Weber on Music: Approaching Music as a Dynamic Domain of Action and Experience

Introduction

The question of how to account for art from a social perspective without neutralizing it has been, is, and probably will remain, a structuring question for the social and cultural sciences. Music has been a privileged site for asking this question, perhaps because, whilst thoroughly social, it clearly exceeds all determinations. In the last 15 years, the sociology of music has moved both ‘beyond Adorno’ and ‘beyond Bourdieu’ in an attempt to open up new paths to rise to this challenge, as testified, for example, in special issues of Poetics (Peterson and Dowd, 2004) and Cultural Sociology (Santoro, 2011) and their ensuing debates, as well as in the present special issue.

In part under the influence of Actor Network Theory, and in the midst of interrogations as to Bourdieu’s legacy for the sociology of art (Prior, 2011), the social and cultural sciences have been exploring anew their capacity to give an account of engagement with art that is not reduced to analyses of the social reproduction of taste; an account of creation that is not reduced to the outcome of the positions, strategies and struggles of artists and other agents; an account of the specific social relations taking place in music, rather than the translation from the social space of structural positions; and consistently with all these, they have, albeit cautiously, sought to give more consideration to aesthetic value.

In this endeavour they have paradoxically mobilized and transformed Adornian notions, such as that of ‘mediation’, against the excesses of Bourdieu’s sociologism, in an attempt to unravel the specificity of connections to music, i.e. to bring out the specific affects, attachments, and agency developed in and through music (e.g. Hennion, 2008; Krzys Acord and DeNora, 2008). However, these concerns are also being addressed through the development of more specific conceptualizations of music spaces, in critical engagement with Bourdieu’s notion of the artistic field. Thus Bottero and Crossley have criticized Bourdieu’s ‘homologies between sets of practices in different fields’ and their mapping on to the social space of structural positions (2011: 103). In their place it has been proposed to investigate the concrete relations structuring musical spaces, for example conceived of as ‘networks’, or through the mobilization of Becker’s concept of ‘worlds’ and the notion of ‘scene’ (e.g. Bennett and Peterson, 2004).

In this paper I propose to leave the pursuit of beyonds, and return instead to beforehands, by listening to what one of the founders of the social and cultural sciences had to say before Bourdieu and Adorno. Max Weber’s study of music, an unfinished piece written in 1912–13, published posthumously in 1921, is a historical, sociological and comparative piece, nourished with the latest music theory and ethnomusicology of its time. Contrary to what has been argued (e.g. Martin, 1995), it is not one more instance of Weber’s thesis on the rationalization of the West, but accounts for music as a cultural domain of action, engagement and relations, starting from the matter of music, its sounds, technologies, instruments and logics of organization. Weber’s ‘Music Study’ and other art writings preceded, inspired and were appropriated in highly selective ways by both Adorno and Bourdieu. But fresh assessments of Weber’s music writings may uncover new pathways for exploring the specificity of the social in art, and more specifically in music.

This paper seeks to make a contribution to such assessments and to outline possible directions for future comparison with Adorno and Bourdieu’s conceptions of the dynamics of music or the artistic field. Unfortunately, there has so far been little engagement in the English-speaking world with the Music Study, ¹ let alone with its general gesture and the vision it conveys for a sociology of the arts and other ‘domains of culture’. The work of Christoph Braun (1992, 1994), and the edition of the Music Study by Braun together with Ludwig Finscher for the complete edition of Max Weber’s work (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe – hereafter MWGA) (2004), have started to alter this state of affairs – certainly in the German-speaking world. A highly able French translation (Weber, 1998) and a lively stream of research on musical practices have also restored the ‘Music Study’ to the place it should have in Francophone countries (e.g. see Pedler, 2010 and the two issues of the Revue de synthèse coordinated in 2008 by Philippe Despoix and Nicolas Donin). This paper aims at broadening interest in the Music Study in the English-speaking world, and at conveying at least some of the boldness of its proposal for cultural sociology.

I attempt to do this by first bringing out the building blocks of Weber’s approach, namely his focus on the dynamics shaping the means and matter of creation – especially the organization of the ‘sound material’ (2004: 146; 1921: 3) ² – rather than directly addressing creative subjectivities, or merely focusing on the social conditions of creation; on the interplay between such an inner dynamic and its economic, social, technological determinants; and on carriers (theorists, composers, instrument manufacturers, practitioners and listeners) acting as nodes of connection between art domains and their external conditions. But I also aim at showing how such a vision of the cultural domains allowed for analyses of creation, in particular through what could be called the artistic ‘stance’ (Frade, forthcoming) and of the inward connection to music, including that of the listener. I thus hope to make clear not only the very sociological character of Weber’s ‘historical study’, but also the possibilities offered by these writings, perhaps in spite of Weber himself, for valuations of musical works, based on the understanding of the problems and tensions facing composers in the musical situation.

