Die Haut oder der Hut? Zur Geschichlichkeit musikalischer Anschauungs- und Denkformen

This article was the result of three interdisciplinary colloquia financed by the Werner-Reimers-Stiftung, Bad Homburg, Germany. It was provoked by the observation that in Western culture music has gained eminent social and intellectual prestige which is based on music’s scientifically derived sound materials and enacted by the culturally vindicated ‘language’ applied to works of art. The central question addressed by the colloquia was, whether by virtue of this state of affairs music could claim to represent a paradigm of perception and thought in its own right. This is denied by the author. Instead, I show the historicity of some features that have sometimes been claimed to have the status of universals. Firstly, I argue that that there was a continuous discussion of tuning and temperament between the 15th and 18th centuries which superficially resulted in the substitution of Pythagorean tuning by equal temperament. Yet, more importantly, an 18th-century theory of music based on temperament became in itself regressive in view of the growing complexity of the musical discourse especially on matters of melody, form and aesthetics at that time. Secondly, I demonstrate that the historical origins of interval tendencies towards the ‘perfection’ of consonances, controversially situated between the 12th and 15th centuries, already had their counterpart in Aristotle’s psychological terminology. Thirdly, I show that the sixteenth-century controversy about Adrian Willaert’s motet “Quid non ebrietas”, which famously ends on a seventh, provoked some writers to think beyond a mathematically determined tonal system and develop aesthetic criteria for the evaluation of music. The discipline of music therefore cannot claim to represent paradigms of thought and perception, because in each of the three case studies it is shown that the categories underpinning the discourse could be complemented by another field of knowledge, the legitimacy of which cannot be denied.