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  3. Helmholtz and the Modern Listener
  • Cited by 44
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      August 2012
      July 2012
      ISBN:
      9781139057745
      9781107015173
      9781107504332
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139057745
      Dimensions:
      (247 x 174 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.75kg, 296 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (244 x 170 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.48kg, 296 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Music, History, History of Science: General Interest, Nineteenth-Century Music
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    Subjects:
    Music, History, History of Science: General Interest, Nineteenth-Century Music
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    Book description

    The musical writings of scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) have long been considered epoch-making in the histories of both science and aesthetics. Widely regarded as having promised an authoritative scientific foundation for harmonic practice, Helmholtz can also be read as posing a series of persistent challenges to our understanding of the musical listener. Helmholtz was at the forefront of sweeping changes in discourse about human perception. His interrogation of the physiology of hearing threw notions of the self-possessed listener into doubt and conjured a sense of vulnerability to mechanistic forces and fragmentary experience. Yet this new image of the listener was simultaneously caught up in wider projects of discipline, education and liberal reform. Reading Helmholtz in conjunction with a range of his intellectual sources and heirs, from Goethe to Max Weber to George Bernard Shaw, Steege explores the significance of Helmholtz's listener as an emblem of a broader cultural modernity.

    Awards

    Winner of the 2014 Emerging Scholar Award, Society for Music Theory

    Reviews

    '… this is a richly textured, impressively detailed and well-chiseled study that will deepen our engagement with Helmholtz’s complex acoustic cosmology.'

    David Trippett Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

    '[Steege's] text moves … with an interpretive delight and a virtuosity, drawing in a wide range of subjects and interlocutors.'

    Leslie David Blasius Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society

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