Dieter Christensen

Erich M. von Hornbostel,

Carl Stumpf, and the
Institutionalization of
Comparative Musicology

E THNOMUSICOLOGY is giving increasing attention to the individual as the

creator, performer, transmitter, consumer of music. The individual is
seen as a member of various groupings, as center or part of multifarious
and complex relationships, not any more as the representative of that hy-
pothetical homogeneous entity, "culture:' whose members would share
one set of beliefs, knowledge, a way of life, and a musical style. A similarly
ethnomusicological approach to the history of ethnomusicology and its
antecedent, comparative musicology, appears indicated. A history of eth-
nomusicology has to proceed beyond the notion of "schools" to the indi-
viduals who, through their ideas and actions, contributed to the shaping of
the discipline.
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (1877-1935) shares with Carl Stumpf
(1841-1936) the reputation of having fathered the "Berlin School of
Comparative Musicology." When in 1952 I first learned about compara-
tive musicology in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, the gloss "Berlin
School" had not yet been coined. As one of a small group of students
around a solitary teacher, the Privat-Dozent Dr. Kurt Reinhard, I con-
structed an image of our academic identity populated with intellectual
heroes'-Hornbostel, Sachs, Stumpf-listening into the distant past of hu-
mankind through Edison phonograph horns, debating their findings and
thoughts loftily, and far removed from all earthly troubles. I imagined
them sharing their insights with other scholars in sessions of (multidisci-
plinary) scholarly societies, and I saw them penning letters to the likes of
Bela Bartok, Jaap Kunst, Franz Boas, and even Frances Densmore.
From my work with the collections and tools Hornbostel left behind in
the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, from my reading of letters and the litera-
ture, I formed the vision of the 1920s and early thirties as the Golden Age
of comparative musicology, with the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv as the
center of a worldwide network of scholarly discourse, of gatherers of in-
formation and recordings, a fountainhead of ideas. A naive, idealized im-

201
202 Dieter Christensen
age, no doubt. One, I submit, that is not very far from what our more cur-
rent, more erudite texts have to say about the "Berlin School." How did
contemporaries see what we now call the "Berlin School"?
The Zeitschrift fur Musikwissenschaft for 1934 carried an article,
"Neue Aufgaben der vergleichenden Musikwissenchaft." 1 It appeared only
one year after the first periodical for comparative musicology, the
Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, had been launched, three
years after the monumental record series Musik des Orients had appeared
on the market, four after the Gesellschaft fiir die Musik des Orients, soon
renamed Gesellschaft fiir vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, had formed-
all enterprises initiated or carried out by Hornbostel or his close associates,
a group of people of whom Fritz Bose, the author of the article, was one.
Bose's article also appeared the year after Erich von Hornbostel had fled
the country.
Bose appeals to the readers of the Zeitsc~rift to awaken comparative
musicology from its "Dornroschenschlaf," its enchanted slumber. He calls
for a renewal of comparative musicology as a musicological enterprise af-
ter long years during which it had been nothing more than a sleepy hand-
maiden to ethnology. He complains that "comparative musicology, thirty
years ago a promising new field of topical interest, vividly discussed, with
worldwide goals, [had] in recent years faded more and more into the back-
ground" (Bose 1934:229), and he made it clear that he meant the academic
world as well as the general public to :~vhom comparative musicology had
lost its attraction.
Bose, one of the few students of Hornbostel's, was hardly launching a
veiled attack at the new regime that had forced his mentor out of the coun-
try. There is no indication that he wished to attack Hornbostel, his teacher
for whom he always expressed respect and admiration, nor are there po-
lemics against Marius Schneider who had assumed the directorship of the
Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv upon Hornbostel's departure. We can treat
Bose's description as the perception of a participant who measures the
standing of his chosen discipline against that of related ones-within aca-
demia as well as in the public eye.
