Between Race and Culture - Hearing Japanese Music in Berlin

Between Race and Culture:
Hearing Japanese Music in Berlin
Benjamin Steege, Columbia University
ABSTRACT
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Otto Abraham’s “Studies on the Tone System and
Music of the Japanese” (1903) is a classic representative of comparative musicology,
bringing together a heterogeneous array of methodologies constituting the early dis-
cipline. But what did the two Berlin psychologists aim to accomplish with this docu-
ment? Understanding the central, unstated project of early comparative musicology
requires an evaluation of its fundamentally psychologistic character and of the ethical
potential the new psychology was thought to bring. Despite its wealth of ethnological
detail, “culture” as such was in fact precisely what these authors sought to bracket out
in order to isolate a psychological element that would transcend forms of difference
and work against polygenist race thinking. Yet their insistence on the foundational
significance of raw psychological apprehension was also a weakness insofar as it left
the project open to the very racially inflected modes of thought it otherwise resisted.
O
tto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, two Berlin psychologists as-
sociated with the research program commonly known as comparative mu-
sicology (a forerunner of today’s ethnomusicology), begin their sixty-page
1903 essay on Japanese music with an abrupt juxtaposition of the discontinuous cul-
tural spaces of the theater and the laboratory. The occasion for their contribution,
they tell us, was a run of performances by the musical theater troupe of Kawakami
Otojirō—starring the highly regarded actress, dancer, and instrumentalist known as
Sadayakko—who had passed through Berlin two years earlier as part of a hugely suc-
cessful European tour managed by modernist icon Loïe Fuller.1 Abraham and Horn-
bostel immediately note that Sadayakko herself had assisted their research by agreeing
1. A detailed account of the performance appears in Joseph L. Anderson, Enter a Samurai: Kawa-
kami Otojirō and Japanese Theatre in the West (Tucson, AZ: Wheatmark, 2011), 506–7.
History of Humanities, Volume 2, Number 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/693319

© 2017 by Society for the History of the Humanities. All rights reserved. 2379-3163/2017/0202-0004$10.00
361
This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
362 | HISTORY OF HUMANITIES FALL 2017
FORUM
to be recorded on a phonograph cylinder, performing a koto solo as well as playing in

an ensemble piece.2 While most of the recordings appear to have been made in the Psy-
chological Institute at the University of Berlin, one was exceptionally taken in the
wings of the theater, capturing an offstage shamisen player in the acoustic foreground
accompanying an onstage dance by Sadayakko, while the sounds of a voice and per-
cussion performance can be faintly heard in the distance.3
Beyond this initial mention, the name Sadayakko passes with scant further com-
ment, but its early highlighting suggests an assumption that their readers were aware
of her status as a superstar who was being compared favorably with Sarah Bernhardt
in the American and European presses.4 Presumably, one was meant to read the in-
volvement of such a figure as a mark of prestige and as a promise of the study’s rele-
vance to broader problems of cultural evaluation. But a vaguely comical element arises
by virtue of the ambiguous conjunction of the world of theatrical fame with the ac-
tual research imperatives pursued by Abraham and Hornbostel. The authors appear
to have been oblivious to the peculiarity of their abrupt shift from touting Sadayakko’s
cooperation to describing their arcane methods. Their opening gambit gives no indi-
cation that anybody involved with producing this work of scholarship enjoyed the nar-
rative drama of a play, or a dance, or a song performed on stage. Rather, instruments
are forthwith measured, phonograms transcribed, frequencies determined, tuning sys-
tems derived.5
The agenda for the following discussion is to make a few comments about the form
this production of knowledge took and some suggestions about the largely tacit ethical
work it performed. Why were Abraham and Hornbostel apparently so uninterested in
the cultural texture of the historical event they witnessed? Why would the European
performances of Kawakami Otojirō and Sadayakko, which deeply impressed a range
of viewers from Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Pablo Picasso, largely disappear from the
account, even when so much value was placed on the phonographic preservation of
the acoustic trace of these performances?6 In other words, what motivates such an as-
2. Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Studien über das Tonsystem und die Musik der
Japaner (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1903), 1.
3. Fujita Sennosuke, voice, and Kineya Kimisaburō, shamisen, “Dance Pieces from Act II of
‘The Geisha and the Knight,’ ” Wax Cylinder Recordings of Japanese Music (1901–1913), Berliner
Phonogramm-Archiv, BPhA-WA1 (2003). A rough transcription appears in Abraham and Hornbostel,
Studien, 47.
4. Anderson, Enter a Samurai, 180 and 490.
5. Brief descriptions of the performance appear later, yet the decentering of the event merely rein-
forces the point. Abraham and Hornbostel, Studien, 37–38 and 43.
6. Mitsuya Mori, “Introduction: The Prelude to Modern Drama in the Meiji Era (1868–1912),”
in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama, ed. J. Thomas Rimer, Mitsuya Mori, and

