Frederik Pio:

On the historical background to the modern discourse on musical man

In the second half of the 19th century occurs in Germany - under the influence of the positivist current - in a certain way a crucial displacement within the musical erudition about the individual person. Within the framework of music the constitution of the Tonphysiologie beginning in 1860 can be regarded as marker of this overall event, when the medicin and experimental psychology assert themselves in relation to the already exsisting musical scholarship under the auspices of acoustics and philosophy: The body appears as empirical object of a new musical examination.

Hence, the article involves a discussion of two sourcetexts with reference to an understanding of the musical effects caused by the appearance of the exact sciences within musical scholarship in this period. The historical document Wer ist musikalisch? by fameous physiologist Th. Billroth together with german physician C. H. Würtzen and his investigation into the pathology of musical behaviour, is here brought to illustrate a conflict - historically located in the decades around the turn of the century (1900) - bound up with the above suggested change within the epistemology of musical knowledge.

The intervention of the exact sciences into the field of music brings about - by way of the new musical examination - a mechanical and reductionist theory of knowledge that rests upon a basic opposition to the musically innovative currents more or less connected with the simultaneous breakdown of the tonality. Consequently the article suggests the outlines of an historical interpretation of the positive sciences that grasps the encounter between this field of rationality and the life of occuring music as a far from unimportant event, in relation to the musical transformations marked by the appearance of the different schools of new modernistic currents of music (Schönberg, Satie).

Thus, the quantifying and objectifying logic of the exact sciences collides in the scrutiny of musical man with the mirrored flesh emanating from a life of occuring music which is qualified on the basis of musical values. Since the idealist notion of a science about musicology (Musikwissenschaft) must be rejected as a positivist misconception (scientism), the question of how to assess the meeting between positivism and music consequently cannot be a purely scientific matter. Thus, we stage the attempt to open up a future discussion of the music educator as a practicioner of an ethics. With that, the question is raised in which sense the practice of the music teacher of today can be regarded as modern? In other words, are the musical values upon which the contemporary didactics of music are based still marked by their own past: The events centred around the historical encounter between a new objective knowledge and musical man under the shelter of the traumatic breakdown of tonality?