Chapter 23
Music Scholarship and Disciplinarity
Introduction
When contemplating the nature of musicology as a discipline, it is generally thought that the nineteenth century was the incubator of a specialized discipline whose foundations were mainly laid by a few scholarly geniuses.* Hugo Riemann is certainly one of the most representative of these intellectuals who established the fundamentals of twentieth-century musicology that influence us to this day. But in fact the discipline that formed in France, England, Germany, or Italy seems more to have derived from the actions of a diverse mix of skills that were at the service of music and its study. Musicology should thus see many of its origins in several new scientific approaches that inspired nineteenth-century intellectual thought: history dominates, but philology, sociology, physics, physiology (of hearing), and psychology must also be taken into account, to mention only those disciplines that would contribute to the theoretical and methodological foundations for a science of music.
The need to “specialize” into musicology came, among other sources, from the ideas of young musicologists who very often had remarkably broad general educations and who quickly devoted their energy to developing musical expertise in a subject through the analysis of strictly musical parameters (harmony, melody, rhythm, etc.) within a larger sociological or historical context. The desire to develop a new science was accompanied by the difficulty of obtaining its institutional recognition, leading to a limited distribution of musicological studies in the journals of the time. The music press was primarily of a general nature, and interest in musicology was not sufficient for their attention. Disciplinary specialization would therefore require the creation of increasingly focused media outlets: for example, the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft (1885), founded by Philipp Spitta (1841–1894), Friedrich Chrysander (1821–1901), and Guido Adler (1855–1941); the Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales (1901), founded by Jules Combarieu (1859–1916), Romain Rolland (1866–1944), Maurice Emmanuel (1862–1938), and Louis Laloy (1874–1944); the Revue musicale S.I.M.1 (1907), founded by Laloy et Jules Écorcheville (1872–1915); and the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft (1918), founded by Alfred Einstein (1880–1952). These journals were part of a general movement to organize intellectual life in Europe, and in France in particular (Loué, 2016, 378–379).
In the 1880s and subsequent years, the scientific press grew as a result of the development of education and the resulting enthusiasm for science in both intellectual and more distant social circles. But this branch of media represented only one outlet for dissemination of musicological knowledge in a network of increasingly important scholarly production. At the turn of the twentieth century, both Hugo Riemann (1849–1919) in Germany and Jules Écorcheville in France saw the possibilities for greater interest in the subject and were supported by their teachers Spitta and Rolland, one a historian, the other a writer, each convinced of the need to develop a true science of music using methodological and theoretical tools, even if these tools were, in fact, derived from other sciences.
This chapter examines some of the leading figures in musicology’s development within a more interdisciplinary context than is usually considered.2 By starting from a national point of view and going progressively toward an international amalgam of thinking and tradition in the humanities at the turn of the century (1900, with the first international history of music conference held in Paris), the chapter will show that, despite being founded and acknowledged as a discipline and gradually receiving the recognition of European academics, musicology during the second part of the nineteenth century was in reality a remarkable patchwork of knowledge (physic, history, philosophy, literature, music, poetry, and new sociology, among others) that grew intensively in the last decades of the century, until 1914.
It is interesting to hypothesize that the contemporary design of interdisciplinary musicology—where the boundaries between approaches fade away in favor of inclusive studies of the musical phenomenon—has deep roots in the nineteenth century, when many disciplines that are regularly brought together today were developed or simply came into being. Acoustics, psychology, and sociology all supply important perspectives for the work of many musicologists today, and we owe much to the pioneers of the nineteenth century, from Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz (1821–1894) to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) to Charles Darwin (1809–1882).3 Drawing on the figures of Edmond de Coussemaker (1805–1876), Hugo Reimann, Hermann Kreschmar (1848–1924), Lionel Dauriac (1847–1923), Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), Romain Rolland, Jules Combarieu, and Louis Laloy, among others, the chapter paints a portrait of musicology whose interdisciplinary foundations would ensure a future envisaged like the one the discipline seems to have revived in the twenty-first century.
This view may seem to contradict some pioneering works on the history of musicology, particularly French musicology, in that it was thought that once the discipline of musicology had been defined according to Adler’s terms and solidly anchored in philological and historical scholarly orientations as proposed by Riemann, Rolland, and their disciples, and that it would navigate independently through most of twentieth century.4 However, if we take into consideration the effect of generations of musicologists, national imperatives, and the evolution of thinking in the humanities that occurred between the end of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth century, we can in fact see a three-part movement materialize: a first period to establish a musicology that owes much to the sciences; a second period of independence based primarily on the study of repertoire and composers; and a third period in which musicology once again shares its topic of study with other scholarly disciplines.
