Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Republic

Abstract

In 1926, Henry Ernst published the short memoir ‘My Hunt for the ‘Tschetzpend’’ (‘Meine Jagd nach der ‘Tschetzpend’’) in the German entertainment musician’s journal Artist. A unique document, it provides a rare account of a Weimar musician’s encounter with, and education in, early jazz. Ernst first heard the word ‘jazz’, he claimed, at the end of an engagement in Switzerland, when a hotel manager asked him to play ‘Tschetzpend’ (‘jazz band’) when he returned the following season. The word and its meaning were enigmatic, Ernst explained, since ‘scarcely a musician in Germany knew what a jazz band or a Shimmy actually was’ in 1920. Much of the rest of the story narrates his frustrating pursuit of the music and the wrong characterizations he received from many different sources. Finally, prepared to hand in his resignation, he discovered some sheet music in a local bookstore that included a photograph of a London jazz band. The moment was an epiphany, he asserted; his now wellestablished jazz band was based on this discovery. Strangely, the most informative aspect of the sheet music was the not the musical notes but the photograph. ‘No Egyptologist had ever taken into his hand more lovingly, and studied more intensely, a newly discovered piece of papyrus than I did this Jazzband-photograph’, he claimed. 1 But how could an image inform music so decisively? How could a photograph dictate the perception of sound? Ernst’s sensory border-crossing creates cognitive dissonance: for Ernst, this translation seemed so evident that he didn’t see the need to explain it; for us, it remains mysterious. Ernst’s presupposition does not just seem counterintuitive; it also contradicts a recent narrative of the modern senses. A number of scholars have argued that a key component in the modern understanding of perception is the separation of the senses. 2 By the 1840s, philosophers and physiologists had broken up the classically unified sensorium into component parts, reimagining hearing, seeing, smelling, touching and tasting as individual senses. According to this narrative, the new mass media of the nineteenth century were themselves an extension of this new understanding—and the consequent development of the sciences—of the senses. Sound (telegraphy, the telephone and sound recording) and image (the phanakistiscope, stereograph and photograph) reproduction technologies were the outcomes of a sensory ‘regime’ which made hearing and vision subjective, singular objects of knowledge. 3 Single sensory media such as the