An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought. By Benjamin Steege

Abstract

Many American monographs in the history of theory have chronicled the grand projects of individuals now central to the discipline’s canon, such as Jean-Philippe Rameau, François-Joseph Fétis, Hugo Riemann, and Hermann von Helmholtz. In Benjamin Steege’s An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought, by contrast, no hero emerges. Instead, Steege’s characters comprise a diffuse ensemble cast, united by their proximity to the Weimar Republic and their shared task of bringing music theory to bear on the philosophical domain of phenomenology. To use the language of one of Steege’s characters, Hans Mersmann, An Unnatural Attitude contributes less to a “history of heroes” than to a “history of problems” (194). Steege’s history of problems sits squarely within the aims of its parent book series, New Material Histories of Music, which “sets out to embrace the many accounts of materiality that are invigorating music studies today.” In music theory, specifically, many new accounts of materiality have gone hand in hand with phenomenology, especially in areas like transformational theory, performance studies, and embodied cognition. As a participant in music theory’s phenomenological turn, An Unnatural Attitude embarks on a tantalizing historical project, querying music theory’s first encounters with phenomenology in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Piecing together a wide variety of primary texts, the book presents an intellectual history peopled not only by musicologists but also by philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, whose ideas exert direct influences on the fascinating musical thought of their disciples.