HEARING JAPANESE MUSIC IN BERLIN | 363
FORUM
sertive move to decontextualize the performance event and reduce it to elements famil-
iarly accessible to an experimental psychoacoustic approach? I think there has been a
tendency to read the moment of comparative musicology without fully entertaining
these sorts of questions, as if it went without saying that at some juvenile stage of the
discipline that would eventually become ethnomusicology, scholars’ judgment was as
yet stunted and their cultural sophistication still undeveloped. The fact that the 1903
Japanese music study was Hornbostel and Abraham’s first musicological publication
only encourages this narrative.
But it is also possible to read the paper as a more subtle response to certain prob-
lems of epistemology and ethics that are not directly announced in the text itself. Two
major concerns, which we can mark down for shorthand’s sake as “culture” and “race,”
haunt the essay, even (or especially) though they are not often introduced as matters
for explicit or sustained thought. I am not concerned here with the longer-term legacy
of comparative musicology for contemporary ethnomusicology, but instead with the
more local problem of the relation between the status of the 1903 essay as “psychology”
and the ghosting presences of culture and race. The loose hypothesis this essay will en-
tertain is that psychology functioned in Berlin comparative musicology as the domain
of study that would displace or supersede a race-biological understanding of human
difference, on the one hand, and that would forestall or slow down a cultural under-
standing of human difference, on the other hand—without, however, fully negating
the implications of either. In other words, the psychological register, so to speak, occu-
pies a kind of precarious middleground between biology and culture that allows for cer-
tain research operations to be carried out that would be impossible within the purview
of either of the surrounding terms. I will begin by addressing the historical relation be-
tween race and psychology in the immediate context, then turn to the question of cul-
ture, and end by briefly indicating some of the problems that remained from Abraham
and Hornbostel’s approach, specifically as they emerged in one revealing contempora-
neous interpretation of their work.
* * *
It has been noticed, most explicitly by Philip Bohlman, that comparative musicol-
ogy failed to do adequate justice to questions of race. For Bohlman, and I suspect he
represents many readers here, the primary relation between comparative musicology
M. Cody Poulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 1–28. Indeed, it would be difficult
to overstate Sadayakko’s transformative significance within the history of Japanese theater culture,
as discussed in Ayako Kano, Acting like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender and Nationalism
(New York: Palgrave, 2001), 39–119.

FORUM
and race thinking was one of imposing scientific authority, specifically in the form
of the laboratory, in order to manage and discipline alterity into conformation with
standing beliefs about racial superiority. “It seems almost remarkable that the colonial-
ist obsession with collecting and controlling cultural otherness should rely on the dis-
courses of the laboratory. A laboratory mentalité informed almost all aspects of repre-
sentations, ranging from the transcriptional decisions employed by . . . Hornbostel . . .
to the photographs of racial types that accompanied musical works on nationalism.”7
Meanwhile, as Vanessa Agnew in particular has shown, even a liberal scholar like Horn-
bostel became all too easily entangled in German colonial ambitions in Oceania, where
his and others’ theorization of musical difference was crudely mapped onto physical
difference and thus coopted to support strategies of domination.8 Underlying the easy
cooptation of comparative musicology for colonialist ends was its pervasive thematiza-
tion of evolutionary hierarchy, where the aim became to plot every instance of musical
culture on a spectrum from primitive to civilized.
Bohlman’s and Agnew’s retrospective critiques are well founded, and there is no
sense in trying to explain away the profoundly racialized terms in which early compar-
ative musicology carried out its basic endeavor. Yet the analysis of the discipline’s im-
brication with larger structures of state and colonial power does not in itself do much
to help us understand how it is that the odd pairing Bohlman observes between scien-
tific rationality and lingering racism might have arisen. One might well ask what role a
specifically psychological style of knowledge played in this scenario. What significance
are we to grant to the fact that this research program inhabited the “Psychological In-
stitute”?9 A slightly later article Hornbostel coauthored with institute director Carl
Stumpf offers a slim but revealing clue by singling out the mid-nineteenth-century an-
7. Philip Bohlman, “Erasure: Displacing and Misplacing Race in Twentieth-Century Music Histo-
riography,” in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 14.
8. Vanessa Agnew, “The Colonialist Beginnings of Comparative Musicology,” in Germany’s Colo-
nial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2005), 41–60.
9. It is not that this question has not yet been posed in the scholarly literature, only that its impli-
cations for race thinking have not been explicitly thematized. See, e.g., Dieter Christensen, “Erich M.
von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and the Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology,” in Compara-
tive Musicology and Anthropology of Music, ed. Bruno Nettl and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991), 201–209; Martin Müller, “Erich M. von Hornbostel: Gestaltpsychologie und
Kulturvergleichende Forschung,” in Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns: Erich M. Hornbostel als
Gestaltpsychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler, ed. Sebastian Klotz (Berlin: Schibri, 1998), 169–
83; and Sebastian Klotz, “Tonpsychologie und Musikforschung als Katalysatoren wissenschaftlich-
experimenteller Praxis und der Methodenlehre im Kreis von Carl Stumpf,” Berichte zur Wissen-
schaftsgeschichte 31, no. 3 (2008): 195–210.