1. The Dynamic of Music as Domain of Culture ³

In the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ of the Economic Ethics of World Religions, whose first draft he wrote in 1913, shortly after his first contribution to a ‘history of music’, Weber approached the constitution of relatively autonomous spheres through an ideal-typical theoretical construct of the tensions and conflicts between the religious and the worldly spheres. ‘Spheres’ of human action and experience are there elaborated as ‘orders of life’ (Lebensordnungen). The concept of order - a central concept for Weber, but one of ‘very variable extension’ and scope (Grossein, 2005: 698) - is to be understood in connection with Weber’s axiomatic positing of consistency as a ‘command over men’ once they have taken a stand (whatever the actual limitations of this command in practice; see Frade, forthcoming): the life orders then designate the spheres of human life and action as the ‘consistent’ wholes they would be if they were constructed by pursuing such a ‘command’ to the end and drawing its ultimate implications. ⁴ On that basis it would be possible, Weber tells us, to conceive of ‘immanent’ or ‘intrinsic logics’ (Eigengesetzlichkeiten), ⁵ i.e. of logics of deployment of the life orders/value spheres as consistent wholes.

These propositions seem to have been elaborated through Weber’s Music Study. There Weber explained that the particular path of music to the status of ‘art’ started whenever a status group of priestly or professional musicians ⁶ ‘reache[d] out beyond the use of traditional tone formulae with a purely practical orientation’, and awakened to ‘purely aesthetic needs’; ⁷ moreover, this very consciousness designated music as a specific object of rationalization (2004: 188; 1921: 31). However, whereas in Weber’s evocation of the music ‘realm’ in the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ there was no hint of a possible rift between the aspiration to sublimated musical experience and the constraints of form (1991: 222), the tension between the quest for refined aesthetic expression and the rationalization of the musical material and instruments pervaded the Music Study. In the ideal-typical construct of the ‘Intermediate Reflection’, Weber explored the conflicts arising (mainly) between spheres when the ‘rational’ steers each of them to its ultimate consequences, whereas he thought that a historical study should look at the inner momentum created within a specific ‘domain of culture’ or life when rationalization is deployed in practice, and inevitably stumbles upon the ‘irrational’ and other forms of rationality (1988: 438, 518). Weber laid down this conception of the purview of historical analysis particularly clearly in a famous footnote to the 1913 essay on ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’:

The way in which the relation between the correctness type of a behaviour [NB: correct according to a particular ratio] and the empirical behaviour ‘works’ and how this developmental momentum relates to sociological influences, e.g. in the concrete development of an art, I hope to illustrate in the future with an example (music history). It is precisely these relations, namely the junctures at which the tensions between the empirical and the correctness type can break open, which are of the highest significance in terms of developmental dynamics, not only for a history of logic or other sciences, but also in all other fields. [As significant] (albeit with individual and fundamental variations in each domain of culture) is the fact that and the sense in which an unequivocal correctness type cannot be carried through, but compromise or choice between a number of such bases of rationalisation becomes possible or inevitable. Such problems, which are of a substantive nature, cannot be discussed here. (1988: 438) ⁸

Weber’s investigation of the inner momentum of music opens on a primary, foundational, contradiction, stemming from the ‘encounter’ between the ‘correctness’ ‘behaviour’ of sounds (correctness according to the ‘physics of sounds’) on the one hand, and their empirical behaviour on the other hand. The main intervals subjectively ‘recognized’ as consonant in all musical cultures, namely the octave and the intervals that divide it, the 4th and the 5th, correspond to fractions (of lengths of string segments and of frequencies) of a very specific nature (‘superparticular ratios’, i.e. fractions n+1/n) whose powers never equalize. This means that the cycles of 4ths, 5ths and octaves never coincide in any system of just intonation of pitches – thereby evidencing an unbridgeable gap between the expected and the empirical ‘behaviour’ of sounds. The 12th fifth, for example, differs from the 7th octave by a very small interval, called the ‘Pythagorean comma’.

From this ‘fundamental’ ‘inescapable state of affairs’ derives the impossibility of a ‘rationally closed unity’ (2004: 145–8; 1921: 3–5) since the cycle of fifths extends to infinity (Jeans, 1968: 166). It is such an impossibility of full consistency which, for Weber, is foundational precisely since it makes for human creativity and movement, as Christoph Braun has shown (1992: 19; 1999: 185). ⁹ For rather than ever being resolved, the tension caused by the ‘irrationality’ of the empirical behaviour of sounds is harnessed in different ways for the constitution of music cultures into productive systems (and sensory fields) of structured yet practically infinite possibilities:

The various great systems of all peoples and ages differentiated themselves above all in the art and manner in which they covered up or bypassed this inescapable irrationality [the Pythagorean comma], or, conversely, put it at the service of the richness of tonalities. (Weber, 1991: 11–12)

Hence music systems fall into two broad types, which Weber elaborated into ideal-types, respectively the harmonic system (which seeks to ‘cover or bypass’ irrationality) and the melodic system (which plays with it). Although both systems recognize the octave, the 5th, the 4th and the whole tone which results from their difference, progression from one tone to another in the harmonic system follows the principle of ‘affinity’ (Verwandtschaft), where tonalities immediately related through the cycle of fifths share the same sound material except for one note (2004: 147–8; 1921: 4); whilst, in the melodic system, progression mainly takes place through the ‘proximity’ of pitches (Nachbarschaft), starting from the division of the 4th (2004: 151; 1921: 7).

