Opening the Music Box

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I am very grateful to Gina Rivera and Jonathan Kregor, who first encouraged me to give the Simpsons their scholarly due.

Notes

1 See John Tresch and Emily Dolan, ‘Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science’, Osiris, 28 (2013), 278–98, who still used the Baconian moniker ‘New’ at the time. The actual term ‘critical organology’ goes back to Maria Sonevytsky, ‘The Accordion and Ethnic Whiteness: Toward a New Critical Organology’, The World of Music, 50/3 (2008), 101–18, and Eliot Bates, ‘The Social Lives of Musical Instruments’, Ethnomusicology, 56 (2012), 363–95. Critical organology was put on the map after a round table at the 2013 meeting of the American Musicological Society, complete with ensuing controversy between organologies old and new, as documented in Jessica L. Wood’s and Emily Dolan’s position papers printed side by side: ‘Perspectives on Critical Organology’, Newsletter of the American Musical Instruments Society, 43/1 (spring 2014), 14–16.

2 W. Anthony Sheppard, ‘Puccini and the Music Boxes’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 140 (2015), 41–92, may describe the only example that comes close.

3 See Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). For non-American readers, the ‘Springsonian Museum’ is the Simpsons’ pun on the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

4 See Emily Dolan and Alexander Rehding, The Oxford Handbook of Timbre (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019).

5 Guido Adler, ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 1 (1885), 5–20 (p. 5).

6 Ibid., 6.

7 Ibid., 6–7.

8 For an investigation of Adler’s scientific models, see Benjamin Breuer, ‘The Birth of Musicology from the Spirit of Evolution: Ernst Haeckel’s Entwicklungslehre as Central Component of Guido Adler’s Methodology for Musicology’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2012).

9 Adler, ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel’, 6. Translation from Erica Mugglestone, ‘Guido Adler’s “The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology” (1885): An English Translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 13 (1981), 1–21 (p. 9).

10 The full story is more complex, of course, and would include such other nineteenth-century institutions as (entirely silent) museums for musical instruments. I thank Emily Dolan for pointing this out to me.

11 Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 39, and chapters 9 and 10. Here again, the full story is more complex: Dahlhaus was fully aware of the shortcomings of the model of musicology of Adler’s age; see ibid., 131.

12 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), i: The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, xxiii.

13 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

14 Emily Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, 156–8.

15 Eggebrecht, it should be noted, was not without his critics. See, for instance, the AMS round-table discussion on Eggebrecht in Indianapolis 2010 at <http://www.ams-net.org/indianapolis/eggebrecht> (accessed 16 August 2018). I am using his example here because it is more explicit than most others, in order to outline a general tendency that was more muted in most other quarters.

16 Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, ‘Musikalisches und musiktheoretisches Denken’, Geschichte der Musiktheorie, ed. Frieder Zaminer, 9 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984–2000), i: Ideen zu einer Geschichte der Musiktheorie: Einleitung in das Gesamtwerk (1985), 40–58 (p. 57).

17 Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, ‘Musikalisches Denken’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 32 (1957), 228–40 (p. 230); Eggebrecht, ‘Musikalisches und musiktheoretisches Denken’, 58.

18 Oswald Koller tried to bring Darwinian evolution and the principle of sexual selection to the field of music history by pairing up genres and styles with composers who gave birth to them. See his ‘Die Musik im Lichte der Darwin’schen Theorie’, Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 7 (1900), 35–50.

19 See especially Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution, chapter 2. See also Cornelia Fales, ‘Listening to Timbre during the French Enlightenment’, Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, ed. Caroline Traube and Serge Lacasse (Montreal: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, 2005), 1–11. See <https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cornelia_Fales/publication/228619981_Listening_to_timbre_during_the_french_enlightenment/links/0046353a0c1db0719b000000/Listening-to-timbre-during-the-french-enlightenment.pdf> (accessed 16 August 2018).

20 See Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Julia Kursell, ‘Ohr und Instrument: Zu Hermann von Helmholtz’ physiologischer Grundlegung der Musiktheorie’ (Habilitationsschrift, Technische Universität Berlin, 2013).

21 Of course, Riemann was hardly alone here. It is indicative of the wider focus on ideal forms – Hanslick’s tönend bewegte Formen – for which instruments merely provided a material garb.

22 Hugo Riemann, Katechismus der Orchestrierung (Anleitung zum Instrumentieren) (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1902), 5.

23 Jacques Attali, Bruits: Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977), trans. Brian Massumi as Noise: The Political Economy of Music, with an afterword by Susan McClary (Minnesota, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1985).

24 For a critique of Attali, see Eric Drott, ‘Rereading Jacques Attali’s Bruits’, Critical Inquiry, 41 (2014–15), 721–56.

25 See especially Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). The best introduction to Kittler’s work remains Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Kittler and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

26 Sybille Krämer, ‘The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media’, Theory, Culture and Society, 23/7–8 (December 2006), 93–109 (pp. 97–8).

