Melting musics, fusing sounds. Stumpf, Hornbostel and Comparative Musicology in Berlin

The ancient Greeks already used to give ethnic names (Doric, Phrygian, Lydian, etc.)\ua0to their different scales, and observations on differences in music of the various nations always raised the interest of musicians and philosophers. Yet, it was only in the late nineteenth century that \u201ccomparative musicology\u201d (i.e. ethnomusicology) became an institutional science. An important role in this process was played by Carl Stumpf, a former pupil of Brentano\u2019s who pioneered these researches in Berlin. Stumpf founded the Phonogrammarchiv (1900) to collect recordings of folk and extra-European music and a dedicated journal, the Sammelb\ue4nde f\ufcr vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. Gifted in the field of science no less than in that of musicology, Stumpf developed an empirically-oriented approach to phenomenology, deeply divergent from Husserl\u2019s and highly influential over the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology. A self-declared \u201coutsider\u201d among armchair philosophers, Stumpf experimentally investigated the perception of sounds and the origins of musical consonance. Developing the physiological studies of Ernst Weber on the sense of touch, Stumpf discovered that two sensations of tone, given at the same time, tend to mix in a certain degree. Musical consonance \u2013\ua0he claimed \u2013\ua0lays in this level of \u201ctonal fusion\u201d, not in the allegedly \u201cnatural\u201d series of the harmonic partials of a vibrating chord, as suggested by the naturalists of all times from Pythagoras to Stumpf\u2019s great contemporary Hermann Helmholtz. Accordingly, no musical system can claim for preponderance over the others: Stumpf\u2019s researches in comparative musicology served to corroborate his theses on \u201ctonal fusion\u201d and the psychological foundations of consonance. Although Stumpf later revised and finally abandoned this theory, its permanent value lays in its opposition to dominant naturalistic approaches. The commitment for comparative musicology at the Berlin School is then no concession to a positivistic fashion for exoticism. The fundamentally Eurocentric stance of naturalistic theories of music is also fiercely contrasted by Stumpf\u2019s pupil Erich Hornbostel, who suggests that music ought to be considered as culture, rather than as nature, and focuses attention on the eventually melting human cultures. The Berlin school flourished until the Nazis forced most of its exponents to emigration and,\ua0for tragically obvious reasons, heavily discouraged\ua0researches on these topics