Weber was here taking up the two principles highlighted by Hermann von Helmholtz in his foundational theory of music, tone ‘affinity’ and ‘proximity’ of pitches. But he fundamentally transformed their meaning by granting them an autonomously structuring role as conflicting principles operating in two distinct rationalization processes – harmonic and melodic (2004: 190; 1921: 33; also 1988: 521). Helmholtz, for his part, had defined the principle of affinity indeed as an ‘aesthetical principle, not a natural law’, thus giving rise to different tone relations in ‘modern music’ and other music cultures, but had nevertheless rooted it in the physics of sounds. Finding out that affinity was insufficient to account for scale formation in non-harmonic systems, he had also suggested the other principle, proximity of pitches, as consisting ‘in an endeavour to distinguish equal intervals by ear, and thus make the difference of pitch perceptibly uniform’: but he had argued that this principle ‘subsequently had to yield to that of tonal relationships’ (Helmholtz, 1954: 249, 256). As Weber suggests, within the harmonic system Helmholtz only granted the principle of proximity a function of ‘passage’ between two harmonically defined but not immediately akin notes (2004: 151; 1921: 7). ¹⁰

Weber referred to ‘tonal ratio’ as a ‘form-giving principle’ (2004: 253; 1921: 79), especially for the Western harmonic system. However, this was too much of a concession to Georg Simmel’s vocabulary of life and form (see below), since, as just suggested, Weber found what is ‘form-giving’ not so much in each principle in itself, but rather in the encounter and struggle of the principle steering one system with the other principle, as both are present in both systems.

The strength of the engagement and struggle is not symmetrical in both systems. Because of their organization through the distance principle, melodic systems, of which Weber studied especially the variants of Ancient Greece and the Arabic world, can accommodate the contiguity of very small intervals and thus a ‘richness of tonalities’. But this also makes them very vulnerable to the complete dissolution of all rationalized form: hence the attempt of melodic rationalization to set ‘tonal barriers’ playing a similar role to those found in harmonic systems, e.g. the ‘melodic centre of gravity’ uncovered by the Stumpf school, or ‘even more importantly … typical melodic formulae’ which come to characterize the equivalent of ‘keys’ (2004: 191–2; 1921: 34) and most clearly with Pentatonic scales (2004: 166; 1921: 17). ¹¹ In music cultures closest to the melodic ideal-type, such tonal grounding is ‘constantly threatened’, and at risk of being captured by the fundamental orientation of the system to melodic ‘refinement’ (2004: 209; 1921: 48), i.e. an extreme fineness of expression and listening obtained through sounds very proximate to each other, and hence through the tonally ‘irrational’ juxtaposition of various intervals of the same kind (e.g. seconds or thirds).

There is no such wholesale domination of one principle by the other in the harmonic system: Weber takes a contrary view to that of the ‘Panharmonicists’ (Rameau, and, closer to him, Riemann), and asserts that melody ‘cannot be derived harmonically’ although ‘it is, in truth, harmonically conditioned and bound’ (2004: 150; 1921: 7). Melody carries with it, inside the harmonic system, the principle of tone proximity, which clashes with that of harmonic affinity and creates a tension, looking for resolution: ‘Without the tensions motivated by the irrationality of melody, there would be no modern music, since these tensions count amongst its most important means of expression’ (2004: 153: 1921: 8).

It could be said that the successive crystallizations of the tensions arising in the deployment of harmonic ratio served to maintain the tonal principle as the backbone of Western music, although at the same time always stretching it. These were the ‘compromises’ referred to in the footnote of the ‘Essay on Categories’ (see above), provided we understand by compromises not any kind of illusory middle ground, nor the ‘relativizations’ between ultimate values made so to speak inadvertently at ‘every turn’ of everyday life (as per the ‘Value Freedom’ essay), which in fact testify to adaptation to the dominant gods of the day – especially the rationalized capitalist economy – but rather productive moments in the dynamic of a cultural domain. ¹² Crucial examples of such crystallizations for the harmonic system were the various forms of polyphony, the tonal integration of chromaticism and the decisive ‘equalization of inconsistencies’ through equal temperament (2004: 243; 1921: 72).