FORUM
thropologist Theodor Waitz as a possible role model for the consolidating field of com-
parative musicology.10 While Waitz’s name does not surface frequently in other writ-
ings by Abraham, Hornbostel, or Stumpf, his background significance for the wider
evaluation of comparative psychology in this period can hardly be overstated. In 1859,
Waitz published the first volume of what is often taken to be a founding text of modern
anthropology—translated in 1863 as Introduction to Anthropology—a book that takes a
sharply polemical stance against the then prevalent theory of polygenism, that is, the
belief that humans evolved from and still belong to multiple species and could therefore
be ranked hierarchically on biological grounds.11 Waitz argued that there was insuffi-
cient evidence to support a multiple-species view of humanity and instead pointed to
research indicating that humans of all varieties shared mental abilities that suggested
a common origin, a so-called psychic unity of mankind, which happened to accord with
Biblical teaching.12 His position was formulated in academic terms, but his anthropo-
logical work was morally motivated by horror at the state-political racism of American
slavery and ongoing extermination of indigenous peoples, both of which were being
justified by polygenist theory.13 Passing from Waitz through the slightly younger an-
thropologist Adolf Bastian to Stumpf’s own agenda, this particular strain of psycholog-
ically inflected ethnology can be read as maintaining the background moral and, though
at a remove of several degrees, theological imperatives that were more explicit in Waitz.
At a psychological level, human populations share some panracial specific identity, and
it was the job of ethnology to pinpoint the features that would reveal this potential iden-
tification. To move from the biologism of early physical anthropology to the psycholo-
gism of the new ethnology was to assert, perhaps again with lingering theological com-
mitments, that humanness was not incidentally but essentially psychological, where
“psyche” continues to bear some trace connotation of ensoulment.
So for all the flamboyant sorting, classifying, and ranking in Berlin-school compar-
ative musicology as practiced by Stumpf, Hornbostel, and Abraham, and although the-
10. Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Unter-
suchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst,” Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft
6 (1911): 102–3.
11. Theodor Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, vol. 1., Ueber die Einheit des Menschenge-
schlechtes und den Naturzustand des Menschen (Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer, 1859).
12. See Matti Bunzl, “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and National-
charakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture,” in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on
Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 44–52.
13. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 12–14. For a broader discussion of the implications of
polygenist theory, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 29–54.