Had comparative musicology in Germany indeed declined, fallen into
enchanted slumber after the First World War, turned into a handmaiden of
culture-historical ethnology, and lost its appeal to neighboring disciplines
as well as to the general public? Or were both Bose and I victims of the
Golden Age syndrome, and was it perhaps true that as a discipline, com-
parative musicology had never amounted to much? There are, of course,
those who see the Berlin School as a well-established academic discipline in
The Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology 203
its own right, respected and secure among other disciplines that form the
pantheon of Western learning. But how well established was comparative
musicology? Is it not rather the case that it was fragile and insecurely
placed? Why did it not take a more prominent place among the disciplines?
What place, indeed, did it take? And what can account for the course of
events?
These issues, I believe, are important for our understanding of the
achievements and failures of comparative musicology, and their study can
raise some questions about more recent, even current developments in
what we now call ethnomusicology. But before we can address them, it will
be necessary to clarify my use of some of the key concepts in our delibera-
tions.
An issue has been made whether ethnomusicology-and by extension,
comparative musicology-is a discipline, or a field or area of studies. 2 I do
not intend to resume that discussion here. Suffice it to say that it is not dif-
ficult to find writings that treat these words as synonyms. 3 Yet these are, to
me, different concepts. Field refers to a subject matter; discipline, short for
academic discipline, connotes an organized, institutionalized process of in-
quiry, teaching, and learning in which disciples as a group of individuals
carry a tradition of asking questions and seeking answers in an academic
setting.
Another concept on which I wish to comment also appears in the title of
this essay: "Berlin School." This stands, of course, for the Berlin School of
Comparative Musicology, and while the ideas and scholarly practices de-
veloped in Berlin have certainly spread beyond that city-it is sufficient to
mention George Herzog, Jaap Kunst, Mieczyslaw Kolinski-! shall take
the term literally and concentrate on Berlin.
My considerations concern some aspects of the history of comparative
musicology. Histories can be constructed as histories of thought-as Geist-
esgeschichten, as histories of ideas or of paradigms. Ideas, however, even
paradigms, exist not by and of themselves, but rather because people have
thought them, have expressed them, or have otherwise acted on or with
them-in words or in their works, in what they did or did not do. Ideas un-
derlie the perception and choice of options, and they are affected by their
social environment and by the consequences of those choices. Since we are
dealing with the history of comparative musicology as a discipline, then,
the behavior and its products have to be studied as well.
How do academic disciplines as I define them come into existence? I pro-
pose that several conditions have to be met for a new academic discipline
to become established. There have to be a theoretical basis for intellectual
204 Dieter Christensen
order; methods and techniques that permit dealing with specific questions
in a systematic fashion; social need for the particular knowledge and in-
sights; and individuals and institutions to carry on research and to provide
continuity. In the case of the Berlin School of Comparative Musicology,
much has been written about theoretical bases for intellectual order, and
the roles of the phonograph and the cents system of measuring as specific
methods and techniques that brought musical sound into the realm of pos-
itivistic investigations, but very little attention has been given to the social
needs or uses for the knowledge and insights that comparative musicology
would have to offer, or to the role of individuals and institutions in its de-
velopment. These institutions include those of neighboring disciplines.
I propose that it is in the domain of people, institutions, and social needs
that we may find some answers to the question of what place the Berlin
School took among the disciplines, and why it developed the way it did. An
understanding of the domain of social environment and needs-the transi-
tion from the colonialist-imperialist late nineteenth century through the di-
saster of World War I to the National Socialist era-is very important for a
history of comparative musicology. For the present purpose, however, I
shall concentrate on the role of individuals and institutions between 1900,
the year that Carl Stumpf and Otto Abraham recorded and analyzed music
of a Thai theater troupe in Berlin, and 1933, when Hornbostel fled Ger-
many, two months after the National-Socialist takeover.
