So Mozart wrote from Paris in 1778. A few years earlier, the British musicologist Charles Burney heard the soprano and high tenor in the main Paris concert series ‘screaming’ and ‘bellowing’. At the Académie Royale de Musique, the home of serious opera, things were little better: voices ‘in themselves really good and well toned’ but, in their expression, ‘detestable and unnatural’. At the other main house, the Opéra-Comique, ‘bravura songs’ were ‘so ill performed that no one used to true Italian singing can like anything but the words and action’. It was ‘hardly too much to say, [good singing] is never to be heard at the theatres’.

Mozart and Burney were among many who, into the early nineteenth century, dismissed French opera singing out of hand because it was unlike Italian. By the 1770s the two operatic traditions had been established for over a century; between them they dominated Europe. The Italian tradition ruled from Lisbon to St Petersburg by way of London and Berlin; it was the way to sing in the theatre, just as Italian opera was the opera and Italian or Italian-trained singers appeared on stage everywhere – but not in France. There, occasional visits by Italian companies – from the 1640s to the 1750s – set off debate; their methods found champions, yet every time the French public went back to its own composers and singers and to their performing style, however ‘detestable’ to outsiders. Though the tradition must have pleased the bulk of the home audience, in Europe it was isolated.

There is a very large repertoire for choral societies and larger choirs ranging from the late Baroque of Bach and Handel, through the Romantics such as Mendelssohn, Reger and Brahms to composers of the present day. Although there are professional choir singers, the numbers involved usually mean that most people are singing for fun, though ‘fun’ in this case may mean a great deal of commitment and effort. Amateur singers are enthusiasts, often men and women who could have become professionals but for various reasons ended up pursuing singing as a hobby (which often begins after a hard day's work).

The singer

Singing in a large choir is very demanding for the singer. It may seem easy, with many singers on each part, but it is essential that the individual singer's resources are fully used in order for the complete ensemble to sound well as a choir. One of the most difficult problems is controlling your own voice when you may be sitting next to some one whose voice is very different from your own. It helps to think of a kind of mutuality of sound, each voice blending together, perhaps reducing the vibrato so that you can clearly hear each other's pitch. Consider the style of music that you are singing. Although the choir may have its own distinctive sound, the best choirs have a keen awareness of style: Bach, for example, will need to be approached with a straighter sound than the full-blooded singing appropriate for Richard Strauss.

Weber devoted a large part of his early work to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. He published a book on Roman agrarian history, an article on the social causes of the decline of ancient culture, surveys of the agrarian history of ancient civilizations (Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum) in three successive editions of the encyclopedia Handwörterbuch der Staatstwissenschaften, and compared the ancient city (-state) with equivalents in European, and non-European cultures (Die Stadt, The City). There are numerous, if scattered, references to antiquity in his Economy and Society (E&S) and his collection of articles on the sociology of world religions (GARS).

Despite the considerable quantity of research and writing which Weber did on antiquity in his work prior to 1914 he never presented a comprehensive account of his view of antiquity. Rather he approached the subject under various questions and different angles. He started with agrarian history (and was occupied at the same time with current developments in the eastern parts of Prussia), widened his approach to a general view of the ancient economy, and finally used Greco-Roman Antiquity as one element for the cross-cultural comparisons he concentrated on in his later work.

Weber's Roman Agrarian History and its Importance to State and Civil Law of 1891 (the Habilitationsschrift by which he qualified himself for the discipline of Civil and Commercial Law; see MWG 1/2) is the only text which lives up to the usual standards of scholarly work on antiquity by constantly referring (though somewhat casually) to the ancient sources. It nevertheless proved to be highly controversial.

Introduction

Max Weber engaged psychophysics directly and in detail on several occasions: the methodological article “Research Strategy for the Study of Occupational Careers and Mobility Patterns in the Workforce in Large Scale Industry,” written for colleagues conducting a survey for the Verein für Sozialpolitik; the 1908/9 literature review “On the Psychophysics of Industrial Work,” which includes a case study; the 1909 review “On the Methodology of Social Psychological Questionnaires”; a reader's letter concerning Marie Bernays; and an intervention in the debate at the annual conference of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in autumn 1911.

