Max Weber's Unlucky Number

Abstract

Christoph Braun's masterly exposition of the Musiksoziologie (MS) has rendered obsolete the excellent excuse we have had for misunderstanding Weber's difficult monograph. Some five years ago I began the first of several readings of the publication entitled The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, all of which ended in frustration. Each time I opened the book I was led into a fantasy of writing an expose which would demonstrate conclusively that Weber should be dismissed out of hand for ignoring Harry Partch (1979; 1991). Some five months ago I finally realized that the major obstacle to my project (aside from the anachronism) was the virtually unusable translation of what Theodor Kroyer, not Weber, had entitled Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik. Having recourse to the English-language expositions of Weber on music, not excluding the translators' introduction to RSFM, was not helpful. Like Weber, they could be excused for not having heard of Partch. But if they had consulted as basic a reference as Barbour (1951), they would have translated iberteilige Bruche as ratios, instead of referring vaguely to successively determined relations. As for Weber's Ratio (not a vernacular German word but a Latinism, concerning which see Braun, p. 169, n. 68), I am still looking for a suitable equivalent, which the English ratio certainly is not, as is evident from the havoc it wreaks in the translation. [In regard to superparticular ratios and why they matter-this is a topic requiring an extensive discussion, which I have offered elsewhere (Duncan, 1993), developing an argument that might have occurred to Weber had he stopped to ask the question and followed up on Helmholtz's reference to Tartini as the discoverer of difference tones.] It was just as I was realizing, to my horror, that before I could devastate him I would have to start reading Weber all over again, exercising a meager and long unused command of German, that a fortunate coincidence led me to Braun's newly published study. Having now only begun to appreciate its elegance and wealth of reliable information, I am once more back at the beginning, writing a cursory prospectus for what I think is urgently needed: a detailed and severely critical appraisal of Weber on music. My preliminary impression is that Braun himself has withheld, perhaps for separate publication, some fairly strong reservations about the MS. The best clue is his frequent citations to Martin Vogel, a prolific exponent of reine Stimmung (Just Intonation). I don't know if Vogel ever heard of Weber, but he cannot have been favorably impressed with such a Weberism as the unshakable position (unerschitterliche Stellung, MS, p. 94) of the piano. On the contrary, he has proceeded with the shaking, first by his invention of an enharmonic guitar (Schneider, 1992) and second by his involvement in the construction of keyboard instruments adapted to performance in JI (Vogel, 1984a). This is the kind of thing people do if they think there really are choices to be made (cf. Cohen, pp. 216217) rather than inexorable, historically necessary, dictates of theory to be followed. Whatever Braun's view may be, mine is that Weber missed the boat by not making better use of one of his major sources, Hermann Helmholtz. The treatise that Weber underlined (the third German edition, 1870) but did not take seriously enough was also