Stumpf and Hornbostel are, no doubt, the towering figures of the Berlin
School. They affected the course of comparative musicology in quite differ-
ent ways, yet it is difficult to imagine how one could have succeeded with-
out the other. Stumpf, the psychologist and philosopher, student of Bren-
tano and Lotze, assumed a rationalist position and believed in the unity of
the human mind. For his psychological interest in the sensual experience of
tones and intervals and their ordering into tone systems, and for the testing
of his hypothesis of perceived fusion of tones (Verschmelzungstheorie), he
needed data ideally from all cultures. His famous Bellakula essay (Stumpf
1886) and his "Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen" (Stumpf 1901) were
two of his own attempts to broaden the empirical basis for his psychologi-
cal studies. As director of the Psychological Institute of Berlin University, 4
he was in a position to assign assistants to a task of his choice, and to seek
funding for it. In 1901 he commissioned Otto Abraham, a medical doctor,
and the newly arrived twenty-four-year-old Hornbostel, whose training
was in philosophy and the sciences, especially chemistry, to build a collec-
tion of phonograph recordings in the Psychological Institute that should
serve the purposes of psychological research.
The Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology 205
Stumpf's great contribution to comparative musicology is that he made
this assignment, that he provided an institutional basis and stability over
two decades, and that he did not resist when young Hornbostel, still his as-
sistant, took the project far beyond its original goals and scope to develop
a new mode of scholarly inquiry that soon transcended the bounds of psy-
chology. When Stumpf retired from the university in 1921, the Phono-
gramm-Archiv came under the administration of the Berlin State
Conservatory5 but remained physically at the Psychological Institute.
Stumpf made yet other important organizational contributions to music
research. Above all, he attained for systematic musicology the recognition
as an academic Fach by the University of Berlin. It is in this context, as part
of systematic musicology, that comparative musicology came to be taught
in the University of Berlin and could attract disciples, students in the
proper sense.
Hornbostel addressed Stumpf on his eighty-fifth birthday as the "Alt-
meister" of comparative musicology and as the fatherly friend, 6 surely also
of the discipline. Hornbostel himself adopted Stumpf's assignment-to de-
velop the archive-as his life task, 7 and one could view his systematic and
theoretical thought as a by-product, resulting from the inevitable striving
of a trained and passionate intellectual for order and deeper insight. Horn-
bostel did not depend on an earned income, at least not until the inflation
of 1922-23 diminished his independent means. Jaap Kunst describes
Hornbostel in an obituary (Kunst 1937) as a genius of intuition and, at the
same time, of childlike innocence, 8 someone who was loftily oblivious to
the material aspects of daily life, not interested in politics, whose life-style
was extremely simple, but whose daily schedule had little in common with
that of people around him. In this respect, Kunst wrote, "he did not con-
cern himself with others" (Kunst 1937:244 ).
This loftiness extended also to his professional life. Apart from the director-
ship of the Phonogramm-Archiv (which he apparently supported in part out of
his own pocket), Hornbostel shunned institutional responsibilities. 9 He did not
accept a teaching position until1923 when, after much persuading, he took his
Habilitation and began to teach two courses per semester, a lecture course (Vorle-
sung) and a seminar (Ubung), in the capacity of a nontenured, part-time university
10
teacher. His announced courses covered music psychology, comparative musi-
cology, and music ethnology (Musikalische Volkerkunde, Musikethnologie)
almost evenly-since 1906 he had carefully distinguished also in his termi-
nology between the musicological-psychological and the anthropological
perspectives. 11 Beginning in 1928, his courses were announced to be held at
the Psychological Institute, always in the late afternoon and evening,
206 Dieter Christensen
and it has been reported that they were not very popular. Only two stu-
dents of comparative musicology earned their doctorates under Hornbos-
tel: Mieczyslaw Kolinski in 1930 and Fritz Bose in 1934, when Hornbostel
was already officially "on leave" 12 and de facto in exile.
