Rethinking Rationalisation: Evolutionism and Imperialism in Max Weber's Discourse on Music. E-Book

Ana Petrov

• Herausgeber: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 407

Beschreibung

Max Weber as a sociologist of music? Scrutinising an array of nineteenth-century discourses on the concept of 'development’ in music, Ana Petrov focuses on Max Weber’s theory of rationalisation in music, which led him to see 'rationalised’ music as the most 'developed’, the most 'complex’ and the 'best’ music that the whole of civilisation had ever achieved. Weber was convinced that his analysis could prove that the 'peak’ of the rationalisation process was to be found in the 'great’ masterpieces of German composers, starting with Johann Sebastian Bach and finishing with Richard Wagner. Petrov argues that Weber’s allegedly 'neutral’ concepts were far from 'innocent’ and 'ideology-free’, but rather outcomes of his social and intellectual background. She explores the implications of Weber’s concept of rationalisation in music, discussing correlations between the theories of evolution and rationalisation and the paradigm of cultural imperialism, which can be recognised in Weber’s promulgation of the superiority of Western music traditions.

Leseprobe

ANA PETROV

RETHINKING RATIONALISATION:EVOLUTIONISM AND IMPERIALISM INMAX WEBER’S DISCOURSE ON MUSIC

Editor and copy-editing assistance: Tatjana Marković (Vienna, Austria)

English copy-editing: Kim Burton (London, UK)

Layout and cover: Nikola Stevanović (Belgrade, Serbia)

Printed and bound in the EU

Ana Petrov: Rethinking Rationalisation: Evolutionism and Imperialism in Max Weber’s Discourse on Music.Vienna: HOLLITZER Verlag, 2016

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION: MAX WEBER AS A SOCIOLOGIST OF MUSIC?

THE STUDY OF MUSIC AND WEBER’S SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE

The Period Before 1910

The Period After 1910 and the First Meeting of the Deutsche Soziologische Gesellschaft (German Sociological Society)

COMPONENTS OF WEBER’S SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC

The Concept of Geist (Spirit) of Modern Art

The Concept of the Rationalisation of Art

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO WEBER’S DISCOURSE ON MUSIC

Researching Weber’s Theory

Reading Evolutionism in Weber’s Theory

EVOLUTIONISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

HERBERT SPENCER’S THEORY OF EVOLUTION

Evolution as Progress

Evolution as Racial Differentiation

CHARLES DARWIN’S THEORY OF EVOLUTION

Selection and Evolution

Extermination as an Inevitable Consequence of Selection in the Evolutionary Process

SPENCER’S AND DARWIN’S DISCOURSE ON THE EVOLUTION OF MUSIC

Spencer and Darwin on the Role of Music in Evolution

Spencer’s Theory on the Origin of Music: Music as ‘Natural Language of Emotion’

Spencer’s Theory on Development from Homogeneous Towards Heterogeneous Species: The Path from ‘Primitive’ to the ‘Civilised’ Music

Darwin’s Theory on the Origin of Music: Voice as a Means for Attraction in Sexual Selection

Darwin’s Thesis on Music as Emotional Expression

EVOLUTIONISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY DISCOURSES ON MUSIC

THE INFLUENCE OF EVOLUTIONIST THEORIES ON DISCOURSES ON MUSIC

The Construction of Scholarly Discourses on Music

The Incorporation of Evolutionism in Discourses on Music

Deconstructing Scholarly Discourses on Music

THE CONCEPTS OF ‘DEVELOPED’ AND ‘UNDEVELOPED’ MUSICS

The Science of Music as the Investigation of Tone Species’ Evolution: The Case of Adler

The Science of Music as a Natural Science: Helmholtz and Riemann

THE CONCEPTS OF WESTERN AND NON-WESTERN MUSICS

Implications of the Musicological Discourse on Progress: Constructing the Field of ‘Primitive’ Music

Criteria for Constructing the Difference between Musics: Constructing the Superior/Inferior Dichotomy

Comparative Musicology as an Alternative Discourse on Music (Or a Discourse on Other Musics)

EVOLUTIONISM IN WEBER’S DISCOURSE ON MUSIC

THE INFLUENCE OF EVOLUTIONIST MUSICOLOGICAL DISCOURSES ON WEBER’S CONCEPT OF MUSIC RATIONALISATION

Dealing with Acoustics: Dialogue with Helmholtz’s Theory

The Influence of the Music Theory Discourse: Incorporation and Modifications of Riemann’s Discourse

Incorporation into the Discourse of the History of Music as a Positivist Science on Written Works of Art

Complete Incorporation into the Nineteenth-Century Musicological and Ethnomusicological Discourses: ‘Developed/Undeveloped’ and ‘Western/Non-Western’ Dichotomies

RATIONALISATION AS AN IMPERIALISTIC EVOLUTIONIST MODEL OF CONSTRUCTING MUSIC HISTORY

The First Evolutionist Symptom: ‘Development’ of the Intervals from the ‘Simpler’ Forms to the Increasingly ‘Complex’ and Continuous ‘Progress’ of Tonal Species

The Second Evolutionist Symptom: Struggle and Selection in the Field of Professional Music