FORUM
ology is essentially absent in their work, we should not be surprised to discover this
drive toward determining commonalities. Indeed, it does not take much to see that
the hierarchization of some domain would first depend on establishing the unified
principles that defined that domain in the first place.14 This, then, is the sense in which
race as a biological category might be felt to hover unnamed in the background of a text
like the 1903 essay on Japanese music, although one searches almost in vain through
Hornbostel’s complete works for sustained reference to race. While it would have been
considered an intellectual embarrassment for German scholars of their milieu to write
about human difference as a matter of biological fact, the new psychology, of which
comparative musicology was a special branch, allowed for a kind of loose translation
or sublimation of the evolutionary narrative-conceptual structure of biologistic race
thinking onto this other plane.15 In accordance with Waitz’s original formulation,
Stumpf and his cohort could operate on the assumption that while humans shared cer-
tain basic mental capacities, the location of significant difference was now to be found
in observing just how far a given individual or population had actualized or developed
those capacities. So the old thematic of evolution was both preserved and also denatu-
ralized, and in being denaturalized, it could also be moralized, since “development”
could now be considered at least partly a matter of either realizing or failing to realize
a potential.
Yet the kind of psychological knowledge that characterizes Abraham and Horn-
bostel’s work in this context is not self-evidently hierarchistic. In the Japanese music
study, the questions that emerged for psychological evaluation were roughly as follows.
First, to what extent is the formation of musical scales influenced by the perception of
tonal fusion (i.e., the judgment that two or more tones may sound as one) as well as by
the ability to hear distances between pitches as equal? Second, are absolute and relative
pitch broadly shared or ethnologically differentiated capacities? Third, to what extent
is the perception of a tonic pitch an aesthetic-psychological constant? At least the first
two of these issues, tonal fusion and absolute pitch, were the subject of extensive ex-
perimental study by Stumpf (whose notion of fusion had been a notable contribution
to psychological theory a few years earlier) and Abraham (who had just published an
extensive and virtually unprecedented study on absolute pitch in 1901).16 Since I am
14. This point is elaborated in Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of The-
ories of Culture (New York: Crowell, 1968), 102, 139–40.
15. On the decidedly monogenist tenor of German anthropology around 1900, see Benoit Massin,
“From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ Wilhelmine Ger-
many,” in Stocking, Volksgeist as Method and Ethic, 79–154.
16. Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, vol. 2 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1890), 127–218; Erich Moritz von
Hornbostel, “Das absolute Tonbewusstsein: psychologisch-musikalische Studie,” Sammelbände der

FORUM
mainly concerned here with the form and style of knowledge production, I will not go
into the details of their answers to these questions, other than to note incidentally that
they contradict Alexander J. Ellis by arguing that Japanese tunings tend to be pure
rather than tempered.17 But I would observe that in order to arrive at the provisional
conclusions they do draw, Abraham and Hornbostel first needed to screen out a wide
variety of other impinging contingencies. For example, in addition to “purely” psycho-
logical factors of consonance and pitch discrimination, to what extent is a tuning sys-
tem influenced by long-standing traditions of numerology and cosmology, which here
would involve comparison with the history of Chinese music theory as well as the
deeper background of a possible common source in Pythagoreanism? Or by the mate-
rial demands of instrument building, which are simultaneously immediate and tradi-
tional? Does it make a difference for the understanding of Japanese musical repertories
as a whole that notation and theoretical literacy were largely confined to aristocratic so-
cial classes and hence only to a small subset of sacred musical genres, such as gagaku?
Much attention is devoted to these latter problems, giving the impression of a truly hy-
brid discipline, situated at some complex intersection of physicalist, psychologistic, his-
toricist, and ethnographic views of the same basic set of objects. Yet in both its form
and its overriding rhetorical tenor, the essay leaves the strong impression that every-
thing beyond the sensory or the cognitive, while immediately material to the problems
under discussion, is nonetheless ancillary to the core value placed on the life of the
mind. Or, to put it another way, ethnological facts—tuning systems, instrument design,
and so on—are held either to conceal or, even in partially concealing, to reveal under-
lying mental acts.18
I am not especially interested in whether or not comparative musicologists’ own self-
perception as aspiring to unite the human species on the basis of the shared mental
traits observable in musical behavior is valid or compromised. Rather, I want to mark
out these aspirations as a baseline from which to ask, now, if this is indeed the ideol-
ogy, so to speak, what is the methodology, and how do the two relate? That is, given
that Abraham and Hornbostel immediately, in the first sentence of their first publica-
Internationalen Musik-Gesellschaft 3 (1901–2): 1–86. For much more texture on Stumpf ’s and Horn-
bostel’s psychological research, see Julia Kursell, “Experimental Cylinders: Experiments in Music Psy-
chology around 1900,” Journal of Sonic Studies 13 (2017), https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view
/324247/324248.
17. Abraham and Hornbostel, Studien, 19.
18. This is all the more notable given that Hornbostel himself would later come to devote consid-
erable attention to the formative significance of bodily engagement with musical sound, on which see
especially Stephen Blum, “European Musical Terminology and the Music of Africa,” in Nettl and
Bohlman, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, 1–36.