Coming back to the relation between the expression of aesthetic needs and form defining artistic domains, we see that aesthetic ‘refinement’, encountered in melodic systems, always feels curtailed by rationalized form and indeed stems from the overflow over form: rationalization tends to remain external. ‘Sublimation’ evokes a different kind of relation, arising as a result of a process of ‘inner rationalization’ of music – in particular of scales (2004: 246; 1921: 74–5), where innovations inspired by melodic and expressive concerns (e.g. chromaticism) are incorporated after a struggle and insofar as they can ultimately be harmonically grounded. In Charles Rosen’s words, in classical style, ‘a dramatic effect seemed at once surprising and logically motivated’ (1998: 44). Expressiveness is conveyed through form, although it is also constantly stretching it and attempting to break free from it. Sublimated forms are forms which have turned into what Weber had called ‘value-forms’ (2005: 28); they are alive and inspire musical creation. But what the Music Study unveils is the specific kind of struggle which it takes in the harmonic system to ‘sublimate’ artistic expression.

Beneath and through the multiplicity of threads followed by Weber, of which I have only mentioned a few here, the Music Study uncovers the structuring of music systems through a dynamic of tensions between opposed poles. These tensions were initially unleashed by the impulse towards the rationalization of the sound material, each tension feeding into yet another one on another plane: from the initial struggle between the theoretical and the empirical ‘behaviour’ of sounds, to that between the principles of affinity and proximity for the ordering of sounds, to, finally, the struggle between the systematicity of harmonic ratio and the expressivity of melody in the plane of composition and/or artistic expression.

Weber summed up these struggles through his final evocation of an underpinning tension between ‘musical ratio’ and ‘musical life’, in all music systems (although particularly stark in ‘ours’), that shapes musical creation, as well as the aesthetic experience, in ways which further fuel the inner tendencies of each system. This, however, might be seen as an unfortunate summary, as the reference to ‘life’ to designate one of the terms of the tensions is rather evocative of Simmel’s idea of life bursting out of form and reaching over, and points to a kind of ontological primacy of ‘life’ as well as to only one logic of form (Darmon and Frade, 2012). Throughout his life and across different phases and domains of his theoretical elaboration (especially in his philosophy of culture and then in his philosophy of life), Simmel staged the face-to-face between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ culture, creativity and expression, life and form, and their ineluctable dialectical entanglement. Hence reification is always looming, already there in the very process of creation itself since all creation involves placing the expression of fluid subjectivity into a series of objectivated human creations with its own logic (Simmel, 1997: 64). By contrast, Weber’s poles of tension, two equally possible logics of rationalization, are not planted in different realms – and, as will become clearer below, their tension structures both the field of the possible for creation as well as the experience of these creations.

2. The Configuration of Western Harmonic Music

Artists, creators, interpreters, the manufacturers of instruments, the art ‘recipients’ and amateur practitioners, all have to grapple with the tensions structuring music as a domain of culture. All are shaped by it and at the same time further contribute to it through their own interpretation and expression of it. ¹³ It is this ‘grappling’ with the immanent dynamic of the musical domain which (I will seek to show in more depth in Section 3) ‘inwardly’ connects individuals to music and thus constitutes its ‘spirit’ – bearing in mind that the very way in which they ‘grapple’ with such a dynamic has very vivid manifestations on the plane of social relations and is itself influenced by the ‘external’, i.e. social, economic, wider technological factors.

For now, let us see how this differentiated connection accounts, in Weber’s approach, for positions in the music domain which are thus primarily defined in relation to the inner logic of Western harmonic music (again, bearing in mind that this inner logic is itself socially, economically and technologically conditioned), rather than primarily in their relation to each other. This is in contrast, for example, with Bourdieu’s homology between a space of works understood as ‘system of differential gaps’ and a space of schools or authors understood as ‘system of differential positions in the field of production’(1994: 69). ¹⁴

Both Bourdieu’s fields and Weber’s domains are structured by tensions and struggles. But though these, for Bourdieu, are deployed on different planes (the space of works, and within it, ‘genres, forms and themes’, and the field of production), they revolve around a single axis, e.g. the transformation/preservation axis in the literary field (1993: 183), hence the homology between the various planes and the organization of fields as fields of positions. Weber also recognizes such a struggle between advocates of the new and those defending the canons, but the structuring tensions arise not along one axis but between two principles of organization of both the material and means of action in the domain. As I will show below, positions and stances are formed in a particular conjuncture of that tension – carried by actors whose other interests and positions are likely to bear ‘affinity’ with these stances but are not organized by the same tension. It is through their capacity to assume and productively harness the tensions pervading the music systems that human as well as instrumental figures are called to take on a culturally dominant position within the field (1988: 517).

Melodic systems are prone to the flourishing of virtuosi singers and players, characteristically deploying their talents of expression in complex and endless chromaticism, which threatens to dissolve all tonal boundaries. In the Arabic system, for example, the only limit that was put in some specific epochs and places was through the ‘stereotyping’ of melodic sequences (i.e. their fixing and repetition), but these did not resist the search for increasingly refined melodic expressivity and the accession of the ‘virtuoso or professional artist trained in virtuoso-like performances as carrier of the musical development’, whose ‘entirely irrational expressive means’ rely on specific qualities – ‘recherché, baroque and affected aesthetic mannerism, as well as intellectualist gourmet refinement’ (2004: 241–2; 1921: 70–1).