27 William John Thomas Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 115.

28 This is as good a place as any to point out the continued relevance of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon essay (1766), which divided the arts along the lines of space and time. Lessing did not cover music, which is why the essay has not received as much attention in this field as it has in others. It is no surprise that German media theory has latched onto this tradition. See, for instance, Electric Laokoon: Zeichen und Medien von der Lochkarte zur Grammatologie, ed. Michael Franz, Wolfgang Schäffner, Bernhard Siegert and Robert Stockhammer (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007).

29 Sound studies has had a complicated relationship with visual studies. See Jonathan Sterne’s celebrated ‘audiovisual litany’, in his The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), chapter 1.

30 This category of objects was famously foregrounded in Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), one of the foundation charters of visual culture/visual studies.

31 This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), redefines this key moment in history as a new approach to media and communication.

32 Benjamin’s original title (1935) was Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit ; trans. Michael W. Jennings as Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility [First Version]’, Grey Room, 39 (2010), 11–37. The widely used English title takes its cue from its first published version, in French, L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée.

33 The University of California Press deserves praise for making this book available for free download (at <https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520288027/instruments-for-new-music>, accessed 16 August 2018).

34 Thomas Y. Levin, ‘“Tones from Out of Nowhere”: Rudolf Pfenninger and the Archaeology of Synthetic Sound’, Grey Room, 12 (2003), 32–79.

35 Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, trans. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 55. See also Parikka, What Is Media Archeology? (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

36 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 1–22.

37 Cited in H. Floris Cohen, ‘Galileo Galilei’, Number to Sound: The Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution, ed. Paolo Gozza (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 219–32 (p. 222; spelling updated).

38 David Creese draws attention to the Aristotelian difference between apodeixis (proof) and epideixis (demonstration) in the use of musical instruments in scientific settings. While he focuses on ancient science, the methodological reflection provides food for thought extending far beyond its historical period. See his ‘Instruments and Empiricism in Aristoxenus’ Elementa harmonica’, Aristoxenus of Tarentum: Texts and Discussions, ed. Carl A. Huffman (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 29–63.

39 Gioseffo Zarlino, Galilei’s former teacher and the principal authority of music at the time, had made this problem relevant with his emphatic promotion of just thirds (5:4 and 6:5). Vicentino’s and Galilei’s proposed solutions can be regarded as representing opposite extremes. The classic work on tuning systems remains Mark Lindley, Lutes, Viols, Temperament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

40 See Daniel Chua, ‘Vincenzo Galilei, Modernity, and the Division of Nature’, Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–17.

41 David Dolata, Meantone Temperaments on Lutes and Viols (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017) complicates a story that is often told all too simply.

42 Daniel Walden, ‘Daniele Barbaro, Nicola Vicentino, and Vetruvian Music Theory in Sixteenth Century Italy’, Daniele Barbaro 1514–1570: Vénitien, patricien, humaniste, ed. Frédérique Lemerle, Vasco Zara, Pierre Caye and Laura Moretti (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 373–90. My ‘Instruments of Music Theory’, Music Theory Online, 22/4 (2016), <http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.4/mto.16.22.4.rehding.html>, examines Vicentino’s archicembalo. See also Brandon Konoval, ‘Pythagorean Pipe Dreams? Vincenzo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, and the Pneumatic Mysteries of the Pipe Organ’, Perspectives on Science, 26 (2018), 1–51.

43 Roger Moseley, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016). This book, too, has remarkably been made available on open access as a free download, at <https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520291249/keys-to-play>.

44 Vicentino’s theoretical model requires 31 divisions of the octave, but his keyboard offers 36.

45 On this topic, see also the JAMS colloquy ‘Discrete/Continuous: Music and Media Theory after Kittler’, especially Sybille Krämer, ‘Flattening as Cultural Technique: Epistemic and Aesthetic Functions of Inscribed Surfaces’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 70 (2017), 239–45.

46 Others have been more courageous than me. See Jacob Smith’s review in this journal, ‘I Can See Tomorrow in Your Ludomusicology’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143 (2018), 483–8.

47 Bernhard Siegert, Passage des Digitalen: Zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft 1500–1900 (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 2003).

48 Emily Dolan, ‘Toward a Musicology of Interfaces’, Keyboard Perspectives, 5 (2012), 1–13.

49 Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, 39.

50 See Rekursionen: Von Faltungen des Wissens, ed. Ana Ofak and Philipp von Hilgers (Berlin: Wilhelm Fink, 2009).

51 Wolfgang Ernst, Im Medium erklingt die Zeit (Berlin: Kadmos, 2015), 218.

52 Ibid., 196.

53 In Ernst’s defence, he clearly excludes music, when defined ‘as an artform with a cultural semantics’, from the domain of media archaeology. Media archaeology is interested only in the ‘techno-acoustical framework of sound and the implicit knowledge contained therein’. See ibid., 183.

54 Ernst tends to call his work zeitkritisch, that is, ‘time-critical’. I prefer Evander Price’s term ‘chronocritical’. See <https://evanderprice.com/category/chronocriticism/> (accessed 5 November 2018).

55 See my ‘Music-Historical Egyptomania 1550–1900’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 75 (2014), 545–80.