Rationalisation as Progress

Development, Progress, Evolution, Rationalisation

Concept of Style as the Final Answer in the Problematisation of Progress in Weber’s Theory of Rationalisation of Music

CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS OF WEBER’S DISCOURSE ON RATIONALISATION OF MUSIC

Decolonising Weber: Mapping Weber’s Theory in the Debate on Imperialism

Foundations for Problematisation of Imperialistic Discourse on Music Evolution: Musicological Readings of Weber

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

CURRICULUM VITAE

ANNOTATIONS

FOREWORD

This book was written during the research for the doctoral dissertation in sociology in the Department for Sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy University of Belgrade between 2008 and 2012. The dissertation under the title Evolucionistički elementi u sociološkomuzičkoj teoriji racionalizacije Maksa Vebera (‘Elements of Evolutionism in Max Weber’s Socio-musical Theory of Rationalisation’) was defended in 2012. Although this study and the dissertation share certain common parts and issues, this is not a text that is essentially the same as the one that the dissertation contained. Rather, it is a consequence of my long dealing with Max Weber’s discourse on music and a wish to explore questions and perspectives that did not find their place in the dissertation. In comparison to the doctoral dissertation, this book has a relevant change – different theoretical apparatus. Drawing on the research in the fields of scientific and cultural imperialism, I wanted to point to the aspects of Weber’s theory that have continuously been neglected in the investigation of the author’s discourses. Simultaneously working on the version of this book in Serbian, as well as presenting some parts of the investigation at conferences, certain results of my research were presented in the following publications: “Koncept evolucije muzike u teorijama Herberta Spensera i Čarlsa Darvina”;1 “If it’s not on Paper, is it Music at All? The Paradigm on the Written Record in Nineteenth-Century Discourses on Music”;2 “Max Weber’s Theory of Music Development: Evolution and Rationalisation of Music”;3 and “Are we still evolutionists? The Case of Reception of Max Weber’s Theory of Music Development”.4

I want to express my gratitude for the support and help to friends and colleagues without whom this book would not be possible. The whole manuscript or its parts were read by Leon Stefanija, Thomas Hilder and Kim Burton. Their comments helped improving the final draft of the book. Special thanks I owe to Kim Burton who proofread this text. Furthermore, I wish to thank Srđan Atanasovski, who followed my work on this topic from its inception and whose constructive criticism helped me greatly; then, many thanks to Miško Šuvaković, for giving me a continuous support for many years, for reading the draft of this manuscript in Serbian and encouraging me to continue the research; finally, I would certainly not finish this book without the support of Tatjana Marković, a great friend and colleague who has always believed in me and had time to read my texts, which helped me significantly in improving the earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Before I locate the issues I am dealing with in the book, I want to point out what this book is not. In other words, I believe it is relevant to highlight that I am fully aware what the shortcomings of the book might be and I want to address these issues at the beginning. In accordance with the understanding of science as a theoretical discourse that has never been neutral or objective (even though it was considered to be for rather long period of time), I realise that I could not include all relevant aspects of Weber’s discourse, so that I made a choice to exclude some of them that have been discussed numerous times. Believing that a scholarly study should not provide final and fixed answers to the posed questions and give ‘the truth’ about the analysed material, I here propose certain insights into Max Weber’s discourse on music and address some issues that I find to have been hardly researched so far. This is a book that propose rethinking of the ‘classical thinkers’, by pointing to the neglected aspects of Weber’s discourse. Since sociology of music sometimes lacks critical re-examination, this is a book with many questions for further research.

Having in mind the mentioned, this book is not for the readers who seek to find ‘the truth’ about Max Weber, or musicology, sociology and history. It is meant for those who still have a need to rethink and bring into question the values that seem to be firm and fixed. I also want to dedicate this book to students and young researchers in the fields of musicology, sociology, sociology of culture, anthropology, history of science and many other disciplines. The main objective of the book is to open new questions and to bring to new perspectives for rethinking of the ‘classics’, as well as to pose a crucial question: what haven’t we learned about the ‘classics’ and we should have?

In Belgrade,

January 2016

INTRODUCTION:MAX WEBER AS A SOCIOLOGIST OF MUSIC?

The sociology of culture and the sociology of art are not disciplines that are often linked to the work of a ‘sociological classic’ such as Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber, who is generally considered to be one of the ‘founders’ of sociological scholarly discourse, has usually been studied in the context of issues of historical and political sociology, as well as social economy, the sociology of law, and religion. Social stratification, research into institutions and organisations, and the question of the methodological tools applied in social sciences are questions that regularly arise in discussing Weber’s discourse. In the light of this consideration, references to Weber may appear to be extensive, but when all aspects of the author’s activity are taken into account, they are in fact rather limited.