FORUM
tion, broach the possibility of the “experimental basis” of their approach to the Kawa-
kami troupe, what can we expect this experimentalization to have accomplished, or to
have failed to accomplish? What was the experiment, and what did it do?
There are many available ways of talking about experiments, but I want to draw a
few suggestions from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s theoretical writings on the topic that
seem generative in this context. Broadly speaking, Rheinberger has urged that we ought
not to think of experiments as aiming to fix the identity of their investigative objects
once and for all, as if the notion of a successful experimental outcome were to find
out the conclusive answer to just that question one had entered a laboratory in order
to pose. Instead, what experimental systems have historically turned out to do is to pro-
duce things to know about that are unforeseeable before the experiment begins. An-
other way of putting this is to say that in the experiment, things emerge whose identity
is never fully stabilized, in a process of perpetual deferral of meaning—hence Rhein-
berger’s notion of the “epistemic thing,” which, far from implying those already ac-
knowledged apparatus (instruments, phonographs, etc.) that generate discrete, name-
able objects of knowledge, refers instead to the unpredicted, novel things that emerge
from within the experimental scene.19 A germane example is the upper partial tone,
some of whose phenomenal qualities were to be sure indexed in texts dating back to
antiquity, but which emerged as an unforeseen by-product of other concerns within
the highly particular material, institutional, historical conditions of mid-nineteenth-
century acoustics, and then rather than finally collapsing into a fully cognizable, the-
oretically closed object, instead continually posed questions about just what it was,
whether physical, physiological, psychological, and so forth.20
For comparative musicologists, of primary interest were the psychological judg-
ments listeners made about what they heard. The paradigmatic shift of emphasis from
Helmholtz’s acoustic beats to Stumpf ’s subjectively judged tonal fusion as the basis for
defining the experiences of consonance and dissonance carried over as well to more
complex protomusical situations. But this still raises the question of just what new things
could come into being on this precarious level of psychological experience marked by
subjective judgment. Can a judgment be an epistemic object in Rheinberger’s sense?
In order to try to gain a keener feeling for this problem, let’s look at one representa-
19. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test
Tube (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 28–29.
20. Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), 54–58. Relatedly, Julia Kursell, in her essay “Fine-Tuning Philology” (in this forum), proposes
that Helmholtz himself interpreted the historical emergence of the pure 4∶5 third in Arabic lute
tunings in terms that would suggest the workings of an epistemic thing, which would emerge from
exploratory operations on the lute and might in turn generate new acoustic objects and tone relations.

FORUM
tive example from the 1903 article. At one point, the authors are reflecting on the de-
tails of koto tunings they have observed through recordings and their study of partic-
ular instruments. The tuning of the koto’s thirteen strings ranges just over two octaves.
Each octave contains five strings, whose tuning is variable. Further pitches may arise
through stopping, so that gaps in the scale may be filled ad hoc, as shown in figure 1.
For the psychologists, the question thus arises of how to reckon the status of these non-
tuned pitches: what theoretical role should these seemingly marginal phenomena be
given, not just for the derivation of the scale but in terms of their presence to sensation,
perception, and thought?
It is evident that with the string-stopping technique, the intonation of the raised
degree does not always come off with complete clarity. The emergence of the
neutral intervals that we sometimes detect in Japanese music, and whose emo-
tive character strikes us as so unfamiliar, is due to this kind of intermediate in-
tonation. These tuning fluctuations may either completely escape a Japanese per-
son, free from harmonic feeling, whose attention is not predominantly directed
toward thirds and sixths, or else they perceive them at any rate as not disturbing.
Based on the results of our measurements, we cannot really assume that they
were intended. On the other hand, they doubtless belong to the peculiarities of
Chinese music . . . and . . . they may have infiltrated Japan but not into the mu-
sical popular consciousness of the Japanese. . . . However, we are not sufficiently
informed about the practices of Japanese music to conjecture anything more
definite about this.21
What is the object of this train of thought? The authors are trying to form an impres-
sion of what it is like for a musically educated Japanese listener to hear koto music.
Though Abraham and Hornbostel are setting out from the occasion of an immediate
acoustic signal they themselves intensively perceive, they are not interested in the raw
signal present to themselves but rather in what judgment this imagined listener might
make of it. Their description is baldly and unapologetically hypothetical and thus cre-
21. “Es ist begreiflich, daß bei der Saitendruck-Technik die Intonation der erhöhten Stufen nicht
immer ganz scharf ausf ällt. Solcher intermediärer Intonation verdanken wohl die neutralen Intervalle
ihre Entstehung, die wir gelegentlich auch aus japanischer Musik heraushören, und deren Gefühls-
Charakter Japaner, dessen Aufmerksamkeit nicht vorwiegend auf Terzen und Sexten gerichtet ist,
mögen dagegen diese Intonations-Schwankungen entweder ganz entgehen, oder er empfindet sie doch
nicht störend. Daß sie intendiert seien, können wir nach den Resultaten unserer Messungen nicht gut
annehmen. Dagegen gehören sie zweifellos zu den Eigentümlichkeiten der chinesischen Musik und
dürften . . . wohl nach Japan, aber nicht in das musikalische Volks-Bewußtsein der Japaner einge-
drungen sein. . . . Unsere Erfahrungen über die praktische Musik der Japaner reichen aber nicht
hin, um etwas Bestimmtes hierüber zu vermuten” (Abraham and Hornbostel, Studien, 27–28).

