Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 135, Special Issue no. 1, 1!

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 ‘Funda-
mental 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

1
Hugo Riemann, Ueber das musikalische Hören (Leipzig, 1874); idem , Wie hören wir Musik? Drei
Vorträge (Leipzig, 1888).
2
Heinrich Besseler, ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für
das Jahr 1925 (Leipzig, 1926), 35!52.
3
Heinrich Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit , Berichte über die Verhandlungen der
Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse, 104/6 (Berlin,
1959).

ISSN 0269-0403 print/ISSN 1471-6933 online

# The Royal Musical Association
DOI: 10.1080/02690400903414772
http://www.informaworld.com
2 NIKOLAUS BACHT

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.

4
Wolfgang Dömling, ‘‘‘Die kranken Ohren Beethovens’’ oder Gibt es eine Geschichte des
musikalischen Hörens?’, Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft , 1 (1974), 181!94 (p. 194).
5
James 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).
INTRODUCTION 3

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