Formed within the framework of the issues and disciplines set out above, the Weberian paradigm in the social sciences has traditionally neglected one sphere of Weber’s discourse that is sometimes labelled “a mysterious gap” in the author’s work.5 By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the mentioned mystery in the author’s opus was beginning to be unveiled. Weber’s ideas about writing a study on sociology of culture (which was interrupted by his sudden death) were extremely ambitious, complex and comprehensive. In the last decade of his life (from 1910 until 1920) the author started to deal with multifarious aspects of modern culture, and it appears that his approach to a study of the sociology of culture would have encompassed music, architecture, painting, sculpture and literature. Although one can only speculate about the books final content, had his work been completed, one part of Max Weber’s ambitious project was realised – a study of the sociology of music. This unfinished study, in the form of a fragmentary manuscript that Weber left behind on his death, was published in 1921 thanks to the efforts of Marianne Weber (Max Weber’s wife, 1870–1954) and musicologist Theodor Kroyer (1873–1945), while a resurgent interest in the last decade of the twentieth century, followed the publication of a large and highly informative study by Christoph Braun in 1992,6 as well as the 2004 reprinting of Weber’s study on music from which incorporates Braun’s study as the introduction.7

THE STUDY OF MUSIC AND WEBER’S SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE

It is usually stated that Max Weber’s life and work took place in one of the most turbulent periods in Western culture. He was a witness of the consolidation of modern capitalism, the development of cities, and advances in technology, as well as numerous avant-garde currents in the arts. The importance of art in Weber’s life is evident from his biography which testifies how continuously and thoroughly he was acquainted with fin de siècle cultural movements.8 Consequently, one possible approach would be first to discuss Weber’s personal experiences, i.e. the place of art in his life and education, and then to discuss how and why his experience was incorporated in his specific and fully developed explications of culture and art. His professional interests, interpolated with personal reflections, resulted in a complex discourse on the culture of his time.

The biographical data make it possible to identify two phases in Weber’s life and engagement with art, which are distinguished by the author’s changing interests in art, his increasingly elaborate approach to it and finally, the construction of a theoretical framework for it. It is in fact possible to see the year 1910 as the watershed between these two phases. The first was marked by Weber’s personal interest in developments in the arts, his education, reading of literature on art history, as well as his travels and personal experience of artworks in Italy and the Netherlands. The second phase, which was the last decade of Weber’s life, was characterised by a more intensive professional engagement. It was in this last decade that author dedicated himself to the study of culture, art and music.

THE PERIOD BEFORE 1910

Writing about her husband’s education, Marianne Weber commented that he had always been interested in history and politics, and in classical and contemporary literary works. In addition to his library of historical and literary works, Max Weber also possessed a considerable number of histories of art, some of which were illustrated. Ms. Weber also pointed out that her husband had a permanent professional interest in the arts that he incorporated in his discussions on the concept of culture and the research into culture (as an area of the scholarly study of culture – Kulturwissenschaft), which included investigating religion, artistic production in general, and music in particular.9 This professional interest in researching culture was in fact just an elaboration and continuation of Weber’s continued interest in art, literature, poetry and music, as testified in many of the author’s letters from the earlier period of his life.10

Although biographical approaches to Weber have often neglected this author’s artistic affinities, considerably more is now known about Weber’s position in the context of the artistic movements of his time.11 In regarding this aspect of Weber’s life and work has been enriched as a consequence of the continuous effort invested in editing his legacy and publishing his works as part of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe project, an important part of which covers the correspondence that sheds light on unknown or previously neglected aspects of the author’s work. On one hand, after visiting Florence twice, in 1902 and 1908, Weber commented on Italian renaissance architecture and painting in his letters.12 On the other hand, a stay in The Netherlands in 1903 was marked by Weber’s fascination with Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), with whose life and works the author had become acquainted by reading studies such as a recently published book by his friend Carl Neumann (1832–1925), an art historian who often lent many professional art history books to Weber.13

THE PERIOD AFTER 1910 AND THE FIRST MEETING OF THE DEUTSCHE SOZIOLOGISCHE GESELLSCHAFT (GERMAN SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY)

Max Weber’s interest in addressing art did not actually gain much importance until 1910, when he began intensive work on his the study of art. Weber’s personal interest in art and his occasional comments on culture in general received a concrete and complete (although brief) form at the first meeting of the Deutsche Soziologische Gesellschaft (German Sociological Society) held in Frankfurt am Main in October 1910. This meeting can be seen as marking the beginning of Weber’s more detailed, subtle and long-term engagement in the sociology of culture, art and music. Weber’s intensive and permanent focus on this new field during the last decade of his life was thus the direct consequence of his participation in this meeting and its topic (technology and culture), and papers presented there can be considered to have been an immediate and unequivocal motive for the intensification and expansion of Weber’s engagement with the sociology of culture.

