832--1901), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821--1894) and the birth of modern acoustics
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Article
Kursell, Julia;
(2013)
Experiments on Tone Color in Music and Acoustics: Helmholtz, Schoenberg, and Klangfarbenmelodie
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Chapter
Heidelberger, Michael;
(1997)
Beziehungen zwischen Sinnesphysiologie und Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert
(/isis/citation/CBB000072987/)
Chapter
Holmes, Frederic L.;
Olesko, Kathryn M.;
(1995)
The image of precision: Helmholtz and the graphical method in physiology
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Book
Hörz, Herbert;
(1994)
Physiologie und Kultur in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Briefe an Hermann von Helmholtz. Unter Mitarbeit von Körner, Marie-Luise
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Article
Yamaguchi, Chuhei;
(1983)
On the formation of Helmholtz' view of life processes in his studies of fermentation and muscle action, in relation to his discovery of the law of conservation of energy
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Article
Welsh, Caroline;
(2008)
Nerven-Saiten-Stimmung. Zum Wandel einer Denkfigur zwischen Musik und Wissenschaft 1750--1850
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