Research Article| April 01 2017 Discrete/Continuous: Music and Media Theory after Kittler Alexander Rehding, Alexander Rehding Convenor ALEXANDER REHDING is Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is the author of Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Music and Monumentality (Oxford University Press, 2009), and a monograph on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for OUP's Oxford Keynotes series (forthcoming in 2017). He is editor-in-chief of the Oxford Music Handbooks Online series, and was awarded the 2014 Dent Medal. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gundula Kreuzer, Gundula Kreuzer GUNDULA KREUZER is Associate Professor of Music at Yale University. Her monograph Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera is forthcoming from the University of California Press. Other publications include her award-winning Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and her edition of Verdi’s chamber music for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (University of Chicago Press, 2010). She has served as reviews editor for Opera Quarterly and in 2015–16 was an Italian Academy Fellow at Columbia University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Peter McMurray, Peter McMurray PETER McMURRAY is a musicologist and media artist. He is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he is completing a book and film project on sound and Islam in Turkish Berlin. He is coeditor of a special issue of Twentieth-Century Music on magnetic tape recording (Spring 2017). Other research interests include histories of sound technology, the physiology of hearing, and the current refugee crisis. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Sybille Krämer, Sybille Krämer SYBILLE KRÄMER is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, specializing in questions of media. She is a founding member of the Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques, and is especially known for her work in the research group “Image—Writing—Number.” She is the author of numerous books, including Medium, Messenger, Transmission (Amsterdam University Press, 2015). A member of the German and European Research Councils and of the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg, she holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Linköping (2016). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Roger Moseley Roger Moseley ROGER MOSELEY is Assistant Professor of Music at Cornell University. He is the author of Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (University of California Press, 2016) and of articles on topics ranging from eighteenth-century keyboard improvisation to contemporary technologies of musical recreation. He is also active as a collaborative (forte)pianist. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017) 70 (1): 221–256. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.1.221 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Alexander Rehding, Gundula Kreuzer, Peter McMurray, Sybille Krämer, Roger Moseley; Discrete/Continuous: Music and Media Theory after Kittler. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2017; 70 (1): 221–256. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.1.221 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search At first blush, the pair discrete/continuous seems to take us far from the concerns of musicology and place us firmly in the realm of statistics, data analysis, and number crunching. Put graphically, “discrete data” translates into dots or interrupted lines, while “continuous data” implies a curve. This would mean counting and measuring—how can these activities be relevant to music? Our initial association might be with computers, but it is not necessary to invoke that squishy entity called the “digital humanities” here.1 We fare better if we think of the discrete/continuous pair in the context of a different and seemingly outmoded approach to music aesthetics. Going back in time, beyond the influential Kantian tradition, we return to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) of almost a century earlier, the great rationalist and mathematician who invented calculus from his Hanover home at the same time as Newton in Cambridge. Leibniz understood music as... Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.