Historical Instruments of Music / Science

Abstract

The advent of electrical and electronic components not only changed the way music and sound were reproduced and transmitted, but also the ways in which they were generated and designed. From around 1900 electrotechnical components and circuits previously used in communications technology migrated into music. As novel materials, they got explored, recombined, and rededicated for genuinely musical purposes. This required not only the integration of knowledge hitherto remote from music, but also an engagement with the material itself: Winding and bending wires, stripping and soldering components, designing and trying out circuit configurations. It turned out early: working on circuits means working on sound.

One of the places to provide space for this new kind of sound work was the 1928 founded Radio Research Lab (Rundfunkversuchsstelle) at the Berlin College of Music, which was shut down after the takeover of the Nazi party in 1933. Here, the engineer Friedrich Trautwein, composer Paul Hindemith and student Oskar Sala developed the electronic instrument Trautonium. While previous studies on Trautonium’s history have mainly highlighted the discursive backgrounds, I draw upon the two earliest versions of the instrument (1930/32) to direct the view into its circuits themselves.

Based on extant instruments (collection at Deutsches Museum München), their circuit diagrams, historic sound samples and patents, I will outline the Trautonium’s development at the Radio Research Lab as an interplay of sound specific material research, aesthetic ideas and circuit design. In doing so, I also reflect on how my media archaeological studies gave me an understanding of early music electronics. The construction of an apparatus combining Theremin, Trautonium and Ondes Martenot, which I will demonstrate as part of my presentation, brought me closer to my object of study and let me think about potentials and needs for circuit-sensitive sound research, which I would like to outline finally.

Biography

Christina Dörfling is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Music and Media Studies at Humboldt  University Berlin (department Viktoria Tkaczyk) and will be visiting associate professor  (Vertretungsprofessorin) for Sound Studies and Musicology at the University of Bonn in the summer  term 2023. She was awarded a doctorate in 2019 at the Berlin University of the Arts with the thesis  Der Schwingkreis. Schaltungsgeschichten an den Rändern von Musik und Medien (Fink Verlag: 2022;  engl. translation: The Resonant Circuit. Circuit Stories at the Interface of Music and Media). She was  research assistant at the University of Arts Berlin and at the college of Music Weimar and was  awarded fellowships at the Deutsches Museum München and the Max-Planck-Institute for the  History of Science. 

Abstract

Music theory can be expressed not only linguistically, but also materially, in the form of what Alexander Rehding (2016) calls “instruments of music theory.” In recent scholarship, instruments of music theory have been studied in relation to expansive geographical networks, following the history of music theory’s “global turn” (Raz et. al. 2019; Hu 2019; Rehding 2022). And yet despite this global turn, instruments remain persistently regarded as nodes within global networks, rarely assumed capable of themselvesembodying global perspectives. My paper shows how musical instruments can crystallize global histories of theory from the past, nuancing and historicizing the global turn today (Beckert and Sachsenmaier 2018).

As a case study, I turn to 1930s America, where Henry Cowell developed a novel instrument called the Rhythmicon. Cowell’s Rhythmicon sonified whole-number ratios as “polyrhythms,” so that when its “3” and “2” keys were held, for instance, a 3-against-2 hemiola would sound. As scholars have acknowledged, Cowell intended his Rhythmicon to teleologically “advance” the history of Western music theory, unlocking more complex rhythmic patterns for modern composers (Sachs 2012; Rehding 2016). And yet as early as 1927, Cowell also conceived of rhythmic theory in a global historical context, claiming that rhythm had been developed “further” in the non-West than in the West (Cowell 1927).

Cowell’s universalist notion of “progress” in rhythmic theory reveals itself clearly in archival sources, especially his unpublished treatise of the mid-1930s, “Rhythm.” Further archival sources connect Cowell’s rhythmic universalism to his concept of a global history of music theory, which he shared with his wife, Sidney Cowell. In 1937, Henry wrote to John Cage that his Rhythmicon could explicate complex Hindustani rhythmic patterns, and later, in 1954, Sydney taught a course in rhythm at The New School, where she rooted rhythm complexities in non-Western cultures in a theory of polyrhythms.

While most today would balk at its intended universalism and developmentalism, Cowell’s Rhythmicon nevertheless provides useful lessons: it shows that the global history of music theory can itself be historicized, and that global perspectives inevitably reflect the locations, assumptions, and priorities of those who adopt them.

Biography

Lee Cannon-Brown is a doctoral candidate in Music Theory at Harvard University. He was a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for Fall 2022, and he is a former chair of the Society for Music Theory’s Music and Philosophy Interest Group. Cannon-Brown’s dissertation re-evaluates the history of post-tonal music theory in the first half of the twentieth century, excavating a global intellectual network that spanned Russia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America. His dissertation has been supported by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Society for Music Theory, and his work has been published in Music Theory Spectrum.

Abstract

In his 1913 “Melodie und Skala,” comparative musicologist Erich von Hornbostel asserted that European “harmony, notation, and keyboard […] work together to make our Tonsystem appear as a tool supplied to the musician with which to ‘compose,’ more or less as one might assemble a mosaic out of colorful little blocks.” Unlike the Hornbostel-Sachs system, which classifies instruments by method of sound production, Hornbostel’s approach in “Melodie und Skala” foregrounds the epistemic role of instrumental interfaces. The essay combines technological pessimism with a polemic against the limits of European musical thinking: techniques like those that characterize European “musical culture,” Hornbostel asserts, reinforce “the unpsychological notion that music is made up of tones.”

My paper investigates Hornbostel’s category of the “unpsychological” by situating it within the intertwined histories of “Berlin School” comparative musicology and Gestalt theory. I begin by identifying a methodological shift in early comparative musicology. Beginning in 1909, Hornbostel rejected the scale-centric approach of Alexander Ellis, Carl Stumpf, and of his own earliest publications. Instead, influenced by Benjamin Ives Gilman’s “Hopi Songs” (1908), in which Gilman claimed to have identified “methods of composition and performance which replace and exclude reliance upon a scale,” Hornbostel argued that the comparative study of pitch structure needed to approach motives and melodies as undivided wholes that are prior to fixed Tonsysteme (Hornbostel 1909). Next, I connect this shift to psychologist Max Wertheimer’s first two publications that invoke the Gestalt concept: “Musik der Wedda” (1910), an article on the music of a Sri Lankan Indigenous group; and “Über das Denken der Naturvölker: I. Zahlen und Zahlgebilde” (1912), which attacked the “dogmatic-European” view that “reality-abstract” combination of arbitrary objects represented the most effective or highly-developed form of numerical thinking (Wertheimer 1912b). I then link Wertheimer’s theoretical orientation in this study to Gestalt theory’s mature approach to perception, and conclude by suggesting that, despite their radical sheen, Wertheimer and Hornbostel’s radical-seeming polemics on the limits of European thinking on number and music ultimately reinforced the colonial Naturvölker/ Kulturvölker binary.

Biography

Henry Burnam is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at Yale University. His dissertation project investigates the intertwined histories of comparative musicology and Gestalt psychology in early twentieth-century Berlin. His other research interests include meter, the notation and analysis of late-medieval polyphony, and the phenomenology of music. Henry is one of the organizers of the Medieval Song Lab at Yale.