By contrast, Weber unveiled the relation of affinity between the ascetic ethos of medieval monks, their quest for methodical lack of ambiguity and the possibility of planning, and the development of the fixed notation of polyphonic pieces, against the 13th-century practice of improvised counterpoint singing, e.g. by those appointed to the pontifical chapel. The domination of the monks of the Dutch missions over the chapel after the Pope’s return from Avignon to Rome ensured the embedding of notation as against improvisation (2004: 237; 1921: 67–8), contrary to what happened in Byzantium, where musical arrangements were entrusted to professional song-makers trained in the Hellenic tradition characteristically oriented to ‘melopoeia’, the art of melody (1988: 522).

The decisive contribution of the fixed notation system was to make composition possible, and thus to create the ‘real “composer”’ (2004: 238; 1921: 68). Contrary to the virtuoso artist whose aesthetic expression sets him/her in direct contact with the sensitivity of audiences, the composer mediates expression through the creation of new forms. It is thus the figure of the composer which can make the most of the particular ‘tension between musical ratio and musical life’ which characterize the dynamic of the Western music system. Indeed it is that tension (provided we take it, as suggested above, as a tension between two principles rather than as an expression of a reification process) which makes such figures possible and constitutes the composer as the ‘dominant type of human being’ in the music domain. ¹⁵

A paradigmatic example here is that of JS Bach, who ‘brought counterpoint to its highest perfection’ (2004: 215; 1921: 52), counterpoint being the form which by definition both encapsulates harmonic ratio and stretches it through the primacy of melody. ¹⁶ Weber’s references to Corelli, Scarlatti, Mozart, Chopin and Liszt further highlight other ways in which composers have harnessed the tensions of harmonic music, especially as all of them were virtuosi players, whose art of composition freed or further developed the expressive possibilities of their respective instruments. A sense of the end of an era, of exhaustion of the momentum of the harmonic system, is already there with Liszt, who had gone furthest in ‘unlocking’ the expressivity of the piano (2004: 278; 1921: 94). Thus not only were the composers of the harmonic system spurred to actualize the tensions between affinity and proximity, as well as between harmony and melody, but their very creation consisted of new ‘value-forms’ which impacted harmonic ratio in turn.

It is in the analysis of the trajectories of instruments – and, accordingly, of their manufacturers, the instrumentalists as well as the composers associated with them – that the dynamic character and explanatory power of Weber’s approach to the music domain appears most clearly. The key polarization here, bearing in mind that the study is unfinished, is between strings and keyboards, and more pointedly between the violin and the piano; it starts in the late Renaissance, a crucial period for the completion of the basic structures of the harmonic edifice, but one in which such completion was still in process.

The Renaissance period was that of technical ‘experimentation’, which started in the artistic terrain before becoming the purview of science as the result, Weber tells us in his comparative study of the Economic Ethics of World Religions, of the ‘singular blending of two elements’:

the empirical skill of Occidental artists, developed on the grounds of craftsmanship; and their ambition, determined through cultural history and socially, and rationalist throughout, to raise their art to a rank on par with a ‘science’ and thus secure an eternal meaning for it as well as social worth for themselves. (1991: 142)

However, such blending of elements only ‘typically’ characterized Leonardo’s art (1991: 142). In music, Weber showed that the elements remained more separate.

On the one hand, there is the figure of Zarlino and his ‘experimental keyboards, at the core of this powerful wrestling of the Renaissance which operated with the characteristic artistic concept of “nature”’ (1991: 142), since the Zarlino scale operates with ‘pure’ 3rds, 5ths and octaves. Zarlino was maestro di capella at St Mark’s in Venice as well as a composer, and above all a theoretician of music, not a crafts keyboard manufacturer. Rather, he ‘had keyboard-like instruments specially constructed for [him] for experimental purposes’ (2004: 273; 1921: 91). On the other hand, the manufacturing of the violin, viola and cello was the product of a ‘very long period of experimentation’ in Brescia and Cremona in northern Italy, but wholly within the context of ‘craftsmanship’, and, thereby, wholly at the service of the ‘expressive beauty of sounds – of a singing sound – as well as, probably, the elegance of the instrument’ (2004: 260; 1921: 83). The Renaissance music domain staged the rational experimentation with keyboards and the crafts-based experimentation with strings in parallel rather than organizing their synthesis.

This led to a polarized positioning of both families of instruments in the domain defined by the tension constitutive of harmonic music. Thus, in the 17th century, organists and pianists (the technique of both instruments being tightly linked until the end of the 17th century) ‘felt themselves to be, separately and in solidarity, the artists and carriers of the development of harmonic music, by contrast, notably, with string instruments, which “could not produce any full harmony”’(2004: 273; 1921: 91–2). For its part, the ‘creation of the great violin-builders lacked … a rational foundation’. String instruments, in their technical construction, were not meant to foster harmonic music; the few technical means which had facilitated the production of chords or the harmonic underpinning of melody (e.g. drone strings) were dispensed with in modern instruments, ‘which rather seemed destined to carry melodic effects’ (2004: 261; 1921: 85).