This first meeting of the German Sociological Society was attended by Max Weber, Alfred Weber (1868–1958), Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Ferdinand Toennies (1855–1936), Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), Werner Sombart (1863–1941), and other scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. The relevant commentary was made by Max Weber in the conference in reply to Werner Sombart’s lecture Technik und Kultur (‘Technology and Culture’) and it was this discussion that had an impact on Weber’s following interest in modern culture and especially music. Weber commented on several other papers at the conference as well, most of which were subsequently published: on the concept of race,14 Christian-Stoic conceptions of natural law,15 and law and science. He also presented a business report where he outlined the tasks of the Society as whole and proposed collaborative sociological studies of the press, voluntary associations and the choice of professions.16

The immediate spur for Weber’s further research, i.e. his fascination with the phenomena of modern culture and music was Werner Sombart’s lecture on technology and culture. Sombart’s lecture sketched a remarkably wide-ranging survey of the influential and indispensable part played by particular technologies in the formation of various cultural spheres (the effect of the steam engine in transforming capitalist industry, the use of gunpowder in enhancing the military force of the modern state, the importance of the press in spreading the word of the modern church, the influence of transportation systems on the communication of scientific ideas and so on). Sombart’s general concern was to consider, firstly, the extent to which the economy is a function of technology, and then, if culture is a function of the economy. His specific objective was to assess whether the influences in the examples cited are predominantly positive or negative, mediated or unmediated, active or passive, and he concluded by arguing against an orthodox Marxist interpretation of a one-way causal relationship between the economy and culture.17

Dealing with the role of music in the analysis of the mentioned problems, Sombart came to the conclusion that there was a connection between “the noise of the modern music” and the noise in the modern cities, which he explained as having being similar to the fact that in the past “the relaxing music” had been the consequence of “the peace in small towns”.18 In revising the lecture for publication in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (The Archive for Social Science and Social Policy), the journal he co-edited with Weber and Edgar Jaffé (1866–1921), Weber expanded the section on music and modern life that he had focused on in his reply. At the same time, however, he also complained of the “wilful misunderstanding” of his interlocutors and singled out Weber’s critical remarks as “not of a fundamental nature”.19

Although Weber commented on Sombart’s lecture, he himself later dismissed it in private correspondence as “ein Feuilleton” – mere journalistic entertainment with little scholarly value.20 However, it is clear that the themes addressed resonated profoundly with the new phase of the work Weber was about to embark on. In the years immediately following the conference, he developed some of these ideas on the rationalisation of music and the history of the Occidental city, partly in light of his more general concern with how technology shapes the cultural worldview of modernity and potentially facilitates the emergence of new value-forms.21 Moreover, Sombart’s impact on Weber’s later discourse was evident from the fact that the very topic of the meeting (technology and culture) marked his theory in the following years. Weber also publicly commented on Sombart’s discourse itself.22

As his personal documents show, Weber’s initial interest in art was growing more serious, so that he began to develop his ideas for writing a study on music shortly after the meeting and the debate with Sombart. The reason for Weber’s increasing interest in music is often linked with two aspects of the author’s personal life – his love affair with the pianist Mina Tobler (1880–1967) and his frequent consumption of music, such as concert going and playing music at home. In addition, it is useful to bear in mind that Weber was a typical product of nineteenth-century elite musical culture; he had been given piano lessons from an early age, he used to play music regularly at home, he had been a member of a student choir, and was a regular concert and opera-goer. Weber also visited Bayreuth, then a central pillar of German musical culture, on two occasions, once in the summer of 1911 with his wife, and again in 1912 when Mina Tobler joined the couple.23

Bearing all this in mind, a conclusion that Weber’s interest in music was totally sudden and unexpected, beginning in 1910, becomes untenable. Rather, as the personal documentation shows, his interest was a consequence of his continually consuming, informing and thinking about the music of the time. These pieces of information can be found, as I have said, only in his personal documents, and sometimes almost exclusively from the notes written by Marianne Weber.24 Still, it is clear that he developed a particular professional interest from 1911 onwards, and that and his decision to write the study dates from the same year, when Marianne Weber wrote that her husband was “completely immersed in music”, that he enjoyed performances of Don Quixote (1897) and Salome (1905) by Richard Strauss, Beethoven’s sonatas for violoncello op. 5 and op. 102, and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro [The Marriage of Figaro, 1786], as well as in the performances of Richard Wagner’s (1813–1883) music dramas in Bayreuth.25 The crucial document that testifies about his renewed interest in music and decision to write the study is a letter from 1912 (written a few months after his attendance at a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde [Tristan and Isolde, 1859]) that he addressed to his sister Lili Weber. He commented to his sister that he was writing about music history, and specifically, how remarkable it is that certain social conditions can be found and thus can be explained the development of harmonic music:

[…] nur wir [haben] eine ‘harmonische’ Musik, obwohl andre Culturkreise ein viel feineres Gehör und viel mehr intensive Musik-Kultur aufweisen.26

At the time that Weber decided to write about music, he was also regularly (starting from 1911) organising gatherings in his home, which he referred to as “lessons in sociology of music”.27 In addition to playing the piano, a very common domestic musical practice in the nineteenth century, Weber also gave lectures that contained explanations of music theory, harmony and similar disciplines.28 As I shall demonstrate later, Weber was very well acquainted with all of these fields.

COMPONENTS OF WEBER’S SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC

How Weber’s study of the sociology of culture would have appeared is a question that has been often posed. It has often been suggested that the author would have written an elaborate study, equivalent to his works of comparative-historical, political or economic sociology. In the absence of the finished study including everything planned, the discourse that deals with sociology of culture can be reconstructed – apart from the study on music – from the author’s remarks made at the meeting of 1910, his essays on sociology of religion, and other papers that do not refer directly to culture or art, but still might help provide an insight into the general tenor of Weber’s observations of society and culture.