In a very strict sense, then, the lineage of the Berlin School of Compara-
tive Musicology extends from Carl Stumpf through Hornbostel to Kolin-
ski and Bose; but we must surely include the influential George Herzog,
who worked closely under Hornbostel from 1923 until 1925, when Her-
zog went to Columbia University to study anthropology with Franz Boas;
and there are several others who claim Hornbostel as their teacher, with
more or less justification: Klaus Wachsmann, Walter Wiora, Hans-Heinz
Drager, Marius Schneider. But what about the other prominent names that
are often mentioned in conjunction with the Berlin School? What about
Curt Sachs, Georg Schiinemann, Robert Lachmann? All three were cer-
tainly Berliners, but none of them received a formal training in compara-
tive musicology, and none followed the theoretical and methodological
orientations of Stumpf and Hornbostel. 13 In his essay for Stumpf's eighty-
fifth birthday in 1933, Hornbostel offered congratulations on behalf of the
"still small circle of friends of our branch of learning that is so remote from
the turn of daily life." 14 The circle of practitioners was even smaller, and
the personal disposition and preferences of each of the few individuals had
therefore a powerful effect on the course of events.
Under the intellectual stimulation and institutional shelter offered by
Carl Stumpf's Psychological Institute, Hornbostel had almost single-
handedly designed and exemplified the scope and method of a scholarly
discipline between psychology, anthropology, and historical musicology,
but he had failed to place it firmly into the institutional network of aca-
demia and to provide early enough for its continuity. The broadness of his
intellect that bridged the established disciplines-psychology, anthropol-
ogy, musicology-had gained his recognition in all three, and a home for
comparative musicology in none.
On 8 November 1933, the Prussian Minister for Science and Popular
Education issued an Executive Order appointing Dr. Marius Schneider as
director of the Phonogramm-Archiv and incorporating the archive into the
Ethnographic Museum. 15 Hornbostel's Phonogramm-Archiv was moved
from the Psychological Institute of the university to the museum's storage
facilities in Dahlem, away from the academic setting and intellectual cli-
mate in which it had grown. No one succeeded him in his teaching position
at Berlin University.
The Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology 207
Hornbostel shares with Charles Seeger the distinction that his name is
invoked probably much more often then his works are read and his
thoughts and actions are understood. There are still lessons to be learned
from the achievements as well as from the failures of the "Berlin School."
Notes
1. Bose 1934. Quotes translated from the original German by the author.
2. See Merriam 1977.
3. See for instance Nettl1964:vii.
4. Psychologisches Institut der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat.
5. The Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik Berlin assumed administrative respon-
sibility in 1922.
6. Hornbostel1933a:25.
7. "Lebensaufgabe"-Hornbostel1933b:41.
8. "Mischung von genialer Intuition und kindlicher Arglosigkeit." Kunst
1937:244.
9. Hornbostel took no active role in the Gesellschaft fur die Erforschung der
Musik des Orients (1930), subsequently reriamed Gesellschaft fiir vergleichende
Musikwissenschaft, or in editing the Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Musikwissen-
schaft. He does appear as coeditor with Stumpf of the short-lived Sammelbiinde fur
vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (1922-23), and as editor of a commercial enter-
prise, the record series Musik des Orients (1930).
10. Since 1923 Privat-Dozent, 1925 "Nicht-beamteter AuBerordentlicher Pro-
fessor," that is, nontenured Associate Professor; see bulletins of Berlin University
1923-33.
11. See Hornbostel and Abraham 1906:452, where the term musikethnologisch
first occurs. Cf. also Hornbostel1909, 1910:66, 1912:495, 1934:60.
12. "Ais Gastprofessor nach New York beurlaubt bis Ende September 1935"
(Bulletin of Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitiit zu Berlin, Winter Semester 1933-34).
13. The art and music historian Curt Sachs contributed his encyclopedic knowl-
edge of musical instruments to the famous classification (Hornbostel and Sachs
1914), but his unilinear-evolutionistic stance placed him far apart from Hornbos-
tel's comparative musicology. Georg Schunemann's studies were primarily in music
history, his interests in pedagogy and administration. During the First World War
he participated in a project to record songs in prisoner-of~war camps. His collec-
tion of some four hundred German-Russian songs appears in the Sammelbiinde fur
vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. As Deputy Director of the Berlin State Conser-
vatory (1920-32, Director 1932-33), he may have been supportive of the
Phonogramm-Archiv, but his scholarly activities in the Berlin School were limited.
