Ideas and Matter

The legacy of idealism has been a guiding doctrine for the study of nineteenth-century music, from an emphasis on neo-Platonic musical works, acousmatic voices and intangible forms, to listening experiences disembodied, ineffable, and within the scene of what Mark Evan Bonds has called “music as thought.”1 This special issue presents a quartet of articles whose subjects mark a deliberate departure from this legacy. Collectively, they pose the question of whether the regime of idealismhas obscured the emergent perspective of natural science during the period, and with it, those of philosophical and scientific materialism that engaged composers, listeners, and their art.ERC Horizon 2020 fundin

Exercising Musical Minds: Phrenology and Music Pedagogy in London circa 1830

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the University of California Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2015.39.2.9

Melody

Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the West, from Aristoxenus to Leonard Bernstein; it traces the rich intellectual currents that saw melody variously coupled to ideas of voice, schemes of rhythmic symmetry, overtones, spatial organization, theories of evolution, and computational analysis

Introduction: The Laboratory and the Stage

At first sight, opera and science would seem to occupy quite separate spaces. The one typically unfolds on the stage of a theatre, the other most often takes place in a laboratory or lecture hall. The one draws on creative inspiration in entwining music, poetry and spectacle, the other on inductive reasoning through observation and experiment; patient activities that, for John Herschel in 1831, constituted the ‘fountains of all natural science’. And while the one offers an opportunity for emotional and intellectual engagement through the public gaze, the other cautiously validates the empiricism of verifiable experience through critical acts of witnessing. To yoke the two together, then, may appear arbitrary

Music and the Transhuman Ear: Ultrasonics, Material Bodies, and the Limits of Sensation

Amid recent moves toward sound as vibrational force, this article argues that hearing has a special role in determining our natural sensory limits, and that recent attempts to push against these limits foreground the underlying matter of what status the biological body has in music perception and performance during the technological age. Between 1876 and 1894, prominent German acousticians—including Helmholtz—argued that humans could hear vibrations as high as 40,960Hz. While this was ultimately discredited, recent post-tonal works have notated pitches that explicitly play with, or exceed, the ordinary range of human hearing; (cf. Schoenberg, Per Nørgård, and Salvatore Sciarrino). In the context of existing ecological approaches to listening, this article asks what kind of listener such works imply. Specifically, it investigates the musical relevance of Umwelt theory by the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, in which individuals “create” the bubble of their perceivable environment according to a reciprocal interchange between limited sense capacity and mental habit. I contrast Uexküll’s acceptance of human limits with a transhumanist worldview which anticipates the enhancement of biological sense capacities through technology. Such “morphological freedom - the right to modify and enhance one’s body” (Bostrum 2009) putatively includes augmentation of the auditory system. Finally, by tracing the genealogy of human prosthesis back to the founder of a philosopher of technology (Kapp 1877), I critique the potential for technologies in clinical audiology to grant access to ultrasonic frequencies, and assess the implications of augmented, prosthetic hearing for non-impaired listeners. The discourse of transhumanism poses questions for musical listening as soon as the body becomes an assemblage subject to variation. It raises the question of how identity—ours as well as that of musical works—might be affected by “morphological freedom,” the extent to which self-identity becomes the lost referential when agency is distributed between biological and non-biological parts, and it asks what value are the new intellectual vistas that emerge when musical experience is conceived in material terms as communication between bodies

Correlations between in situ denitrification activity and nir-gene abundances in pristine and impacted prairie streams

Denitrification is a process that reduces nitrogen levels in headwaters and other streams. We compared nirS and nirK abundances with the absolute rate of denitrification, the longitudinal coefficient of denitrification (i.e., Kden, which represents optimal denitrification rates at given environmental conditions), and water quality in seven prairie streams to determine if nir-gene abundances explain denitrification activity. Previous work showed that absolute rates of denitrification correlate with nitrate levels; however, no correlation has been found for denitrification efficiency, which we hypothesise might be related to gene abundances. Water-column nitrate and soluble-reactive phosphorus levels significantly correlated with absolute rates of denitrification, but nir-gene abundances did not. However, nirS and nirK abundances significantly correlated with Kden, as well as phosphorus, although no correlation was found between Kden and nitrate. These data confirm that absolute denitrification rates are controlled by nitrate load, but intrinsic denitrification efficiency is linked to nirS and nirK gene abundances

Human Sounds and the Obscenity of Information

Miniaturized people, including Damon, retain their deep voices, their perceptual ranges and acuity, and their sensory proprioception; they feel no change of atmospheric pressure, gain no insight into the newly massified world around them, and can still engage with their unminiaturized human interlocutors at will. To be sure, it now seems unsurprising for a postmodern philosopher in the 1980s to signal as casualties the principles of a reality beyond the play of appearances, the existence of unique individual subjects, claims for a truth or a metaphysics that persists. Dystopian rhetoric aside, Baudrillard’s claim that simulation is built on a world of code has proven influential. It asserts that contemporary culture can be coded into ones and zeros, that “digitality is among people. Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication, a pornography of circuits and networks, and objects in their legibility

Wendelin Weißheimer

Annual; Electronic access as of Nov. 19, 2007: 2002/2003-; Description based on: 2002/2003; title from PDF cover (viewed Nov. 19, 2007