I will here focus mainly on two sources (while bearing others in mind) – Weber’s reply to Sombart and his own study on music. The reason for this choice lies in the fact that combining these sources allows the two fundamental components of the author’s theory in the fields of sociology of culture, art and music – the concepts of Technik (‘technique’) and Kultur (‘culture’) – to be properly investigated.29 In other words, Weber’s sociology of culture includes the problem of the autonomy of culture and art (i.e. the development of artistic means that Weber analysed in the context of rationalisation), and, on the other, the problem of social determination of cultural forms and processes.30 Furthermore, Weber’s approach to discourse on culture itself may be reconstructed. Bearing this in mind, the author’s sociology of culture appears to be a discourse incorporating divergent nineteenth-century theories.

THE CONCEPT OFGEIST (SPIRIT) OF MODERN ART

The political and cultural situation of the time inspired both the theme of the 1910 sociology meeting in Frankfurt, and the topic of numerous discussions. The question that was raised related to the issues of making art forms and values that responded to the new social conditions. Weber rejected Sombart’s description of modern music as noisy, and complained about the fact that Sombart had not made a precise distinction between technique understood as the application of means for achieving a specific purpose, and as a mode of processing material goods. Even though Weber’s work within both the paradigm of the autonomy of the work of art and the sociological analyses of art may seem contradictory, he actually combined those two approaches to the research of culture and art. More precisely, he recognised culture and art as autonomous with regard to certain components, but did not consider them to be completely independent from the social conditions in which a work of art was created. What Weber rejected in Sombart’s approach was the superficiality of the analysis in general and the negative evaluation of the development of the modern city, and of modern music in particular. He pointed out the necessity of recasting the very question that Sombart had posed by transferring attention not only to the cultural-historical situation, but also to the phenomenon of the “specifically artistic”.31

From this perspective, Weber was ultimately posing new question that referred to the relation of formal aesthetic values of artwork and the development of specific technical means and procedures. At the 1910 meeting he pointed singled out the following matters:

Gentlemen, perhaps Sombart has emphasized the selection of the artist’s subject somewhat too one-sidedly. In addition, he talked about the influence of technology on modern orchestral music and the like. Now the selection of subjects is a very important element in the cultural historical assessment of a cultural-historical situation, but it certainly does not touch on what is specifically artistic. In my opinion, the decisive question we have to pose would instead be to what extent formal aesthetic values have emerged in the artistic field as a result of very specific technological situations. And here again, the purely technological and economic social sides of the situation would have to be separated from one another.32

Weber’s response to Sombart can be summed up as pointing to the problem of separating the disciplines of the history and the sociology of music. The first discipline would deal, according to Weber, with researching the “das künstlerische Wollen” (artistic impulse) and musical technology, while the latter would deal with the relation between the “general technical conditions” of social processes and “the spirit of the particular musical work”.33

According to Weber, a connection between modern music (and modern culture) and modern city certainly exists, but it cannot be reduced simply to a relationship between the level and the qualities of noise. Weber perceived this connection in the fact that both modern city and culture as a whole had begun to change, leading to the transformation of music and the enjoyment of music, i.e. the “highest aesthetic contemplation” and “the most intense forms of the imagination”.34 However, this did not mean, as Weber stated, that we can properly understand how the “artistic will” developed and changed. The will itself, the author claimed, was a category that “brought to term” the means for dealing with certain problems in art.35

THE CONCEPT OF THE RATIONALISATION OF ART

Weber analysed the concrete technical means through the concept of rationalisation. It is generally accepted that he considered the subject of sociology to be modern society as known in the West and thus he focused identifying the reasons why it was only there that such a society developed. The process of rationalisation is a quality that distinguishes Western European society from any other society in the world. Rationalisation thus represents the unifying link of Weber’s whole discourse since it was construed as the total principle of all human actions, means and goals. Weber understood sociology as a comprehensive science of social action. His analytical focus was on individual human actors.36 So called goal-rational action, according to Weber, is the one in which both goal and means are rationally chosen, infusing the creation of the ‘spirit’ of scientific rationalism into all spheres of society and leading to the disappearance of the affective, emotional and irrational elements in society. In this way the whole Western society and culture was ‘disenchanted’. Owing to this theory Weber was primarily concerned with modern Western society, in which, as he saw it, behaviour had come to be increasingly dominated by goal-oriented rationality, whereas in earlier periods it tended to be motivated by tradition, affect, or value-oriented rationality. His studies of non-Western societies were primarily designed to highlight this distinctive Western development.37

Until recently, Weber’s discourse on culture, art and music (unlike those referring to law, economics and religion) has been totally neglected. It is, furthermore, almost completely unknown that Weber’s engagement with music made him discover, as his wife noted, the very concept of rationalisation in the whole of Occidental civilisation.38 Thus it was in music that Weber first constructed his concept of rationalisation. Given the fact that the concept of rationalisation is one of the most important and best known segments of the author’s work, this information is crucial for construing certain new (disregarded) aspects of Weber’s sociological theory. Only after having considered music history as a process of a rationalised progress did Weber continue to ponder over some other aspects of social life that might have had the same logic. Therefore, the very concept of rationalisation was embedded in Weber’s narrative of music history.