Crystallization of a Discipline
In the remarkable work of Campos et al. (2006) on the history of relationships between music and the humanities, careful attention is given to the specific relationship of musicology and sociology in France between 1870 and 1970. The coming together of these two scholarly disciplines seems to have been a failure, and the authors find that musicology’s autonomy grew by virtue of its topic of study: music studied from its syntax and its acoustic specifics. This scientific orientation would have the effect of isolating it from other social sciences until the end of the twentieth century (Campos 2006, 5–6). As will be shown later, on the side of French musicologists gathered around the figure of Romain Rolland, the strictly sociological approach to music would not be easily accepted. Associated with aesthetic issues, work on the relationship of music to society would seem to depart for a time from the scientific rigor imposed by the history of music, which must be based on the documents of which the handwritten or published scores are a part. It is obvious that in France, the singularity of Combarieu’s works such as La musique et la magie, a “study on the popular origins of musical art, its influence and function in societies” (Combarieu 1909), do not find much resonance among musicologists.5
One hypothesis upon which Campos and his colleagues draw is that “the status granted to music notation since the nineteenth century has allowed musicology to stabilise this topic [music] and to steal it to the investigation of the humanities,” at the very moment in which these disciplines could have “shaken its stability by showing its insertion into contexts and practices” (Campos 2006, 5). This hypothesis is confirmed by a comment regarding the work of the sociologist Alfred Schütz (1899–1959) made by Emmanuel Pedler, who considers “the importance of shared cultural memory (the ‘baggage of musical experiences’ accumulated by the performer without which the score would have no meaning)” and insists on “the altogether secondary role of musical notation” (Pedler 2010, 321). In 1951, Shütz was thus questioning the score and its importance, introducing into reflections on music an eminently social dimension, which is one area of musicology that it seemed not to have done until then, concentrating instead on works detached from their context and composers in a contextual approach limited to the living conditions of geniuses.
Recent work has sought to demonstrate that in France, musicology as a discipline came into being in a dispersed way, initially through a network of amateurs and journalists, and then one of theorists and historians whose institutional affiliations were weak, but whose will to make the study of music a veritable science was strong enough that, little by little, the tools like journals were created or institutions began to integrate the teaching of history into the heart of their mission. Also in France, there is the Paris Conservatory, where history classes were established in 1872, though with limited impact on the discipline, or the Schola Cantorum, where teaching history was closely associated with learning technical skills (Duchesneau et al. 2017).6
Integrating musicological research into the university curriculum would happen slowly in France, while in Germany and Austria, music history professorships started appearing in universities beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, many of these professorships7 were not labeled as “musicology” (musikwissenschaft) and were strictly reserved for music history.8 Moreover, the discipline did not benefit from a well-developed infrastructure. It took until the end of the nineteenth century for the Institut für Musikwissenschaft (1898) at the University of Vienna to come into being, for example. To this day, the disciplines taught bring together harmony, counterpoint, composition, aesthetics and history.
The major variations in the nature of available positions at the universities and conservatories have made it possible to include, in the nonexhaustive list (table 23.1) assembled for this study, certan institutional positions at the Conservatory for figures like Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931), Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (1840–1910), or Maurice Emmanuel. This choice in no way alters the imbalance between France and Germany of institutional integration of the discipline, but it nonetheless puts into perspective the difference between the two countries in their importance given to musicological studies. Although d’Indy was primarily a composer, he contributed substantially to the rise of musicology in France by favoring a “Comtian positivist approach” (Fauser 2006, 126). Annegret Fauser reminds us that d’Indy was a student of “law in the tradition of Auguste Comte.” He thus adopted a systematic attitude in the study of early music,9 countering the narrative discourse of musicologists whom he deemed “arrogant” in reference to the books written about Beethoven that he considered “as verbose as they were idiotic,”10 while he himself was writing a “critical” biography of the celebrated German composer for the publisher Laurens (Indy 1911).
Even if d’Indy does not belong to the same sociopolitical milieu as Gabriel Monod, the two men seem to share the same conception of history if we rely on the fact that Monod laid the foundation for a new conception of history called “methodical school” in order to avoid, among other things, the drifts of a history written by “self-taught people [who] impose on history the imprint of their temperament, their personality [and who] are usually, even the most erudite, literary before being scientists” (Monod 1876, 29).
It may be surprising to realize that this table of music history’s teaching positions includes François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871). Though he did teach counterpoint and fugue at the Paris Conservatory (beginning in 1821), and he was the Conservatory’s librarian, then director of the Brussels Conservatory (in 1833), he did not integrate music history into his teaching while he was at the Paris Conservatory. Still, his work, particularly that relating to the establishment of his well-known music library, is vast and most certainly impacted his teaching (Campos 2013). In addition to his Biographie universelle des musiciens, the series of historical concerts Fétis organized in 1832 must be mentioned. His involvement in the development of the French musical press through the creation of La Revue et gazette musicale would also have great importance and would provide crucial leverage for the rise of a nascent Francophone musicology (Ellis 1995, Duchesneau 2015).
Fétis’s and d’Indy’s positions, coming at opposite ends of the nineteenth century, eloquently illustrate the variety of ways in which the discipline was established within French educational institutions. Still, the passage from theory and compositional practice to music history is also identifiable for German music historians. This is the case for Oscar Paul (1836–1898) or, later, for Hermann Kretschmar (1848–1924). After having been an orchestral conductor and teacher at the Leipzig Conservatory, Kretschmar turned increasingly toward musicology, which he taught officially beginning in 1904.