Such polarization was further bolstered by very concrete struggles for status, as for example when organists and pianists withdrew from the corporation of ménétriers in France (from the old French ‘menestrels’), which pretended to federate all musicians and was headed by a ‘king’, then referred to as the ‘king of violins’, precisely because they saw themselves as the true carriers of harmonic music (2004: 273; 1921: 91–2). ¹⁷ Violinists also fought to be recognized as ‘artists’ in court orchestras, where organists were enjoying such status (2004: 262; 1921: 85).

However, with the further completion of the harmonic music system, and the increasingly structuring character of the tension between the melodic and harmonic principles due to the harmonic grounding of all resolution, no instrument, and hence no instrument manufacturer or player, nor any composer for that instrument, could be the carrier of one principle or the other. In fact, the two families of instruments influenced each other, bringing each other more decidedly within the field defined by the tension between the two principles. ¹⁸ Weber narrates the emancipation of the piano from the organ, ‘first under the influence of dance in French instrumental music … then by following the example of the beginnings of virtuoso violin performance’ (2004: 273–4; 1921: 92). On the other hand, ‘the formation of tones in the learning of string instruments is practised from the beginning at the piano’ (2004: 279; 1921: 94), whose fixed harmonically grounded temperament has dampening effects for the ear’s capacity of distinguishing minute intervals: ‘clearly, it is not possible to attain the fine hearing [that one gets] through instruments tuned through just intonation’ (2004: 279).

The domination, the ‘unshakable position’, of the piano today, for musical education and accompaniment, as well as through ‘the immense wealth of its own literature’, both entrenched harmonic ratio ever more by shaping our ear, and thus in truth by shaping the type of listener that the harmonic system required; and, at the same time, made its limitations (e.g. the closing of the ear to finer intervals) very manifest, as the construction of pianos, ‘conditioned by mass sales’, resisted moves towards a new phase of experimentation (2004: 279; 1921: 95). It is essentially through the piano that the music domain and the capitalist economy became articulated with one another, and whilst this articulation brought about the ‘technical perfection’ of the instrument (through the ferocious competition between instrument makers engaged in very modern business and marketing techniques; 2004: 277; 1921: 93–4), it also entrenched equal temperament as the norm for the tuning of instruments (and this was not the case before the middle of the 19th century).

The last pages of Weber’s Music Study appear to suggest (albeit very sketchily) that developments on the music markets contributed to harden the tension besetting harmonic music and crystallized in equal temperament, – thus in effect pushing towards its explosion at the turn of the 20th century. We thus see how Weber conceived of the interplay between the dynamic of the capitalist economy and the momentum of artistic domains: in this case, it took place with particular intensity through the piano as both object of mass consumption and carrier of the harmonic ratio. By conceptualizing domains of culture, including art, as spurred by their ‘own logics’, Weber suggested that relations of these ‘cultural contents’ to economic forms had to be analysed in the same ways as those between social formations and the economy, i.e. in terms of ‘mutual adequacy or inadequacy’, but never of pure or mere determination and dependency (2009: 3). However, as these logics give rise to dynamics of tension in their domains of deployment, Weber also made them inherently unstable and more or less amenable to pressures conditioning their paths of expression.

3. The Inward Connection to Music

In this section I turn to Weber’s sketched analyses of the way in which artistic will, the inner bonding of artists to their art, ‘works with’ the tensions in its domain of deployment, as well as to the evolution of the other key inward connection to music: that of the listener. ¹⁹

The first connection is not directly evident from the reading of the Music Study, and we first need to make the detour into the ‘Value Freedom’ essay to find an explicit account of the way in which the tension between rational consistency and expression provides the matter with which creators have to work. Such issues are to be found in Weber’s analysis of the springs of Gothic architecture, rather than of music:

It was the encounter between this primarily technologically conditioned revolution and certain contents of feelings underpinned to a large extent by sociological conditions and the history of religion which supplied the essential elements of that material with the problems with which artistic creation worked in the Gothic epoch. (Weber, 1988: 521)

The notion of ‘encounter’, a translation suggested to me by Jean-Pierre Grossein. ²⁰ conveys the fortuitous character of the emerging relation between new rational technology and ‘certain contents of feelings’ which came to define the ‘“atmosphere” of inner Gothic spaces’ (2004: 261; 1921: 84). Indeed the German verb thus rendered, zusammenstieß (literally ‘ran into’, ‘collided with’, or ‘bumped against’), is formed with the same root as the one found in Weber’s description of the fate of rationalization based on the physics of sounds in music, which always ‘stumbles (stößt) on the fatal “comma”’ (Weber, 2004: 248). Nothing obvious emerges from that encounter, and it is only the artist’s ‘will’ and desire (Kunstwollen) which will work upon this as its matter and transform it into a specific relation between form and expression. ²¹