Weber opined that rationalisation in music was evident, on one hand, in composers’ engagement with an ever-increasing complexity of musical agents (that led to the richness of both human action and musical language) and, on the other, in the struggle against certain irrational threats such as social institutions and human beliefs. In his view these irrational threats could slow or halt the development of ‘musical genius’. He was adamant that goal-rational progress in music occurred due to finding the solutions to the technical (compositional) problems, i.e. finding solutions for certain artistic expressions. The rationalisation process in music thus unfolded in six steps, starting with the organisation of intervals and finishing with the equal temperament of the tonal system.39 However, music was not unique in comparison to other arts, since the author claimed that the same rational path existed in other arts as well, including architecture, painting, literature and others.40

As Lawrence Scaff correctly pointed out, the concept of culture itself was subjected to careful scrutiny, as were the methodological underpinnings for any cultural science.41 These views then carried over to major parts of Weber’s best-known work, such as the problematic of Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904–1905] and the important synthetic “Introduction” to the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie [Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion], the three-volume published in 1920. Weber’s 1920 introduction contains numerous examples of the author’s discourse on culture and art, usually realised through comparisons between the West and other parts of the world. The following is a typical example:

There have been Gothic arches as decorative features elsewhere, in the ancient world and in Asia; apparently even Gothic cross-vaulting was not unknown in the East. But what is lacking elsewhere is the rational use of the Gothic vault as a means of distribution of thrust, as a means of roofing differently shaped spaces, and, especially, as a construction principle of great monumental buildings. It also serves as the basis of a style embracing sculpture and painting, like that created in the Middle Ages. Also, although the technical foundations were derived from the East, only the West has solved the problem of the dome, and achieved the kind of ‘classical’ rationalization of the whole of art that the Renaissance created here. In painting this was attained through the rational use of linear and aerial perspective.42

The remark could be read as a summation of Weber’s encounter with the culture of the Renaissance in Italy, conceived in this instance from the standpoint of the effort to solve a problem of technical rationalism in the construction of space, and the implications of that solution for style in architecture as well as in painting and sculpture. One of its most important effects, as he noted elsewhere, was to use technical rationalism “as a means for fulfilling artistic tasks which had until then been scarcely suspected” and to convey a new sense of the “feeling for the human body”.43

Weber’s initial thinking on art, stimulated by the meeting, remained in the framework of the relationship between art forms, urbanisation and development. These elements were also the marks of other aspects of the research in this field. For example, lyric poetry was understood as the reflection of the state of individuals in modern metropolis, but also of the desirability for that modern life to be subjected to critique. Thus “ecstatic symbolic poetry” was analysed by Weber as both an escape from mechanical reality, and as its acceptance through the “aesthetic imagination”.44 As Scaff noted, the portrait of an artist is represented as twofold – as a reflection of the times, and as a rebel, an exemplar of l’art pour l’art and a critic of thereof.45

Unfortunately, his comments on development in the visual arts and in literature remained fragmented and they are mentioned here only in order to illustrate Weber’s original plan to write a study on phenomena that supersede music and deals with multifarious aspects of the rationalisation process in all kinds of art. From the certain general conclusion concerning the author’s theory could be drawn from these comments, but it is relevant to bear in mind that music enjoyed an especially important place in the theory of rationalisation, which appears to be the inevitable consequence of the author’s education in music, as well as in music theory and history.

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO WEBER’S DISCOURSE ON MUSIC

In this section of the introduction I intend to demonstrate that, apart from unfamiliar and under-researched in the sociological academic field, when it is discussed, Weber’s theory of the sociology of music was often approached in a similar manner. I will demonstrate what the omissions in the present approaches have been, as well as describing the theoretical background relevant to explaining evolutionism and imperialism as consequential perspectives for research into Weber’s discourse on music.

RESEARCHING WEBER’S THEORY

The renewed academic interest in rethinking Weber from the context of the sociology of culture appears to have been a consequence of the Braun and Finscher’s publication I have mentioned previously, which is not unexpected in view of the fact that this study is the fundamental reference in most of the research that deal with the subject. However, it should be mentioned that in the English language the consequences of a language barrier are sometimes evident. As a result of their unfamiliarity with German, some authors tend to draw conclusions from the translation of Weber’s study in English (The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, 1958), i.e. from Don Martindale’s introduction, which does compare in either size or content with the extensive research done by Braun and Finsher.46

However, neither Weber’s published book on music nor Braun and Finscher’s study on it are not the only sources for studying the author’s sociology of culture. Aside from Braun, I would point to Lawrence Scaff’s research that stands out because of its focus on a new potential of Weber’s discourse – the potential that emerges from the reconstruction of his sociology of culture. More precisely, a large amount of Weber’s general sociological discourse (especially that from the period between 1910 and 1920) is imbued with the analysis and interpretations of contemporary cultural currents, first of all, the analysis of the very concept of culture, then the Kulturwissenschaft. The author’s discourse can thus be reconstructed also from the papers that were not originally or entirely dedicated to the observation of culture. Weber’s opus in the field of sociology of religion, which contains “brilliant essays in the sociology of culture”, occupies a special place in this context,47 but his methodological essays appear to have no less importance, while the lectures held at the meeting of German sociological society that also can supply insights into Weber’s culturological interpretations.

