Helmholtz and the Modern Listener

ISBN-13: 9781107015173 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 296 str.

Benjamin Steege

Opis

The musical writings of scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 1894) 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 Weber to George Bernard Shaw, Steege explores the significance of Helmholtz's listener as an emblem of a broader cultural modernity."

Recenzje

'[Steege's] text moves … with an interpretive delight and a virtuosity, drawing in a wide range of subjects and interlocutors.' Leslie David Blasius, Journal of the American Musicological Society

Spis treści

Chronology; Introduction; 1. Popular sensations; 2. Refunctioning the ear; 3. The problem of attention; 4. Tonal theory as liberal progressive history; 5. Voices of reform; Epilogue: Helmholtz and modernism; Bibliography.