FORUM
Figure 1. Koto tunings, partial list, from Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Studien
über das Tonsystem und die Musik der Japaner, 24.
ates its own sorts of hypothetical objects. For example, they suppose that on certain
occasions, pitches produced by a stopped koto string may result in the interval of a
third or a sixth with another, unstopped string. But these intervals, which may be har-
monic in the context of a tonal triadic organization in which thirds and sixths would
bear a heightened significance, might not even be present for the judgment of some-
one whose “attention,” as they put it, is not directed toward this particular significance.
It is an open question as to whether the sound of these incidental resultant intervals
is even registered as such by the musicians they are studying. So we are dealing in this
case with a kind of negative object, the imagination by Abraham and Hornbostel of
some other aural judgment, which is effectively insensitive or even deaf to what the
psychologists take to be available to themselves, yet an aural judgment that nonetheless
must hear something, though they cannot say what it is just yet. This is in fact a special
case of a more familiar widespread problem of the European scholarly approach to
non-European music in this era, which Alexander Rehding has assessed as a matter
of confronting the disconnect between musical “logic,” in Hugo Riemann’s harmoni-
cally oriented sense, and the acoustic nonsense that the phonograph had seemed to
bring to the fore: a wax cylinder makes no distinction between meaningful and un-
meaningful sound.22 In a related vein, Friedrich Kittler familiarly diagnoses this as
an overwhelming of the symbolic by the real.23 In light of the trajectory of Abraham
and Hornbostel’s 1903 prose, I would amend such formulations to add that rather than
decommissioning symbolic meaning, the phonographic study of Japanese music in
this case seems to aim at deferring judgment about meaning. They imagine that some
22. Alexander Rehding, “Wax Cylinder Revolutions,” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2005): 123–60.
23. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 21–114.

FORUM
cognition may be reached, but not right now. “We are not sufficiently informed,” goes
the banal formula that motivates so many discipline-building statements, but that is not
to say that there could not come a time when we will be. Disciplines tend to work by
declaring themselves perpetually at the beginning of some project, grand or otherwise,
whose ends must always be kept at a distance and constantly revised. This is the sense
in which I think we can perceive that this particular moment in early comparative mu-
sicology is a moment of wanting to put off the arrival of a concern with culture, if by
“culture” we mean something like the interpretation of meaning.24 They are staking
out the space in which such an interpretation might unfold, but they do not jump
ahead to enacting it themselves. This is not just a matter of admitting the blatantly ob-
vious fact that they simply do not know much, or know anything for sure, but rather of
sensing how, once put to an experimental touch, the significance of the acoustic ma-
terial becomes more rather than less open to question. They do not stake out a position
against interpretation in favor of some antihumanist purgatory of callous measuring
and methodolatry, but rather simply for postponing interpretation, slowing thought
down without ceasing to think altogether. It is the reiterative gesture of listening again
and again to the phonograph—a repetition the phonograph patently and famously en-
ables—that constitutes the experimental scene, a difference in repetition. The phono-
graph here is not only a technique of storage, or of transduction, or of neutralizing cul-
tural meaning, but also one of a deferral of closure, setting the experimental listener
over and over at the beginning of some potential thought.
* * *
I have suggested that it was only after a biologistic racism, for which any act of in-
terpretation would be pointless, had been displaced or perhaps merely sublimated, that
this moment became possible. Yet even if this speculation is plausible in supposing
that a psychologistic comparative musicology was suspended undecided between race
and culture, the final point I want to make is just how vulnerable this suspended po-
sition was to covertly sustaining the same race thinking it had provisionally displaced.
It is not just that comparative musicological texts are so obviously littered with all sorts
of embarrassing prejudgments about cultural value and characterology (the “polite-
ness,” “melancholy,” and so forth, of the Japanese, in the present case).25 But rather the
24. These points are of course being deployed in a deliberately schematic fashion, strategically ig-
noring a pivotal text like Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1921), in
which everything that had been suspended or sublimated would break out onto the surface for explicit
consideration.
25. Abraham and Hornbostel, Studien, 31 n. 2, 33.