Among references about Weber’s sociology of culture (still not numerous) are those where the analysis of general concepts related to Weber’s construal of culture, such as phenomenon of modernity and modern culture are dominant;48 those dedicated to Weber’s writings in sociology of religion, from which his reading of culture in general can be reconstructed;49 and, finally, work on Weber’s unfinished project of writing a study in the sociology of culture.50 It is not surprising that among the research the most frequently encountered are those related to the sociology of music. Besides Braun’s monography, certain chapters of books in sociology of music in general deal with Weber’s engagement in the field,51 and a considerable amount of articles on the same subject have been published.52 It should be additionally stressed that there are references to Weber even in papers whose authors make no claim to discuss Weber’s discourse on music in detail, but who are, however, intrigued by some of his interpretations.53

In browsing the literature, I have tried to identify the most relevant and most frequently discussed problems in this field. I came to the conclusion that the authors unequivocally point to the importance of the very fact that a sociological ‘classic’ like Max Weber wrote on music, and the fact that his study has remained almost unknown or ignored in field of academic sociology for a long time. In addition to this paucity of literature, a researcher of this under-studied field is also confronted with the problem of the limited topics discussed in relation to the subject, as well as its unreliability. Even though I attempted to locate new sources and fresh approaches to the topic, I often encountered the same state of affairs – the items of information, the approaches and topics were often similar or identical to each other. An explanation of this situation may be found in the fact that the English language references rarely draw upon the literature in German and consequently rely on Braun’s study, which results in these papers bearing a strong similarity to one another with regard to their contents. Complementary sources can be found in biographies, both recently published,54 and Weber’s wife’s very well known and often cited biography.55 The latter book, joined with Weber’s personal documents, has the potential to improve the research into Weber’s discourse on music significantly.

Max Weber’s study on music, as well as Braun’s discussion of it, drew my interest, first because of the simple and generally ignored fact that a sociological ‘classic’ had written in the field of the sociology of music. Furthermore, what I found intriguing was the content of the study, which appeared to be a mixture of the sociological, aesthetic, philosophical and historical discourses of the time, which is why it has come to be of importance and interest to many social scientists, from sociologists to theoreticians of culture. I consider it relevant to note that the study has been neglected even though its place in Weber’s work has not. I thus draw the conclusion that this “mysterious gap” should be filled in order to reconstruct and rethink the biography and the discourse of the author, and then incorporate the discussion thereof into the context of social theory. Finally, I consider that Weber’s discourse on music should be discussed in the context of deconstructing certain paradigms current in the author’s time (such as evolutionism) and sometimes still present in contemporary debates in the field.

READING EVOLUTIONISM IN WEBER’S THEORY

In my work on Weber’s discourse on music, I firstly saw the importance of the author’s engagement with the sociology of culture and art, which I wanted to demonstrate through the analysis of the most important aspects of Weber’s theory. Then I realised the relevance of the context of Weber’s life and work, and finally I reconstructed the actual components of his theory by discussing the manner in which it was influenced by multiple and varied discourses of the time. Since sociologists have traditionally referred to Weber when discussing political, economical and legal questions, and since Weber’s study on sociology of culture was never finished, it cannot be said that there was certain influence, especially when having in mind the mentioned negligence of it. First of all, I saw how indicative was the similarity between the author’s discourse on music and the dominant nineteenth-century discourses on the subject, which led me to conclude that Weber’s theory should be discussed in the context of these discourses. It was thus necessary to locate the network of the important paradigms in writing on music of the time, then to distance myself from the usual interpretations of Weber’s theory (in which the theory of music was often not considered) and finally to identify questions that I want to investigate in my research.

After becoming familiar with the relevant references on Weber, and bearing in mind the current reconstruction and deconstruction in related fields (musicology, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and postcolonial studies), it became clear that evolutionism constituted an interesting and highly important perspective for researching Weber’s discourse. I realised that the discussion of evolutionism is both suitable and relevant to my research of Weber’s discourse on music. I shall argue in this book that the evolutionistic paradigm is capable of providing an effective and comprehensive insight into the multiple and heterogeneous discourses netted within the author’s theory, rendering it complex and multilayered.

In investigating the elements of evolutionism in Weber’s sociology of music I started with two fundamental hypotheses:

(1) The concept of rationalisation is an example of the evolutionistic construction of history and sociology of music;

(2) The formation of the concept of rationalisation seems to be a consequence of the influence of musicological evolutionism on Max Weber’s discourse.