These “psychophysical writings,” as Weber once described them, have long been neglected by Weber scholars. Either they are ignored altogether, or treated as part of a purely empirical interest in working conditions. To be sure, Weber began his career as an economist with an empirical study of the social condition of agricultural workers, which implied also an interest in the social condition of industrial workers. When the Verein für Sozialpolitik turned in earnest to this later question, it was natural that Weber should be involved. Yet it has been claimed that after the study was conceived Weber's interest in the topic waned. According to this view, the texts of 1908 and 1909 mentioned above represent a conclusion rather than a beginning. It is therefore understandble that until now they have played less of a role in the biography of Weber’s work than in history of emperical social research in general and of industrial sociology in particular.

Max Weber is widely regarded as the greatest figure in the history of the social sciences, and like Karl Marx or Adam Smith, who might be regarded as rivals to this title, Weber was much more than a disciplinary scholar. There is a demotic Weber, whose ideas have passed into common currency; a students' Weber, who is a founding figure of sociology or the theorist of modernity; a scholar's Weber, who is the creator of core ideas that have influenced the development of various specialties and whose specialized writings are is still debated within these specialties; a canonical “Weber ” who is the subject of a scholarly industry, and, so to speak, a “deep ” Weber, who has been the subject of the serious and continued reflection of several of the greatest intellectual figures of the century. Unlike Smith and Marx, there is no “ideological Weber ”: no one has turned Weber's thought directly into a political world view and set of policy recipes for the consumption of the general public. But there is a very important “political Weber ” whose account of the morality of political life has influenced many politicians and political thinkers and remain central to questions about the nature of political responsibility.

Ten years ago, the death of a Pakistani singer, no matter how talented, would have gone unnoticed by most of the world. But when Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (see Fig. 1) died in August 1997, at the age of forty-eight, even America's notoriously parochial television news programs carried the story. Khan was not just one of the world's greatest singers, he was emblematic of a startling rise of interest in non-Western music, especially within the last quarter of the twentieth century. The late Pakistani singer, along with such world-wide sensations as Youssou N'Dour of Senegal and the globe-trotting choirs of Tibet and Bulgaria, came to represent a musical genre known by the informal and somewhat loosely defined term ‘world music’. This chapter provides an armchair traveller's guide to the world's increasingly miscegenated music. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, for example, was a master of the infectious, rhythmically charged Sufi devotional music known as qawwali. Lionised by such rock musicians as Peter Gabriel, The Who's Pete Townsend, and Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder, he also proved himself a thoroughly modern fellow, eagerly embracing his unexpected musical allies and moulding their Western pop styles to suit his own needs.

While it was probably an unintended result of the twentieth-century revolution in communications technology, with hindsight it seems unavoidable that people in the West would find themselves, for the first time since the Crusades, becoming keenly aware of non-Western systems of music and singing. ModernWestern listeners have had the unique experience of hearing their own popular music styles refracted through the prism of a hundred different cultures and returning as a brood of musical changelings – for example, in the form of African or Asian cross-cultural pop. And, of course, listeners in contemporary America or Europe have had the opportunity to hear live performances and recordings by some of the greatest singers in the classical, folk and popular styles of the world.

In the twentieth century the English cathedral and collegiate choir has consisted typically of about sixteen trebles – boys with unbroken voices, aged between about eight and thirteen (often with four additional ‘probationers’) – and at least six men taking the three lower parts. Numbers have varied from time to time in any particular choral foundation; in recent times York, Durham and Winchester Cathedral choirs have all used twelve men, as have Magdalen College, New College and Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. King's College and St John's College in Cambridge have both used fourteen men's voices, each with six basses. St Paul's is the largest establishment of all, with thirty-eight boys and eighteen men.

