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Between Race and Culture: Hearing Japanese Music in Berlin

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/693319

2379-3171

Benjamin Steege,

Neuroscience and Music Perception

Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Otto Abraham's "Studies on the Tone System and Music of the Japanese" (1903) is a classic representative of comparative musicology, bringing together a heterogeneous array of methodologies constituting the early discipline. But what did the two Berlin psychologists aim to accomplish with this document? Understanding the central, unstated project of early comparative musicology requires an evaluation of its fundamentally psychologistic character and of the ethical potential the new psychology was thought to bring. Despite its wealth of ethnological detail, "culture" as such was in fact precisely what these authors sought to bracket out in order to isolate a psychological element that would transcend forms of difference and work against polygenist race thinking. Yet their insistence on the foundational significance of raw psychological apprehension was also a weakness insofar as it left the project open to the very racially inflected modes of thought it otherwise resisted.