FORUM
methodologically cautious insistence on the provisionality of knowledge, or of the tem-

porary unknowability of what emerges as its basic epistemic objects—subjective judg-
ments about musical organization—turns out to be itself a weakness in that it leaves
the door open to concluding that groups of people are blankly opaque to one another
and hence destined to inhabit not just different spheres of the geographical world, but,
more metaphysically, different “worldhoods” altogether. A spokesman for this inter-
pretation of comparative musicology was the philosopher Max Scheler. Scheler, who
came to prominence at this time for his writings on ethics, love, and sympathy, was
a member of the early circle around Edmund Husserl and shared the latter’s impor-
tant critique of experimental psychology for attributing too much significance to iso-
lated sensory and mental contents as the basis for understanding the action of logic
and meaning. Yet, curiously enough, Scheler positioned Stumpf, Hornbostel, and Abra-
ham’s psychologistic work on music prominently in his 1915 book The Genius of War,
which was a blistering polemical justification of the aims of the Central Powers in the
First World War. For Scheler, what comparative musicology showed, along with other
similar research programs, was the incommensurability not just of individuals, or their
beliefs, or national interests but rather, far more grandly, of the “worlds” they inhabit.26
He read the new subdiscipline as gesturing beyond positivist enumeration and taxo-
nomization to instead thematize the sheer variousness of modes of perception and ways
of being in the world. And where the members of the Berlin school by and large dodged
the question of how these differences might relate to racial difference, Scheler was more
emphatic: race, insofar as it was still understood biologically, was a thoroughly discred-
ited and useless category that sought to enforce an unjustifiable naturalistic reduction of
what it meant to belong to an ethnological group, which he understood in quasi-idealist
terms: “My answer to the question, what type of unity is that of ‘Europe’ or the ‘Euro-
pean’ I am discussing, is therefore this: the core of this unity is a particular spiritual
structure [Geistesstruktur]; for example, a particular form of ethos, a particular manner
of viewing the world and of actively forming the world. Precisely this European spirit,
which people always want to ‘derive,’ whether from race, climate, or milieu, is the un-
derivable core within the concept of the European.”27 Yet Scheler’s principled rejection
of biologism hardly rescues him from a stunningly provincial chauvinism nor, indeed,
26. Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg (Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen
Bücher, 1915), 262–64.
27. “Meine Antwort auf die Frage, welcher Art Einheit denn dann das ‘Europa’ ist, oder der
‘Europäer,’ von dem ich rede, ist daher diese: der Kern dieser Einheit ist eine bestimmte Geistesstruktur,
z. B. eine bestimmte Form des Ethos, eine bestimmte Art des Weltanschauens und der tätigen Welt-
formung. Gerade dieser europäische Geist, den man immer ‘ableiten’ möchte, sei es aus Rasse, Klima,
Milieu—ist der unableitbare Kern im Begriffe des Europäischen” (ibid., 294).