The first thesis refers to the analysis of the goal-rational progress as a type of evolutionistic model. In his study on music, Weber postulated that goal-rational progress occurred as a consequence of dealing with technical problems, i.e. finding (continuously new) solutions in artistic expression. Weber was adamant that goal-rational progress in music happened due to finding the solutions to the technical (compositional) problems.56 The rationalisation process unfolded in six steps, starting with the organisation of intervals and finishing with equal temperament within the tonal system. Once the system of equal temperament had been developed, music fitted into an organisational framework in accordance with a strict mathematical-acoustic relation of the tones, which Weber understood as a method of control of all technical agents on the part of the composer. This moment was a further incentive to the music development, since it was the basic condition for the creation, performance and proper reception of musical works (which were becoming continually more complex over time). At this point, according to Weber, music was imbued with a new impulse to continue its development.57

Apart from goal-rational, Weber also wrote about value-rational progress of music, that he saw in the irrational ‘threats’ for the development of music, such as social institutions and human beliefs. These irrational threats, according to Weber, could slow down or stop the development of musical genius. The ‘peak’ in the rationalisation process was seen in the works of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss (1864–1949). Unfortunately, his uncompleted study on music did not include any analyses of these composers’ music; Weber’s approach is known, however, from his personal documents and biographies.58 The ability to use technical solutions correctly was, according to Weber, just a possibility, a condition for a ‘piece of art’ to have a certain aesthetic value and to be a cause of enjoyment. However, the complete reconstruction of Weber’s theory is not possible due to the incompleteness of his study, and I shall thus focus here on goal-rational aspect of the concept of rationalisation, which is of crucial importance for the analysis of evolutionism in the author’s theory, because the rationalisation path appears to be a path of progress, with every following step being an improvement of, and ‘better’ than the previous one. Furthermore, Weber’s entire analysis appears to be thoroughly incorporated within typical nineteenth-century discourses on music constructed within a dichotomy of Western and non-Western systems, which was also characteristic for evolutionistic musicological discourses of the time.

The above analysis leads to my second fundamental hypothesis – the explication of musicological evolutionism as crucial to the final formation of Weber’s theory of rationalisation in music. It is generally known (even by those who are not Weber experts) that this author analysed political, economic, legal and religious aspects of a rationalised, developed, modern and progressive Western society. As previously mentioned, the aspect of rationalisation in culture, art and music (unlike the named fields) has almost completely neglected until recently. The information that Weber was inspired to discover certain rationalism in the whole Occidental civilisation by his thinking on music itself is also unfamiliar. According to Marianne Weber’s notes, it was after 1910 that Weber started to deal intensively with questions of contemporary art and music, reaching a conclusion that a certain principle can be found in Western music that is absent from any other culture. It was only after that discovery that he began to develop his theory in other aspects of Western society.

This information constitutes the fundamental grounds for my thesis that Weber’s knowledge of contemporary works in history and theory of music, as well as his engagement with musical phenomena during one period of his life brought to the rather specific discourse of his study when compared to his other writings. When considering the problem of evolutionism, the manner in which this aspect was formed in the author’s discourse on music and other subjects has frequently gone unrecognised. For example, it has frequently been pointed out that Weber was an exemplar of the historicist tradition in sociology, and that he was notable for his persistent refusal to fit social sciences into the context of the evolutionistic or deterministic philosophies.59 However, Weber’s discourse on music appears to be quite unusual in the context of his work as a whole. This discourse has unequivocally evolutionistic elements, and it was not (or not to a major degree) the sociological that was of crucial importance to his final formation, but rather the musicological theoretical context and in particular the paradigm of evolutionism that by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century had been incorporated in most scholarly discourses on music. Weber’s construal of development in music points to elements of the musicological evolutionistic paradigm, which was dominant at the time. There are numerous examples among music historians and theoreticians of the time whose writings were largely influenced by Herbert Spencer’s (1820–1903) theory of evolutionism. Weber was familiar with the papers of these authors and his theory bears a great resemblance to them, often referring to them directly, as I shall show later.

Bearing all of the above in mind, it is relevant here to show evolutionism as a (dominant) paradigm in musicological discourses, as well as a quality of the very discourse of music history since its beginnings. More precisely, music history was being formed by having natural sciences as its role model, i.e. by defining itself in the way that the sciences were defined at the time. Hence the crucial concepts in music history were in fact directly taken from natural sciences, the evolutionistic idea of ‘continuous development’ being incorporated in the very core of musicology. In addition to musicology, which was constructed as a science of ‘art’ music, the nineteenth century was also characterised by the constitution of the field of discourses on ‘other’ musics – the musics of non-Western peoples, which was the subject of so-called comparative musicology. Weber was acquainted with all these tendencies and I will here argue that his thesis on the rationalisation of music was also a thesis on the evolution of music, and, furthermore, that the thesis developed as the consequence of a complex and multifarious impact of the discourses of both natural sciences and musicology, formed in accordance with the ‘laws’ of ‘proper’ science. As a consequence of the above, this book is structured in three chapters, the third engaging with the Weber’s theory itself, while the first two are dedicated to the reconstruction of the ways the discourse was formed as an evolutionistic one. Moreover, I consider the fact that Weber is regularly discussed as an opponent of evolutionistic tendencies in sociology, which is the reason why I have laid such stress on the entire context of the formation of his discourse on music, since it is insight in context that explains the specific status of this discourse. Certain aspects of Weber’s discourse in general, and on music in particular, cannot be researched without considering nineteenth-century musicological discourses.