Table 23.2 confirms German predominance and the idea that musicology developed there in a favorable university context, while in France, as in England and even more so in Italy, the discipline was dependent on an environment in which universities did not experience the same growth and where its actors formed a much more heterogeneous community composed of amateurs, critics, and musicians whose degree of specialization was more varied (Haines 2001, 22–23 and 32). It would also not do to neglect, as a differentiation parameter, the structure of the education being provided in each area. While in Germany the adopted model was a seminar that favored teaching based on research and its dissemination in a strictly academic setting, in France the applied model was one of public conferences (Sorbonne, Collège de France, Schola Cantorum, École des hautes études sociales) (Campos 2006, 38; Delacroix et al. 2007, 105–107). This latter model was based on research, but did not favor the development nor the creation of a sense of unity as can be found in the context of a seminar.
Initial Multidisciplinary Training: History, Philosophy, and … Law
A distinction can initially be drawn here between “multidisciplinarity” and “interdisciplinarity” in order to better understand how knowledge is organized and applied. Those who today would be known as nineteenth-century musicologists received varied educations, often multidisciplinary, which is to say accessing more than one form of knowledge and, thus, more than one methodology. Certain combinations are more significant than others. Consequently, law appears to have been a discipline studied by more than one future musicologist.11 The lawyer Edmond de Coussemaker (1805–1876) is certainly the most illustrious example. Yet we must not neglect the Italians Francesco Caffi (1778–1874) and Oscar Chilesotti (1848–1916), or the Frenchman Bourgault-Ducoudray and the Austrian Guido Adler, all of whom studied law. Though for many these studies were, to a certain extent, no more than an obligatory steppingstone, most selected figures had a fairly standard education for this era that combined philosophy and history. For students of the French École normale, literature and more were added to this foundation. What emerges from this survey of a few emblematic nineteenth-century figures of the discipline is that training, while being multidisciplinary depending on the institutions and on personal choice, nonetheless revolved around a limited number of traditional humanities disciplines such as philosophy, history, and literature. In most cases surveyed, these studies led to the production of a music-focused doctoral dissertation, defended within the framework of one or another of the affiliated disciplines (see table 23.2).
Table 23.2 Training of “Musicologists”
| Musicologists | Country of Origin | Fields of Study |
|---|---|---|
| Francesco Caffi (1778–1874) | Italy | Law and music |
| Friedrich Chrysander (1826–1901) | Germany | Philosophy (he would become a publisher among other things) |
| Edmond de Coussemaker (1805–1876) | France | Law (composer and “amateur” musician) |
| Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (1840–1910) | France | Law and music (Prix de Rome, 1862) |
| Philipp Spitta (1841–1894) | Germany | Theology and philology |
| Gustav Jacobsthal (1845–1912) | Germany | History and music |
| Oscar Chilesotti (1848–1916) | Italy | Law and music |
| Hermann Kretschmar (1848–1924) | Germany | Philology, music history, composition |
| Hugo Riemann (1849–1919) | Germany | Law, literature, history, philosophy |
| Dom André Mocquereau (1849–1930) | France | Music (cello), palaeography |
| Guido Adler (1855–1941) | Germany | Law, philosophy, music |
| Edward J. Dent (1857–1957) | England | Music history |
| Romain Rolland (1866–1944) | France | History and literature (École Normale) -, dissertation in music history |
| Jules Écorcheville (1872–1915) | France | History (École des chartes), literature (Sorbonne), composition, student of Riemann, dissertation in music history (Sorbonne) |
| Pierre Aubry (1874–1910) | France | Law, philology, palaeography, (École des chartes) |
| Louis Laloy (1874–1944) | France | Literature (École Normale)—Asian studies—theory, harmony, and composition (Schola) |
In practice, a multidisciplinary education leads to interdisciplinarity that, rather than the sum of knowledge, involves the interaction of theories and methods concerning a single research topic. One manifestation of this interdisciplinary approach to music research in the nineteenth century—even if it was not considered so at the time—can be found in the establishment of the first works on medieval music produced by Coussemaker and the Solesmes monks, among whom Dom Mocquereau (1849–1930), who was responsible for the volumes of the Paléographie musicale, must be mentioned. These works, as John Haines points out, were based on three branches of knowledge: “palaeography, genealogy of human handwriting; philology, genealogy of human speech; archaeology, genealogy of human activity … come together in the nineteenth century to form a new science of music” (Haines 2001, 31).
It is from this multidisciplinarity that researchers forged a “specialism based on a specific body of knowledge” (Campos 2006, 35). This would be the case for Pierre Aubry (1874–1910), the “archivist-palaeographer” who would work on medieval songs and would justify the use of philology in music “because the study of melodic language presents all the elements of philology: phonetics, morphology, syntax.”12 However, Aubry did not have advanced musical training, a lack which seemed to serve him well if one goes by a comment praising him following his accidental death in 1910, in which Écorcheville emphasizes the impact of Aubry’s works on French musicology:
[This] characteristic of universality, within a specialism, this tendency for nihil a me alienum puto,13 this preoccupation with seeking the beauty in the veracity of the medieval document would, in France, make Aubry an innovator. Compared to his predecessors, like Fétis, Coussemaker, Lavoix, Aubry had the superiority of being a palaeographer both by preference and by profession. Aubry was enough of an artist to fully feel the pull of music, but was enough of a historian to escape the tyranny of his own partiality. This was a rare balance, an example that could not be suggested enough to all those heading down the path of musicology. (Écorcheville 1911, 44)
Nonetheless, multidisciplinarity among musicologists can be observed evolving over the course of the nineteenth century. To studies in philosophy, philology, or history the musicologists added advanced musical studies, notably in theory and harmony. Thus, the education of someone like Rolland, whose talent as a pianist greatly helped him deepen his study of musical works without developing in-depth analysis skills, can be distinguished from that of musicologists like Kretzschmar, who was above all a musician, or like Laloy, who studied theory and harmony at the Schola.14
Scholarly Interdisciplinarity
The dispersed nature of music research from the second half of the nineteenth century to the First World War masks the importance of these works for the makeup of the discipline. Though musicologists did not participate directly in this research, especially since in France they were so few,15 they did take it into account, discuss it, and, in some cases refute it, as can be seen in journal articles about scholarly research in music (Duchesneau et al. 2017a). These works did not yet have a very high concentration of interdisciplinarity between music and the scholarly disciplines involved, in that the musical knowledge of the researcher was not always supported by in-depth music studies. Interdisciplinarity was therefore situated elsewhere, often between scholarly disciplines (acoustics-physiology; philosophy-sociology), and it is through its research topic, music, that it would influence the development of the discipline, by a double-resistance mechanism: integration and exclusion.
This was the case for the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and its reception in France.16 In a Europe where new mental frameworks were being established (Yon 2014, 97), science was becoming one of the main drivers of societal transformation. Based on Positivist thought (106–107), the study of natural phenomena and living beings could no longer be done without reference to the scientific method. Music was not exempt from this principle. Research in the sciences (acoustics, physiology) and in the humanities (history, sociology, etc.) that was carried out by renowned scientists was becoming the foundation for development of music research. Helmholtz was one of these leading figures in the world of nineteenth-century science. The German scientist would not be the only one to ponder acoustics, but also he was one of the “first to have looked for the links between … three disciplines, acoustics, physiology, and music” (Fichet 1995, 77).17
Helmholtz’s work would sustain that of entire new generations of musicologists, who would frequently refer to his research, as much in Germany as elsewhere, particularly in France. Simply referring to the Combarieu’s Revue musicale (1901–1912) was enough to be convinced, but clearly the approach was sometimes critical when it came to evaluating the relevance of the scientific approach espoused by the German physiologist. Combarieu devoted a series of articles to the “principal systems of musical aesthetics” and within this context, published a text in 1902 on Helmholtz’s “physiological theory,” in which he developed three critical points (Combarieu 1902a).
Without entering into a detailed analysis of Combarieu’s position, it is useful to focus here on his key arguments, which highlight both the importance of science’s contribution to the understanding of musical phenomena of the period and the doubts that this contribution raised for some musicologists, even if often, as pointed out by Campos, “Combarieu’s generalisations fall short of scientific demonstrations, [the latter yielding] frequently to the tropism of the aesthete” (Campos 2006, 24). Yet Combarieu’s discourse is not necessarily an isolated example—it shows the difficult transition the discipline was experiencing, moving from an amateur undertaking built upon the foundation of a certain rhetoric to a professional endeavor based on advances in the humanities and natural sciences, and that was progressively assimilated by new generations. It is not surprising to observe that Combarieu’s first critique concerned the detachment adopted by the German scientist in relation to the very essence of music:
Theorising consonance and dissonance, graphing and measuring certain vibrations, analysing a given sound with the help of laboratory instruments, etc., is no doubt “carrying the torch of the higher analysis” of interesting phenomena, but it tells us nothing about music. (Combarieu 1902a, 46)
While acoustics can explain the musical phenomenon, it cannot explain music’s essence in the sense that, according to Combarieu, there can only be music when there is “a sequence of sounds with meaning” (47). The second critique relates directly to physiology, which Combarieu considered a “science still too underdeveloped, too contradictory to contain all of musical psychology,” all the while setting Helmholtz’s work against that of the psychologist Carl Stumpf. His third critique builds on the previous one:
In terms of the ear’s structure and the function of each of its parts, science has seemingly not yet arrived at complete and definitive results. The ear is still poorly understood; like the great explorers who gave their names to the land, mountains, lakes, and rivers they discovered, physiologists continue studying this little world of wonders and, on many points, they make simple hypotheses. If, generally, it is merely the ear’s organisation that causes musical pleasure or displeasure, we can first ask if artistic intelligence, meaning, and education, rather than being a good thing, are a useless surplus of riches, even an embarrassment, a hindrance to nature’s work. (48)
Nevertheless, Helmholtz’s research did find considerably more positive resonance in, for example, the work of an aesthetician, Charles Lalo (1877–1953). Music was the research topic in Lalo’s first works and would remain as important for aestheticians as for musicologists. In 1908, he defended a doctoral dissertation that would become a book: Esquisse d’une esthétique musicale scientifique. Lalo devoted a chapter to Helmholtz’s physiological theory of music, which he analyzed thoroughly while adopting a critical stance that questioned the possibility of a physiological theory’s taking into account the musical taste and social issues raised by changes in aesthetics. In doing this, Lalo introduced the social dimension into the very heart of the physiological investigation, thereby suggesting that, in limiting oneself to a single perspective, it is not possible to explain musical phenomena, and even less so the historical development of musical practices. Lalo argued for a global approach to aesthetics and based his project on the importance of the concept of “social reality”:
Only in the seventeenth century, with Descartes and Mersenne, did its character change [to no longer be merely mathematical]; and the subsequent generation realised, with Sauveur, Rameau, or Père André, that the science of music is twofold: physical and mathematical. Intellectuals at the time believed they could neglect the first perspective: the recent rise of psycho-physiology to the ranks of the positive sciences had seemed to allow Helmholtz to cease relying on it exclusively. More recently, contemporary scholars have separated and isolated psychology as though it alone is sufficient: for Stumpf, Lipps, or H. Riemann, music theory is essentially psychological, not physiological. At last, and only just now, a few clairvoyant thinkers are beginning to discern a new order of reality beyond all others: social reality.
(Lalo 1908, 9–10)
A student of Émile Durkheim, Lalo believed that sociology possessed a unique characteristic—that of “inferring” things about the other sciences by “supplementing” them while “itself remaining specific and irreducible.” Thus, based on the methodological foundations of Positivism and Durkheimian sociology, he proposed giving aesthetics “an objective and scholarly methodology,” and it was to music that he applied the concept. Of course, the introduction of sociology to the study of music incited debate. After Lalo’s dissertation defense, Rolland, who was taking part, wrote to the candidate to congratulate him, while clarifying that he did not share all the aesthetician’s views:
I congratulate you most sincerely. You have created a powerful, harmonious, rich work. In reading it, I said to myself “At last! Here we have musical aesthetics.” I presently know of none that are not barbarous and ridiculous mutilations of the artistic reality. Yours is both scholarly and deeply human. There are many points upon which we disagree. I even believe that we do not experience music and art in general in quite the same way. But, no matter. Regardless of how interesting the ideas and how solid the system’s construction, I attach even more value to personality; and I am pleased to meet one such as yours.18
When Lalo’s book was published, Combarieu echoed the reticence of historians and undoubtedly repeated certain criticisms that had been articulated by Rolland during Lalo’s defense—notably, that which related to historical “errors.” In his report on the book published following the defense, Combarieu wrote:
Mr. Lalo brings to music philosophy studies the valued benefit of a well-informed and distinguished mind. I would gently reproach him for exploiting the word scholarly, for almost never citing the works of composers (there is no music in his book), and for having a slightly lofty perspective. The conclusions are not easily decipherable to a reader who is merely a musician. We must not forget that in many cases, the best way to philosophise is to put philosophy aside. In Mr. Lalo’s book, there are also dangerous sociological preoccupations from Mr. Durkheim’s school of thought. The Sorbonne jury was displeased. These preoccupations will undoubtedly lead (p. 261) to a categorisation of musicians that is highly contestable. (Thus, the progressions of Gregorian chant placed in Romantic art; Handel and Bach also placed among the Romantics; etc.). (Combarieu 1908, 235–236)
Combarieu was referring to what Lalo described as the “law of musical evolution”: a mechanical law, related to a process of progressive accumulation, and an organic law, known as “increasing complexity.” From this system, Lalo divided music history into four periods based on specific musical systems: “Greco-Roman chant of the Antiquity, Christian melody, Medieval and Renaissance polyphony, [and] modern harmony” (Lalo 1908, 259). Each period was articulated using the same automatic schema of three states, each one incorporating two “eras” (pre-Classical [primitive, precursors], Classical [true Classical and pseudo-Classical], and post-Classical [Romantics, Decadents]. This system led to a specific categorization of works that was partially external to the traditional chronology. Thus, the works of Bach and Handel wound up in the third period, characterized by polyphony (originating in the Middle Ages), and were designated “Romantic” works. In Lalo’s aesthetico-sociological system, this is coherent, since something is Romantic when it “is produced after a Classical period (represented here by the works of Palestrina), at a time in which it can only be compared to the Classical style, as long as it truly represents not a relic but the active and fertile life of contemporary ‘high art’” (253). The semantic weight of Lalo’s terminology was clearly too vast for historians to unravel or to follow the aesthetician in his methodical reasoning.
This theoretical exercise drew from the Durkheimian school of thought that renders the social aspect autonomous.19 This therefore was the path taken by Lalo, one that allowed him to conceive the internal laws of musical development so far as he considered “aesthetic life” an “independent organization whose work is separate enough that a certain number of inherent links can be established in its evolution, without having to consider a single other factor more important than the moment preceding this very evolution” (252–253). Lalo’s case confirms that, as with other sciences, the arrival of sociology in Germany, as in France, played an important role in redefining disciplinary boundaries and allowed researchers to envision the study of music from different angles and based on new theoretical foundations.
New Sciences for the Study of Music: From Sociology to Psychology
The relationship between musicology and sociology was not simple to grasp. Initial studies didn’t have an immediate impact, and as seen in Lalo’s case, the new science was hindered by those holding to a strictly historical approach, at least in France or, as seen in the case of Jules Combarieu as studied by Campos, adhering to combination of sociological and musicological approaches that was not very successful. While Combarieu referred in his writings20 to the work of Gabriel Tarde, Henri Hubert, and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), detailed discussion of the works of these sociologists was often avoided, with sociological theory and method used to benefit the “lone facts” presented in the excerpts chosen by the musicologist (Campos 2006, 23–27). Campos concluded that “there is a major rupture with the leading musicographical discourse, but the use of Durkheimian sociology has ultimately turned out to be superficial” (26).
Is it possible to wholly blame Combarieu for his “superficial” approach? In the absence of foundational works in socio-musicology, this was nonetheless an attempt that deserves consideration. And yet, some German sociologists were already working on sociological issues relating to music. That was the case with Georg Simmel, who in 1882 presented his Psychologische und Ethnologische Studien über Musik (Psychological and Ethnological Studies on Music), which was in fact a doctoral dissertation presented to the Faculty of Philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin, where the jury—who rejected Simmel’s text—was composed of Julius Zupitza (1844–1895), Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), and Hermann von Helmholtz (Pedler 2010, 305). As Pedler points out, Simmel’s work would soon be forgotten (315), even though it was published in 1860 in the encyclopaedia Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, which was edited by Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899). The text appeared in volume 13, and would be the subject of an anonymous review in the July 1885 issue of the Revue philosophique de France et de l’étranger, edited by the philosopher Théodule Ribot (1839–1916). The review listed, one after another, the empirical examples studied by the German philosopher and sociologist. Pedler reiterates that this text: “does not constitute a coherent argument or a program of study for a sociology of music [but it offers] two analytical dimensions … social significance that is represented and expressed by music and … the position and function of music in society” (Pedler 2010, 314).
Though the review was limited to summarizing the facts used for making its argument, the very presence in Ribot’s journal confirms that these music studies circulated in some fields, just not likely among musicologists. Based on an analysis by Klaus Peter Etzkorn,21 Pedler suggests that Simmel’s text failed to find favor because “the objectivist approach that dominated in Germany during the last two decades of the century stands in contrast to the ‘qualitative’ Simmelian approach.” As one of Simmel’s early works, this music study would be put aside in favor of subsequent research, but it nonetheless remains an excellent example of a noteworthy work whose impact was temporarily minimal because the scholarly community was not inclined to carry it forward and ensure its dissemination. Socio-musicologists would have to wait for the publication, in 1921, of Max Weber’s (1864–1920) work on music (Die Rationalen und Soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, 1910–1913 [The Rational and Sociological Foundations of Music]) before establishing an initial frame of reference for the development of sociomusicology (Ravet 2010, 277).
While sociomusicology’s origins were only beginning to appear in Germany as in France during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the situation was similar for the psychology of music. Yet there were significant differences in Germany if one considers, for example, the work of Carl Stumpf. In Spitta, Chrysander, and Adler’s journal Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, Stumpf regularly submitted studies in the scientific and experimental psychology of music. The journal’s inaugural issue (1885) included a study on the psychology of music in England (“Musikpsychologie in England”). Although the journal ceased operations in 1894, Stumpf’s work would continue to be published since, in 1898, he founded the journal Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft (Contributions to Acoustics and Musicology), whose nine volumes would be released intermittently until 1924. The work of the German psychologist would find resonance within Lalo’s work, but also much sooner in the specialized French media because Lionel Dauriac presented and discussed the work throughout the 1890s (Dauriac, 1891).
A student of the École Normale and holder of an agrégation (high-level competitive examination in France) in philosophy, Dauriac defended, at the Paris Faculté des lettres in 1878, a doctoral dissertation entitled “Les notions de matière et de force dans les sciences de la nature” (“The Concepts of Matter and Force in the Natural Sciences”). He was granted a chair in philosophy at the University of Montpellier in 1882. In 1890, he created a philosophy of music course about the psychology of the musician, a major innovation in the French university curriculum of the period. Dauriac’s writings would have significant national and international impact, since they were regularly published in the Revue philosophique de France et de l’étranger, founded by his friend Théodule Ribot.22 Between 1893 and 1896, Dauriac wrote a series of six articles on the “Psychology of the Musician,” in which he addressed “musical aptitudes,” the concepts of “hearing/listening,” “intelligence,” “memory,” and musical “emotions” (Duchesneau et al. 2017a).23 His interest in Stumpf’s approach led him to undertake a research trip to Germany in 1895 to learn about the development of university studies in musical aesthetics.24 That same year, he relocated to Paris to teach, in the hope of being appointed to the Sorbonne. But just as for musicology, the institutionalization of the psychology of music would be delayed in France because, despite Ribot’s support, the plan for a chair in music psychology and aesthetics at the Sorbonne would not see the light of day, even though Dauriac taught classes on “the evolution of music and musical taste in France from La Muette de Portici to Robert le diable,” whose content would be published under the title Psychologie de l’opéra français (Auber, Rossini, Meyerbeer) (1897). Dauriac’s scholarly objective was to determine the “possible psychological effects [of musical works] on the listener and, since these effects depend, in part, on their cause, the nature of their psychological value or meaning” (Dauriac 1897, viii).
Internationalization of the Discipline: German Musicology under the French Microscope
While the interdisciplinary works of some scholars like Helmholtz, Stumpf, Dauriac, or Lalo were circulated in the music research milieu, their steady availability was uncertain.25 Owing largely to the ease of translation of their most significant works, the German output was more widely disseminated than were French works. However, the flow of knowledge continued by different means, notably through numerous connections among musicologists that crossed national borders. Paradoxically, this circulation of musicological information would benefit from an atmosphere of competition and national affirmation.
In general, there was strong competition between France and Germany in all fields of inquiry after the Franco-Prussian War. Indeed, this competition had nationalist roots, and it certainly led to making both nations exceptional, powerful, and influential. In each case, from a musicological perspective, this competition resulted in differing views of the discipline, with the French assuming a scholarly, philological tradition and the Germans, a linguistic one.26 Still, one common factor—history—united them while simultaneously igniting tensions. Works on music history would circulate much more broadly and would be debated. To be convinced of this, simply read what Rolland wrote to Dauriac the day after the Paris music history congress of 1900:
The primary advantage that I see in this congress, is that it made French musicology aware of its force. I have felt this strength emerging for several years now, and I believe Germany could have a surprise coming. I’m not referring to French superiority, which in my opinion is overwhelming, in the study of music of the Late Medieval Period. However, if Aubry and Expert successfully complete their vast undertakings, it will provide us with imposing monuments of French scholarship and of our ancient art.27
Though Dauriac traveled through Germany to learn about new scholarly studies in music, he was not the only French national to undertake such a voyage. Jules Combarieu studied with Spitta in Berlin, Jean Chantavoine (1877–1952) was a student of Max Friedländer (1829–1872) in Berlin, and from 1904 to 1905, Jules Écorcheville pursued his studies with Riemann at the Institute of Musicology, University of Leipzig. German research garnered particular attention from French scholars, as evidenced by publication in La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales, in 1902 alone, of eleven critical reviews of German writings, which included the works of Ritter, Riemann, and Adler (Combarieu 1901, Laloy 1902d and 1902e, Trillat 1902). The same journal also published detailed summaries of works for new issues of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Der Klavierlehrer, and Bayreuther Blätter. In the 1900s, the journals Le Courrier musical and La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales reserved significant space for translations of articles, books, and conferences by German-speaking musicologists.
This interest in German musicology was not an isolated phenomenon among the French—it reflects a strong tendency in French intellectual circles to compare themselves to their peers in Germanic countries; it was a dynamic that combined admiration and a sense of competitiveness exacerbated by the defeat of 1870 (Yon 2014, 106–107). French historians such as Ernest Lavisse, Charles Seignobos, and Gabriel Monod would all visit German universities, and historical studies in the German language would be essential references for the French (Delacroix et al. 2007, 103–104).
Riemann’s works must be mentioned as among those of the German musicologists most monitored by the French. Between 1902 and 1906, no fewer than ten articles or series of articles were devoted to his work and his opinions. These articles can primarily be found in Le Courrier musical, in La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales, and in Le Mercure musical. This “Riemannian moment” coincided with Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi’s (1877–1944) 1902 translation of the Manuel de l’harmonie (Handbuch der Harmonielehre), but also with Georges Humbert’s translation of the Dictionnaire de musique and Éléments de l’esthétique musicale (Die Elemente der musikalischen Ästhetik) in 1899 and 1906, respectively.28
The attention given to Riemann led to articles on true music theory and analysis. Le Courrier musical published “Analyse harmonique du prélude de Tristan et Yseult,” in which the German musicologist Max Arend (1873–1944) suggested going beyond the analyses put forward by Karl Mayrberger (1828–1881) in 1881 (Mayrberger 1881) and “explaining Wagnerian harmony scientifically,” based on the “revolution led by Moritz Hauptmann” in Natur der Harmonik und Metrik (1858) and the theoretical works of Riemann that “shine a bright light on this mysterious problem of harmonic affinities” (Arend 1902, 101). In La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales, Calvocoressi and Paul Landormy (1869–1943) reacted as favorably to these theories as Arend had in Le Courrier musical. Calvocoressi characterized them as a “new harmonic system,” allowing the musicologist to break with the “routine [of] harmony as it is applied” (1903, 543).
In Riemann’s work, Paul Landormy recognized “a theory, and no longer just a collection of empirical instructions” (1904, 140), while considering that the principle of lesser harmonies was a “hypothesis that observation of the facts has not confirmed” (139–140). Presentations and discussions of Riemannian theories do not seem to have permanently altered the practice of music analysis, nor did they contribute to giving analysis equivalent importance to music history within French musicology. Nevertheless, Riemann’s work was a subject of discussion and there was a real attempt at adoption of his ideas by the first decade of the twentieth century. This is reflected in the praise that was bestowed on his “numerous and crucially important” publications in “music history and theory” by the editors of Le Courrier musical in 1903,29 by Écorcheville in 1909,30 and by the participation of André Pirro (1869–1943) in the Riemann-Festschrift volume published that same year.31
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
In 1900, despite major resistance on the part of some musicologists, including Romain Rolland, music as a field of study had grown to be quite vast. During preparations for the Music History Congress in Paris, Julien Tiersot (1857–1936) and Romain Rolland received proposals for talks on themes that strayed far from the music history field, in the direction of other areas like pedagogy, sociology, and even arts administration. In July 1899, while Tiersot was organizing the congress, he wrote to Rolland:
My one wish is that we stay focussed on precise and well-defined topics, and stay away from the phraseology that is unavoidable if we lean toward discourse about general ideas. Hence, I believe we must clearly define our subject, which is history, not aesthetics, nor archaeology, nor some rather mystical and fanciful visions of the future.32
Despite the two men’s shared wish to focus on music history, the pressure to vary would be too great and the final program would include a “Musical Aesthetics” section that would bring together everything not strictly historical in nature. This meant topics related to music’s educational and social roles, musical thought and its influence on literature, and even music history’s practical applications for the composing or performing musician (Chasseloup-Laubat 1906, 325–326).
Throughout the nineteenth century, and especially in its final decades, studies on music benefited from significant developments in the social sciences and considerable advancements in the natural sciences. If the fact that musicology developed around a topic rather than as a method itself makes it a science that is unavoidably interdisciplinary, it also means that the first generations of musicologists could not uphold their intellectual independence from other sciences. That Rolland and Tiersot wanted such independence for musicologists did not diminish their desire for a close relationship with music history. In 1902, Rolland wrote to Henry Expert (1863–1952) regarding the courses taught at the École des hautes études sociales:
At the École des hautes études sociales, we have an excellent platform for making the voices of our grand old artists heard, as well as the most intelligent audience in France. Someone like Croiset, Lemonnier, or Seignobos33 would do more for the dissemination of Maîtres musiciens de la Renaissance than all the Breitkopfs and journalists.34
Could it be that Rolland, by evoking Breitkopf, was referring to the fact that Spitta, Chrysander, and Adler’s journal was published by Breitkopf & Härtel, and that it promoted a multidisciplinary, even interdisciplinary approach to music? The famous table dividing up areas of Musikwissenschaft (musicology), as published in the first issue of the journal, draws on the entirety of the social and natural sciences, even if many fields were considered “auxiliary sciences” (Adler 1885, 16–17). While giving an organizational structure to the discipline, Adler’s proposal also shed light on all the spheres of knowledge that must be brought together to study the phenomenon of music. Each of these spheres would come to exist in its own right, developing at its own pace. For example, ethnomusicology is evoked with Simmel’s work, but so could it be with the work of many others, like Tiersot in France, Gaston Knops (1874–1942) in Belgium, and Constantin Brăiloiu (1893–1958) in Romania in the 1930s. However, this claim would make it necessary to go beyond the scope of this chapter. By the same token, it would have been necessary to evoke Max Weber, whose work in sociomusicology, initiated at the very beginning of the twentieth century (Die rationalen und Soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, published in 1921, but dating back to the 1910s), would be an important part of the sociomusicological future; for as Pedler points out, Weber’s praxeology “remains rich in hitherto unseen developments” (Pedler 2010, 312). Here, though, we are manifestly exceeding the limits of the “long” nineteenth century.
In summary, this long nineteenth century unquestionably laid the foundations for an immense network of musicologists and music scholars, whose bonds, strained by international conflict, would nevertheless remain unbroken. The creation of the Société internationale de musique (1899), which would attract the most attention from musicologists like Jules Écorcheville, would be the source of postwar international initiatives: the Société internationale de musique contemporaine (1922), then the Société internationale de musicologie (1927). It was then that musicologists like Henry Prunières (1886–1942) and Edward Dent (1876–1957) would begin broadening the international scope of a modern and inevitably interdisciplinary musicology.