Robert Lachmann, whom Bruno Nettl considers "a typical member of the Berlin
School of Comparative Musicology" (Nettl 1960:29), discovered his love for non-
Western and folk music also in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Encouraged by
Stumpf and Hornbostel, he studied musicology under Johannes Wolf and Stumpf
(Ph.D. 1922) and pursued a library career, continuing his interest in non-Western
208 Dieter Christensen The Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology
209
music as a serious hobby. While his attention to scales is more in the style of Horn- Nett!, Bruno
bostel than in his spirit, and while he lacked the scientific-psychological founda- 1960 "Lachmann, Robert," in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, F.
tion, he was certainly a member of the inner circle. Hornbostel's personal copy of Blume, ed. (Kassel: Barenreiter), vol. 8, pp. 28-29.
Lachmann's book, Musik des Orients (1929), is inscribed "Herrn Prof. Dr. v. 1964 Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology. New York: Free Press.
Hornbostel mit der Bitte, Nichtpassendes durchzustreichen" [To Prof. Dr. v. Horn- Stumpf, Carl
bostel with the request to cross out whatever is inappropriate). 1886 "Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer,"Vierteljahrsschrift fur
14. Hornbostel1933a:25. Italics are mine. Musikwissenschaft 2:405-26.
15. Erla/5 des Ministers fur Wissenschaft und Volksbildung, VI Nr. 54804 II/8. 1901 "Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen," Beitriige zur Akustik und
November 1933. "Dr. Marius Schneider zum Leiter des Phonogramm-Archivs und Musikwissenschaft 3:69-138.
dessen Ubernahme durch Museum fiir Volkerkunde." It is curious that Marius
Schneider himself claims appointment only in 1934.

Works Cited
Bose, Fritz
1934 "Neue Aufgaben der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft," Zeitschrift
fur Musikwissenschaft 16:229-31.
Hornbostel, Erich M. von
1909 "Phonographierte Melodien aus Madagaskar und Indonesien," in
Forschungsreise SMS Planet 1906107, Anthropologie und
Ethnographie, A. Kramer, ed. (Berlin: Sigismund), 5:139-52.
1910 "U.S.A. National Music," Zeitschrift der lnternationalen
Musikgesellschaft 12 (3):64-68.
1912 "Musik auf den nordwestlichen Salomoinseln," in Forschungen auf
dem Salomo-Inseln und dem Bismarck-Archipel, Richard Thurnwald,
ed. Appendix. (Berlin: Reimer), 1:461-504.
1933a "Carl Stumpf und die vergleichende Musikwissenschaft," Zeitschrift fur
vergleichende Musikwissenschaft 1:22-28.
1933b "Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv," Zeitschrift fur vergleichende
Musikwissenschaft 1:40-45.
1934 Review of H. H. Roberts, Form in Primitive Music, Zeitschrift fur
vergleichende Musikwissenschaft 2:60-64.
Hornbostel, Erich M. von, and Otto Abraham
1906 "Phonographierte Indianermelodien aus British-Columbia," in Boas
Anniversary Volume (New York: J. j. Augustin), pp. 447-74.
Hornbostel, Erich M. von, and Curt Sachs
1914 "Systematik der Musikinstrumente: Ein Versuch;' Zeitschrift fur
Ethnologie 46:553-98.
Kunst, Jaap
1937 "Zum Tode Erich von Hornbostels," Anthropos 32:239-46.
Lachmann, Robert
1929 Die Musik des Orients. Breslau: Jedermanns Biicherei.
Merriam, Alan P.
1977 "Definitions of Comparative Musicology and Ethnomusicology: An
Historical-Theoretical Perspective." Ethnomusicology 21:189-204.