Weber had suggested - at the first meeting of the German Sociological Association - that music history should consider ‘the question of the relation between artistic will and musical-technological means’, whilst sociology should focus on ‘the relation between the “spirit” (Geist) of a particular music and the overall technological basis that influences the vital feeling and tempo of our present-day and (once again) metropolitan way of life’ (2005: 31, 1924: 455). On the basis of the problematization by the Music Study of the ‘immanent logic’ of ‘musical-technological means’, I suggest the following reformulation: the way in which the artistic will of composers (but also instrument manufacturers, and to a lesser extent performers) gets to grips and works with the momentum of the music domain constitutes the ‘spirit’ of the music domain and the subject matter of the musico-historical discipline. The particular affinities between this spirit and ‘technological bases’, as well as specific carrier strata, are within the purview of sociology.

If this is so, then characterizing the inward connection to a sphere means assessing the way in which ‘will’, that is to say desire, ‘works’ with this inner tension of its domain of deployment: whether it seeks to escape it, ignore it by resolutely embracing one of its terms, or whether it confronts it, seeking to ‘draw out the definitive consequences of [the composer’s] own musical conception’ even in the face of obstacles to its deployment (2005: 30). We can see how such assessment allows for positioning creators in an artistic domain according to their specific contribution to its inner dynamic and the direction they have imprinted to it amongst the many possible. Weber was adamant that the assessment of technological ‘progress’ in art history was totally distinct from aesthetic valuation (1988: 521).

But such an emphasis seems odd if we consider that aesthetic judgement bears on a creator’s response to the questions that demand to be addressed in an artistic domain. Does not Weber in fact discuss the poetic stances displayed by Emile Verhaeren and Stefan George (1924: 453)? ²² Does not he commit precisely this kind of valuation when he states that Bach ‘brought counterpoint to its highest perfection’ and that Liszt unlocked ‘all the ultimate expressive possibilities’ of the piano?

He also associated the ‘most modern developments of music in the direction of a corrosion of tonality’ ‘at least in part’ with the ‘intellectualist Romantic turn of our enjoyment towards the search for effects and what is “interesting”’ (2004: 252; 1921: 79). Composers seem here to be ineluctably drawn into the ‘intellectualist Romantic’ turn of a generation of listeners who were also Weber’s audience in his conference on ‘Science as a Vocation and Profession’: young people who sought to escape from the rational intellectualism of science by throwing themselves into ‘the modern Romantic intellectualism of the irrational’ (1994a: 12).

Faced with the extreme enunciation, in equal temperament, of the tension between the demands of expression and harmonic ratio, composers have turned to unbridled chromaticism, which, to Weber, amounts to a ‘flight from the world’ of music at that point in time. But the alternative cannot be the composer’s mere adaptive reproduction of the status quo in the contemporary ‘world’ of music demanded by another section of the listening public. Before figuring out what creative stance Weber appears to be demanding, we thus need to understand the other inward connection – and contribution – to the ‘spirit’ of music: that of the listener.

In the wake of Helmholtz’s analysis of hearing as culturally shaped taste and habit (1954: 234), Weber highlighted the way in which ‘our harmonic conception of music’ (Weber, 2004: 190; 1921: 33), ‘the sense of harmony’ (2004: 252; 1921: 79), works with the listeners’ capacity to ‘interpret the notes according to their harmonic provenance’ and ‘even to “hear” them actually in subjectively different ways’ (2004: 251; 1921: 78–9). The creator’s possibility to play with anticipation and resolution, which is at the core of Western harmonic music, depends on this harmonic disposition of the ear. In the same way, in melodic systems, the ‘ear’ learns ‘profoundly [to] enjoy’ the multiplication of ‘irrational intervals’ (2004: 242; 1921: 71), and in Antiquity it was the trained ‘fineness of the ear’ which gave the ‘melodious refinement of the musical culture … its definitive stamp’ (2004: 278; 1921: 94). ²³

But the tension encapsulated in temperament works its way through hearing. The ear learns to recognize the harmonic provenance of tones (in the sense of recognizing modes and keys), but at the same time the correction mechanism brought by the distance principle means that intervals which would be considered different (for example on instruments tuned according to another system or through just intonation) are here identified to one another, hence blurring the perception of sounds. Fineness of hearing seemed to refer, for Weber as for Helmholtz, both to the capacity to distinguish equal intervals as well as minute intervals by ear; and to the feeling for the just intonation of intervals. In other words, fine was the ear that tasted the ‘baroque’ scales of Oriental music, fine is the ear that tastes the melodiousness of a ‘natural’ third. But equal temperament dampens both.