FORUM
from postbiologistic racism in the style so familiar today. The conclusion Scheler ulti-
mately drew from comparative musicology and other contemporaneous forms of eth-
nological knowledge was that the war was a struggle over how to develop and cultivate
this “European spirit,” and so other groups from Africa to Russia to East Asia were ef-
fectively irrelevant to the central conflict (despite its roots in the intensification of co-
lonialist competition over the preceding decades). Needless to say, it is not a little pe-
culiar that Scheler managed to shoehorn the project of comparative musicology into a
brief for military action against Western European nation states. But it is worth noting
the very possibility of this position circa 1915, because it so patently reveals how easy it
is to maintain a position of denying naturalized difference while still cheering for the
most brutal forms of violence. Perhaps this is what happens when interpretation, as
an ethical act of ongoing communication, is deferred a moment too long.
WORKS CITED
Abraham, Otto, and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. 1903. Studien über das Tonsystem und die Musik der
Japaner. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
Agnew, Vanessa. 2005. “The Colonialist Beginnings of Comparative Musicology.” In Germany’s Colo-
nial Pasts, edited by Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, 41–60. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Anderson, Joseph L. 2011. Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojirō and Japanese Theatre in the West. Tuc-
son: Wheatmark.
Blum, Stephen. “European Musical Terminology and the Music of Africa.” In Comparative Musicology
and Anthropology of Music, edited by Bruno Nettl and Philip Bohlman, 1–36. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan, 1921.
Bohlman, Philip V. 2007. “Erasure: Displacing and Misplacing Race in Twentieth-Century Music His-
toriography.” In Western Music and Race, edited by Julie Brown, 3–23. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Bunzl, Matti. 1996. “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and National-
charakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture.” In Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays
on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, edited by George W. Stock-
ing Jr., 44–52. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Christensen, Dieter. 1991. “Erich M. von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and the Institutionalization of
Comparative Musicology.” In Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, edited by
Bruno Nettl and Philip Bohlman, 201–9. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harris, Marvin. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. New York:
Crowell.
Hornbostel, Erich Moritz von. 1901–02. “Das absolute Tonbewusstsein: psychologisch-musikalische
Studie.” Sammelbände der Internationalen Musik-Gesellschaft 3:1–86.
Kano, Ayako. 2001. Acting like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender and Nationalism. New
York: Palgrave.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1998. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

FORUM
Klotz, Sebastian. 2008. “Tonpsychologie und Musikforschung als Katalysatoren wissenschaftlich-

experimenteller Praxis und der Methodenlehre im Kreis von Carl Stumpf.” Berichte zur Wissen-
schaftsgeschichte 31, no. 3:195–210.
Kursell, Julia. 2017. “Experimental Cylinders—Experiments in Music Psychology around 1900.” Jour-
nal of Sonic Studies 13. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/324247/324248.
Massin, Benoit. 1996. “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’
Wilhelmine Germany.” In Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the
German Anthropological Tradition, edited by George W. Stocking Jr., 79–154. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
Müller, Martin. 1998. “Erich M. von Hornbostel: Gestaltpsychologie und Kulturvergleichende For-
schung.” In Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns: Erich M. Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe,
Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler, edited by Sebastian Klotz, 169–83. Berlin: Schibri.
Rehding, Alexander. 2005. “Wax Cylinder Revolutions.” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 1:123–60.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1998. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test
Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rimer, J. Thomas, Mitsuya Mori, and M. Cody Poulton, eds. 2014. The Columbia Anthology of Modern
Japanese Drama. New York: Columbia University Press.
Scheler, Max. 1915. Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg. Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher.
Sennosuke, Fujita, Kineya Kimisaburō, et al. 2003. Wax Cylinder Recordings of Japanese Music (1901–
1913). Compact disc. Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv BPhA-WA1.
Steege, Benjamin. 2012. Helmholtz and the Modern Listener. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stumpf, Carl. 1890. Tonpsychologie, 2. Leipzig: S. Hirzel.
Stumpf, Carl, and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. 1911. “Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Unter-
suchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst.” Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwis-
senschaft 6:102–3.
Waitz, Theodor. 1859–1877. Anthropologie der Naturvölker. 6 vols. Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer.
Young, Robert J. C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge.


Between Race and Culture - Hearing Japanese Music in Berlin

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Between Race and Culture - Hearing Japanese Music in Berlin

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Between Race and Culture:

Hearing Japanese Music in Berlin

Benjamin Steege, Columbia University

History of Humanities, Volume 2, Number 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/693319

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

to be recorded on a phonograph cylinder, performing a koto solo as well as playing in

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

methodologically cautious insistence on the provisionality of knowledge, or of the tem-

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

Klotz, Sebastian. 2008. “Tonpsychologie und Musikforschung als Katalysatoren wissenschaftlich-

This content downloaded from 072.208.192.025 on December 19, 2017 15:36:56 PM

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen