Recent research has highlighted a flourishing of exchange between the musical and scientific fields of nineteenth-century Germany, with discussions of Hermann von Helmholtz’s writings on music and the psychophysics of listening featuring especially prominently (Jackson 2006; Steege 2012; Hui 2013). This paper outlines a related but little-discussed aspect of this interdisciplinary history. In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, a group of German professors of music, situated primarily in the newly dominant music conservatories, drew from developing knowledges in physiology and psychology to reformulate and expand prevailing conceptions of musical capacity.
Drawing from archival research at Berlin’s Universität der Künste as well as contemporaneous music education journals and other published materials, I discuss how even the most apparently simple of musical actions (playing a single note on the violin, perhaps) came to be seen as demonstrating a remarkable multiplicity of physiological and psychological processes. In response, new emphasis began to be placed on “musicalizing” young students through elementary studies in perceiving and producing musical movement, rhythm, tone, dynamics, and phrasing. Furthermore, both conservatory curricula and journalistic discourse placed new value on musical practices that required transducing between distinct media (such as music dictation, which transduces the reception of auditory information into the production of its written representation). By way of conclusion, I analyze how these attempts to define musicality anew—its norms, potentialities, and pathologies—were entangled with the pedagogical practices of training and examination through which that very musicality was developed and assessed.