The disposition of the ear takes ‘habituation’ (Gewöhnung) - indeed it is the condition for ‘profound enjoyment’ (Genuß) (2004: 242, 278; 1921: 71, 94) - beyond the mere ‘tasting’ of musical effects. Yet, as explained above, habituation has become entrenched, scripted by the piano: as the chief instrument for musical education becomes an object of mass consumption, there emerges and comes to prevail an economic logic to the persistence of equal temperament. Through this connection, the productive tension of the harmonic music system becomes reified.

Where did this leave the creative stance? To Weber, as to Adorno, creative stances mattered to ‘withstand’ reality in the face of commodification (Adorno, 2006: 102). However, the paths they outlined for these struggles were radically opposed. Weber’s position can only be surmised on the basis of his analyses in discussions of lyric poetry rather than music, in particular in a debate with Werner Sombart on ‘technology and culture’ at the first meeting of the German Sociological Association, and in a letter to Dora Jellinek written just before. He evoked the two stances of lyric poetry in the face of the ‘frenzy’ of the modern metropolis – adaptation and enthusiastic surrender, as in the case of Emile Verhaeren, who looked for forms immanent to urban movement; or escape, flight from the world, by constituting form as last a ‘impregnable fortress’ in the face of modern de-personalization, ²⁴ as was Stefan George’s choice at the cost of ‘dismembering’ all passion in himself so as to elevate form from de-personalized grounds (1994b: 561; 2005: 29).

Interestingly, for Adorno, the ‘rigidification’ of the new music (2006: 19), which can be compared to George’s de-personalizing endeavour, as it took place through the total subjectivation of form and entailed the petrification of subjectivity, was the only possibility left to new music for ‘withstanding’ social reality. Adorno’s judgement on new music thus seems to echo Simmel’s and Lukács’ judgement on George, linking the universality and truth of his work precisely to such de-personalization (see Simmel, 1995: 34; Lukács, 1974: 83). Weber’s assessment of Verhaeren and George seemed to point to another - third - possible stance for the artist: to create forms through a struggle to the full with the forces pervading the ‘matter’ of lyric poetry or of music. This meant first: letting oneself be affected by these forces without submerging or extracting oneself. Weber’s conception of the artistic stance thus echoed that of the scientific and political vocations he had outlined elsewhere. In ‘Politics as Vocation and Profession’ he had explained that the correct ‘distance’ in vocation is that which finds one ‘receptive’ to realities, whilst remaining ‘composed and calm’, that is, being able to take them in without letting them damage ourselves or only stimulate the direct expression of affects (Weber, 1994a: 74).

Conclusion

In this article I have proposed an initial analysis of Weber’s response to the question of the possibility of an account of art created from within the social and cultural sciences. Weber actually asked this question for all domains of action, not out of any belief in the ‘autonomy’ of these domains (autonomy is only constructed ideal-typically), but rather due to his premise that no domain of human action can be reduced to another, even though the economy and economic relations tend to determine other relations to a very large extent.

Weber’s gesture crucially starts from the matter of music (or that of politics, or science) and the historically conflicting logics for its organization: it is these which organize music as field of tensions, thus delineating spaces for musical conceptions and practices by socially situated ‘carriers’, for their encryption in musical technologies and conventions as well as in our ears and embodied listening habits. Underpinning Weber’s understanding of domains of culture there lies a conceptualization of historical movement, or ‘inner momentum’, in different music cultures, fuelled by tensions between opposed logics of organization/rationalization and by their interplay with dynamics of music production and consumption. It is such momentum which orders music configurations, and shapes engagements and the social relations within them. And it is the notion of such a momentum of logics in tension which perhaps escapes current attempts at theoretical renewal (Born, 2005).

Weber had wished to undertake a sociology of ‘cultural contents’ (which he referred to as comprising art, literature, ‘Weltanschauung’ and science) and their relations to the economy once he had completed his analysis of the relation of ‘structural forms’ of social action to the economy (in ‘Economy and Society’, 2004: 76). In subsuming both arts and science under cultural contents, Weber pointed to the tight relation he established between scientific and artistic creation: thus the inquiry of ‘Science as a Vocation and Profession’ into the ‘external’ (‘social’) conditions, the ‘inner’ dynamic of rationalization of science and the interrogation of the possibility for ‘vocation’ in such a configuration, could have been carried out for art domains and artistic vocation as well. Indeed ‘vocation’ designates that steadfastness in one’s creative will or desire which impels one to confront the tensions besetting the domain of deployment of such desire: in other words, the creative ‘stance’.

The last paragraphs of each of the two sections of the ‘Music Study’ lead to an acute perception of the impasse at which Western harmonic music had arrived – and of the reasons for such an impasse, not only for composition but for the manufacturing of instruments, for practice and for listening as well. The musical situation seemed to beg creative gestures (in principle not limited to compositional acts but also encompassing technological invention, musical exploration) that did not withstand tensions which had become frozen, but rather reinstated them and redefined their terms: a vindication, ex-ante, of the ‘“Schoenberg event”’ (Nicolas, 1997: 200).