Introduction

This special issue of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association documents a conference held at King's College, Cambridge, on 24–25 November 2006. The purpose of the conference – a joint venture between the Royal Musical Association, the King's College Research Centre and the Cambridge University Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) – was to facilitate exchange between scholars and scientists who, in spite of almost irreconcilable differences in conviction and methodology, share a passionate and timely interest in the topic of music listening.

But, one might ask, what exactly are these differences, why are they irreconcilable and what is the point of bringing the usual and even some new disciplinary opponents together, first in person and now in print? Like most knotty research questions, the answer requires an excursus into the question's historical premisses. A good place to start is Hermann von Helmholtz, for, ever since Helmholtz's seminal research in the nineteenth century, the investigation of listening has been monopolized by music psychologists and cognitive scientists. Their search for universal cognitive laws of listening was – and still is – based on the assumption, counter-intuitive for most historically minded thinkers, that the aural perception of music does not change over the course of history. This assumption is such a powerful one that even Hugo Riemann, the first historical musicologist to have worked on listening, adopted a ‘universalizing’ approach in his doctoral dissertation entitled On Musical Listening (1874) and his later study How Do We Hear Music? (1888).1

The first serious challenge to this assumption was Heinrich Besseler's ‘Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening’ (1925).2 The impact of Besseler's article, however, was so limited that he had to follow it up with a book a few decades later, Musical Listening in the Modern Age (1959).3 This time Besseler elicited a greater response, most notably from Theodor Adorno and Zofia Lissa, but interest in the history of listening nevertheless soon ebbed away. The reason for this lies in the simplistic work-historical approach that comes to the fore in Besseler's latter publication, which advances the notion that listening is predetermined by the musical artwork. According to Besseler, the work is a record of the composer's intention which is experienced by the listener objectively. Such an assumption makes it easy to write a history of listening: as soon as the composer's intentions have been identified, the history of listening can be extrapolated from the history of musical styles. The circularity of this method was of course very soon recognized. Besseler's harshest critic was Wolfgang Dömling, who wrote in 1974 that ‘the idea of an autonomous “history of listening” may be designated a phantom’.4

Two decades passed before the ‘phantom’ reappeared on the musicological stage. After 1995, several publications on the subject appeared almost at the same time, the most notable being James Johnson's Listening in Paris (1995),5 Wolfgang Gratzer's Perspectives of a History of Occidental Listening (1997)6 and special issues of Early Music and Musical Quarterly (1997 and 1998 respectively). These contributions effected a change of perspective from the object to the subject of listening, thus offering a real historiographical perspective that neither Besseler nor Dömling had gained. As a result, research on the ‘historicality of the ear’ is now well established. However, the field is split into two camps that have not reached any kind of consensus, with music psychologists and cognitive scientists on one side, and social and cultural historians on the other. The representatives of the first camp develop, on the basis of empirical science, important theories about the way acoustic perception functions but, as Helmholtz's successors, adopt his basic assumption: the historical invariance of listening. The representatives of the second camp focus on cultural-historical issues, thus defining a space in which historical knowledge is granted exclusive validity. For obvious and understandable reasons, cultural history is a field of study which music psychologists, who continue to consolidate their universalizing paradigm of listening, cannot embrace.

Historical interest in listening may soon flag again, much as it did in the 1920s and 1960s, if these disciplinary borders are not transcended. To prevent this from happening is a top priority and the raison d’être of this special issue of JRMA. To put it programmatically: listening must not be reduced to the musical artwork or to the status of a purely sensual phenomenon that may be understood psychometrically. Nor does listening represent a mere mode of behaviour or socio-cultural practice. Rather, we need to understand precisely which aspects of listening are indeed invariant, and which are subject to historical change. A ‘third way’ needs to be found: a way that takes us beyond the irreconcilable extremes of total universalization on the one hand and total historicization on the other.

My intentionally optimistic, not to say currently unattainable, ambition in organizing the conference documented here was to find such a ‘third way’ and to overcome the fundamental differences that define the field; my minimum hope was to set the ball rolling in that direction by providing a forum where musicologists could lend an ear to colleagues from other disciplines. Which, if any, of these aims has been achieved is to be decided by the reader.

The present publication closely follows the structure of the conference, which was organized into five sessions. In each of the sessions, a leading scientist, classicist, theologian or musicologist delivered a keynote address, which was followed by a brief response or, in the case of Georgina Born's paper, a complementary discussion of the issues raised. Plenary debates then opened out discussion to the widest possible disciplinary scope. All the keynote addresses and responses are reproduced here in their original order, except that Lydia Goehr's response to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson was specially commissioned for this volume. The discussions are summarized in a report that also functions as a review of the conference from the perspective of an audience member.

I thank the Provost and Fellows of King's College, the President and Council of the RMA, and everyone at CRASSH for making the conference possible. I am particularly grateful to Rachel Cowgill and Ian Rumbold for their support. Last, but certainly not least, I thank my research assistants Friederike August and Karin Weissenbrunner for their meticulous editorial work.

Nikolaus Bacht

Berlin, 26 March 2009

Notes

¹Hugo Riemann, Ueber das musikalische Hören (Leipzig, 1874); idem, Wie hören wir Musik? Drei Vorträge (Leipzig, 1888).

²Heinrich Besseler, ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für das Jahr 1925 (Leipzig, 1926), 35–52.

³Heinrich Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse, 104/6 (Berlin, 1959).

⁴Wolfgang Dömling, ‘“Die kranken Ohren Beethovens” oder Gibt es eine Geschichte des musikalischen Hörens?’, Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, 1 (1974), 181–94 (p. 194).

⁵James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, CA, 1995).

⁶ Perspektiven einer Geschichte abendländischen Musikhörens, ed. Wolfgang Gratzer, Schriften zur musikalischen Hermeneutik, 7 (Laaber, 1997).