Historians, journalists, critics and cathedral musicians themselves have been sure they can identify a style of singing peculiar to these choirs which they define by reference to purity of tone, accuracy in intonation, precision in ensemble, and an absence of rhetoric. The ‘essence’ of the cathedral choir said one authority is ‘the boy's voice’, and its men are ‘at their best when they blend with that clean white tone’. Again and again throughout the century the same epithets have been used to characterise the singing, ‘pure’, ‘otherworldly’, ‘ethereal’, ‘impersonal’; writers who do not admire the style refer to its ‘coldness’, its lack of ‘passion’ or ‘personality’, to the cultivation of beauty of sound at the expense of any real expressiveness, to ‘under-interpretation’, to rather barren meticulousness; a French critic writes about ‘performances that are millimetrées, as if they were mathematical exercises’.

Ancient Judaism is perhaps Weber's greatest single creation. Nearly 500 pages in length, though unfinished at the time of his death, it is the largest of the three major studies of the three-volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion) (GARS). The work is deeply rooted in Weber's thought. In the Protestant Ethic Weber had already emphasized affinities between Judaism and the outlook of Puritanism, suggesting that ascetic Protestantism had inherited the “perfectly unemotional wisdom of the Hebrews” which had seen “the rational suppression of the mystical, in fact the whole emotional side of religion” (PE 123). He observed that despite its distinct petty-bourgeois and traditionalistic tendencies, “Old Testament morality was able to give a powerful impetus to that spirit of self-righteous and sober legality which was so characteristic of the worldly asceticism o f … Protestantism” (PE 165).

By the time of Ancient Judaism, Weber's appreciation of the significance of the Hebrew legacy had deepened in proportion as his investigations broadened to deal with the origins of western rationality. One can also read the argument of Ancient Judaism as Weber's response to Nietzsche on the very large questions of the “genealogy of morals” and the significance of the Judeo-Christian tradition for the fate of western modernity in general. For Weber shared with Nietzsche a preoccupation with the peculiar character of the religious impulse as such, especially insofar as powerful inner forces are unleashed in directions that lead to various “unnatural” and self-denying practices (FMW 271-272).

This quotation from an anonymous thirteenth-century treatise is not alone in testifying to the pre-eminent role occupied by the voice in medieval music. The Christian church from the very beginning had rejected the use of musical instruments in worship both because of their intimate associations with pagan cults and because of their connection with the profligate immorality of the Greco-Roman world. Christian liturgical music thus developed in a direction consistent with, and determined by, the capabilities of the singing voice. The organ, an instrument difficult to construct and constantly in need of maintenance, made only gradual headway towards its eventual status as the sacred instrument par excellence. Few medieval churches could hope to possess so extraordinary a treasure. Instruments were tangential to the performance of monophonic secular song of the Middle Ages, and they seemed to have played only the most minimal role in secular polyphony.

The ‘early music’ revival of the twentieth century was guided primarily by instrumentalists whose imaginations could roam freely in the absence of instruments surviving from the Middle Ages. The human voice did more than merely survive: its physiology has remained unchanged, yet as John Potter observed, there was no re-evaluation of singing techniques comparable to the re-examination of playing techniques applicable to ‘period’ instruments. Instead, various twentieth-century vocal practices have competed for ‘authentic’ status, based more on the degree of aesthetic satisfaction they afford to twentieth-century ears than on their conformity with practices of the past.

The background

The intensity of the debate which followed the publication of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904-1905 shows how relevant the essay was considered at the time. The subject interested many of Weber's contemporaries – economists, historians, social scientists and philosophers. What, they were asking, were the origins of capitalism? What were its characteristics in its modern form? How far was it affected by religion and, more particularly, by Protestantism? The prosperity of Holland and England in the seventeenth century, attended by the economic decline of Italy and Spain, had long fascinated scholars and suggested that there was some relationship between the Reformation and economic progress. In order to confirm this theory they could turn to far earlier sources – the seventeenth-century political economist William Petty, the great exponent of the Enlightenment Montesquieu, and the historian Henry Thomas Buckle writing in the mid-nineteenth century. But they were also in search of a more modern analysis of the true nature of the relationship. In his study on suicide which appeared in 1897, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim observed that Protestants, and above all German Protestants, divorced more and killed themselves more than the members of any other confession. Such primacies, he maintained, indicated an industrial society in a particularly advanced stage, with a high standard of education and living. This, in turn, raised the question of the extent to which Protestantism might have contributed to this advance and to the development of the class on which such a society rested, the bourgeoisie.